I picked arranging pep band music as my project because I thought it’d be
neat to pick a song and then turn it into a bunch of individual pep band parts.
Wind instruments allow for only one note at a time, so I usually think of piano
when it comes to full songs, and while I hear the other wind parts in pep band, the volume is such that I rarely can fully make out how they relate to the trumpet part. So, it was interesting trying to take apart the music
and fit it into various instruments.
The song chosen was, of course, “Born to Run,” by Bruce Springsteen. When I was picking
songs I learned that the song needed to be simple (because the pep band is comprised of freshmen as well as sophomores, juniors, and seniors). My original choice was “Sir Duke,”
by Stevie Wonder, but I was told that it would be too complicated for pep band.
So I went through some of the other rock songs that were simpler and picked
Born to Run. Like most songs with a lot of lyrics and vocals, it’s long and
repetitive, so I took what I thought was the best part to cut for a Pep band
piece. Also, Mr. Matthys pointed out that “Born To Run” would fit in with a
football theme.
The actual arranging took a bit less time than expected. I
put the entire melody, including chords, into the trumpet part first, so it basically looked like a piano part. Then I copied and transposed the supporting
notes to some other melody instruments, largely the alto saxes, clarinets,
flutes, etc. I tried to leave the root and fifth of each chord with the
trumpets and clarinets, but mostly trumpets, since they can be loudest.
The tuba part and trombone parts were pretty simple and just
variations of the rhythm and subdivisions. The snare drum I took from what I
could hear on the recording. The bass drum is just there for tempo, the bass
guitar is similar to the tuba part, and the tenorline is just a bunch of
pitched notes that I wrote in without any previous knowledge; the original song
doesn’t have a tenorline to my knowledge, or at least not one that I could hear in the recording.
The finale project turned out pretty well, overall. The playback recording below has a few problems, however. First of all, in Finale Notepad, when you try to play a Finale file with more than 8 parts, it reverts to playing all of the parts in a piano computer recording, so it doesn't sound nearly as good as it did in Finale at school (which, to be fair, was still pretty tin-like and shallow since it was a computer playing). Also, although I wrote in ties, when playing back the music Finale plays the rhythm "1 2 + 4 | 1" as "1 2 + 3 4 | 1" in the third and seventh measures. (The percussion is also a bit quiet).
Nevertheless, here it is (to hear the original song, see the post below this):
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