While There's A Spotlight

I went to see the stage show of The Producers last night (rather than eating my way around the world in London) after Paul stumbled across the Get Into London Theatre 2006 campaign that is making cheaper seats available for a whole range of productions up until the end of March.

The Producers is a great musical - you don't need another review from me - and I was amazed at Mel Brooks facility with show tunes. The songs reminded me that in the days when I used to noodle around on the piano I wrote a lot of fragments in a sort of Broadway style that I was idly assembling into "While There's a Spotlight", the cheesiest musical in the history of the world. Unfortunatley, as I'm not really a trained musician and this sort of stuff is a lot more harmonically sophisticated than songs that you can capture with a melody line and a chord progression I've never managed to get any of it down on paper.

When Ouriel left a comment on this blog about transcriptions I started to wonder whether software mightn't help me with the problem and emailed him to ask, he replied:

The best tool for music transcription is a software called FINALE.
If i am not wrong you can do it indeed directly from an electronic keyboard or midi file

http://www.finalemusic.com/

you also have SIBELIUS
http://www.sibelius.com/cgi-bin/home/home.pl.

So I think I will have a go with that if and when I get my gear hooked up again. It would be odd to have transcriptions of things I wrote that I was not really able, fluently to read.

In the meantime - to whet your appetite - here is the chorus of the song in my imaginary musical that the apparently jaded veteran with a heart of gold (details to be confirmed) sings to the discouraged ingenue (details to be confirmed) to persuade her not to give up on her dreams.

I know that the sun won't catch you crying
I know though the moon just broke your heart
While the stars are all spotlights shining for you
Let's make a brand new start

Break a leg.