…and how much does it cost to produce?
Intro: today’s scenario
One of the aspects people love most of Artistic Score Engraving’s editions is their stunning, often fanatical, care for detail. This level of dedication is no longer the norm in the music engraving industry—as it used to be—, with focus having bluntly shifted to productivity and sheer speed. A score, today, needs to be legible and to cause no issue during recording sessions, that’s it. This is something one can achieve with carefully crafted dedicated templates, with close to no manual intervention required.
When it comes to reaching the precision required for professionally printed music, though, templates are only the starting point and no setting of any software will ever be able to cover all possible cases. Software companies try to convince you otherwise, but what they’re really doing is funnelling their efforts to the 90% of the user base, which, frankly, is an understandable business decision.
Even with my daily service to composers and publishing houses, I have long since introduced a leveled approach, which means taking care of the most glaring issues first, followed by gradually polishing the remaining details if time and budget allows. Gone are the days when one would be given carte blanche, supplanted by always more pressing requests, deadlines, and budget cuts. Today, the most an engraver can do is: send a reasonable quote, hope the customer accepts it, and do their best to stay within that quote—or, actually, a bit lower, to encourage the customer to come back again.
The risk
This approach, while perfect for the industry and for the managers deciding our destinies, brings with it a gloomy risk: being obliged to always limit oneself to respect budget constraints gradually makes the engraver lose their sharpness. The eye starts to no longer see some details, certain priorities are now ignored, and one’s hard-earned level is eventually lost.
I realised this was happening to me around 2018, when the first signals of the industry shifting towards this new, cheap model started to ring not too far in the distance. The only thing I could do was find an activity that would oblige me to keep my eyes sharp and trained, to keep my senses alert to every detail that could escape my attention.
What did I do?
Almost completely out of the blue, I started to craft and publish my editions. Over the last five years, I have constantly refined my techniques, my standards, and my tools, never accepting any result as an arrival point, and I can say it out loud: it made a world of difference. Around the end of 2018, I purchased a 12.9-inch iPad Pro with Apple Pencil and started to proofread my scores on it. It may sound exaggerated, or presumptuous, but I have no reason to lie to you: simply doing this straight doubled my precision and detail level. I would never go back to how I was doing things before.
Of course, there is a catch: adding all this level of control requires a lot of extra time, resulting in less things done overall, even if at a quality level I could have only dreamt of before.
The creation process
To show you my workflow, I am taking the latest edition published, the Three Easy Sonatas for two cellos by J. J. F. Dotzauer (product page, video). Excluding the act of copying the notes, which was done by my friend and colleague Yuriy Leonovich, who had requested this edition for his cello class, the process started with casting off and layout. That meant deciding how many bars go in each system and how many systems go in each page. This needed to be done for the score and for each part. This process was then followed by a cleanup of every notational element. Beam angles, slurs, ties, fingering placement, playing techniques (up/down-bows, etc…), they all got treated to be in their best shape and position. This whole process, for a 38-page score, took about 12 hours for the score and 3 hours for the parts.
Following this, I moved over to the iPad and started the proofreading process. This took about 4.5 hours, including the act of transferring the corrections to the notational program. This edition has three versions: Urtext, then a modern version of the edition by Alwin Schröder, and finally, my personal version. Adding all differences, checking note by note, and checking nothing had moved out of place took 13.5 hours for Schröder’s version and 13 hours for mine. To this, I needed to add, respectively: 3 and 3.5 hours for updating the design, and 6 and 2 additional hours for proofreading. But we are not over yet!
At this point, I started to build the edition in InDesign, ready to be exported in PDF (for digital and print distribution) and in EPUB (for the Apple Books & Kindle stores). To achieve that, I first needed to write the Editorial Notes, which you can find in this blog post. The research, writing, proofreading, correction, and graphical adaptation required, all together, 11.5 hours.
The final, and from a certain point of view, most tedious part, consisted in actually publishing the edition. This follows a process that I am constantly refining but that, in the last six months or so, got into a state that I am very satisfied with. Please let me know if you would like me to explain it to you. This process took 6 additional hours.
If you make the math, creating this edition took about 70 hours, and this excludes all the hours spent on the cello practicing these pieces to check the notes and to add my personal performance suggestions. I will let you calculate how much this is worth based on the average hourly rate of music engravers and book designers where you live. To give you a rough idea, this edition will need to sell around 200 copies before becoming profitable. Not really a sustainable business so far. More something like… a very time-consuming hobby based on what one does best!
Closing thoughts
I hope this recount gave you an idea of the depth of work and effort that goes behind each ASE edition. Rest assured that this is done exclusively by me and—when she can—by my partner, with no external help whatsoever. There is no “team” behind us, and no battery of slaves doing things instead of us.
We are doing this first and foremost because we believe in offering products of the highest possible quality.
Let’s hope we can keep doing this for as long as possible.
Thank you for your support.
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