Lead Sheets

[husk_charmer]

Posted: 1/22/07 at 5:59pm

My school recently did "Spitfire Grill" and a friend was in it, and i was looking through his stuff, and noticed the lead sheets...and he said that they didn't get copies of their songs outside of lead sheet format. Which makes me wonder, are these even remotely useful? I sing, but if I didn't have the bass clef to look at, I'd be lost. I read both, and can come in fine, I use the underscoring to tell me when to sing...but this confuses me. Am I trained/doing something wrong?

[clarkstallings]

Posted: 1/22/07 at 10:24pm

Lead sheets are perfectly useful for a musical like this if you have musicians good enough to interpret them and extrapolate the chord structure with the written melody as a guide into fine accompaniment.

[Jazzysuite82]

Posted: 1/23/07 at 9:38am

I don't think husk charmer is talking about accominaments. Are you talking about the vocal line in the back of the book? If so then yes it's pretty useless to an accompanist because it's less than a lead sheet. There's no chords written in. As a singer you should be able to follow along just fine (provided the accompanist has the full score). All it takes is counting. Sure you don't know what else is going on (which can be helpful) but it's not impossible. Full score is preferable, but rare to get if you're an actor. What I really hate are the Tams-Whitmark old book scenes that simply have a cue line and then you're lines. How in the world are you expected to make a full character interpretation when you can't read the whole play?!