Music Engraving - Traditional Engraving Techniques

Traditional Engraving Techniques

  • Plate engraving: music was reproduced directly onto a zinc or pewter plate in mirror image. Staff lines were created by dragging a 5-pronged "scoring tool" across the plate, thus the designation, "score" for printed music. Fixed symbols, like note heads and clefs, were punched into the metal with dies, and variable symbols, such as beams or slurs, were engraved by hand.
  • Hand copying with pen and ruler, which if done by an expert music copyist can produce high-quality results (see below)
  • Moveable type with music symbols – a centuries-old method, often used for hymn books, but which produced low-quality results
  • Music typewriters – like moveable type, this produced low-quality results and was never widely used
  • Notaset - dry transfer symbols similar to Letraset
  • Brushing ink through stencils, a high-quality technique used by Amersham-based company Halstan & Co.

Read more about this topic:  Music Engraving

Famous quotes containing the words traditional, engraving and/or techniques:

    The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
    —A.J. (Alfred Jules)

    For I so truly thee bemoane,
    That I shall weep though I be Stone:
    Until my Tears, still drooping, wear
    My breast, themselves engraving there.
    There at me feet shalt thou be laid,
    Of purest Alabaster made:
    For I would have thine Image be
    White as I can, though not as Thee.
    Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)

    The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.
    John Steinbeck (1902–1968)