Blog Archives - Engraver's Mark Music

Know Your Lane

2/6/2017

Welcome and greetings from Sammy Sanfilippo, CEO of Engraver’s Mark Music! I am very excited to share with our clients and curious internet explores alike the many experiences, thoughts, philosophies, and practices we are Engraver’s Mark Music have used throughout the years in building our business, building our client-base, and building our reputation as a topflight music preparation company.

When I first got into this business, back in 2005, it was really an accident. I had just graduated from college with a music degree, and was searching for new avenues in the music industry than the one I had been pursuing (I was and still am, an active bass player in Nashville and abroad). A friend of mine kindly asked if I wanted to engrave an orchestration for a church music publisher here in town and I jumped at the chance. To be honest, I was newly married, had no job, no savings, and was flat broke, so I would have jumped at just about any opportunity. What attracted me to this project was: 1. Being able to work from home (for the most part) and 2. Using some of my Finale (and Sibelius as it would turn out) skills that I had been developing as I was writing and arranging during my college years.

In truth, I really had no idea that there was a whole industry around music engraving or music preparation, whatever term you prefer. It’s a very small corner of the music industry, but touches lots of different projects in various areas, from publishing textbooks and transcriptions, to working with orchestras, composers, orchestrators, and producers for Film, TV and other electronic media. It’s a little like being a studio musician; every time you step into the studio, it’s a different client/artist, different project or different company you’re working for and a new set of expectations.

As you might expect, I had a vast learning curve to overcome, but I was very fortunate to be working with one of the best editors in the industry for this project and he guided me step by step through the entire process. It was incredible to see him work, to learn how he looked at music from the perspective of an editor, and learn what publishing companies expected from an engraver. It was a long process, but in the end, I finished the project and was proud of what I had done. Over the next few years my workload continued to expand and Engraver’s Mark Music was born.

One of the most important lessons in that first project I learned was to “know your lane.” In this case, I realized that my place in this project wasn’t to comment, critique or even edit the content of the orchestration. My only function was to take what the arranger/orchestrator had written, clean it up and make sure everything was accurately notated and clear and pass it on to my editor. I embraced this roll, partly because I was in a certain amount of awe of the people I was working with knowing the decades of experience and accomplishments they had, and because I liked knowing where the limits of my side of the project existed. It can be very scary when you’re thrust into a new situation with responsibilities that you aren’t even sure of yourself.

At the end of the project, my editor wrote me a kind email thanking for my help, offering some more advice and tips and even another job coming up, and one comment. “I really appreciated that you knew your lane in this project. Very often, our company works with engravers who are good, but they are all striving to be arrangers or orchestrators or composers. While there’s nothing wrong with that and their knowledge if useful, I really liked knowing you were working on this project from the point of view of only being a music engraver. It really showed in your work and that is really valuable to our company.”

As I’ve worked in this industry I have noticed that often people who do music preparation only do it on the side, to go along with their composing or arranging or whatever. That makes perfect sense as we all at times wear many hats to make ends meet in the music industry. However, I think it can distract sometimes from the focus of engraving, which to make the music as clear, clean and readable as possible, regardless of what the music sounds like. In a sense, you must leave your artistic preferences and comments at the door to enter this side of the music business. Certainly, you need orchestrating skills to be a good engraver and often you can help clients by noticing things that seem strange or unclear to you, but that’s not the primary job of music preparation. Your job is to prepare the music, nothing else.

It has been our experience here at Engraver’s Mark Music that we provide the best value to our clients by staying in our lane and providing them with ever increasing accuracy and efficiency when it comes to preparing their music for the studio, or publication. While we offer additional editorial services even beyond our very stringent quality controls, our core business is to find new ways everyday of giving our clients peace of mind knowing when their work comes into our office, our only aim is to generate the best possible version of their music, the most accurate to their original work, and streamlining all the production of the sheet music to offer dramatic time and financial savings. That provides lasting value to our clients, knowing they have a team of dedicated professionals whose sole focus is to the art of engraving, not using music preparation as an avenue for further artistic aspirations of their own.

So, here at Engraver’s Mark Music, our business is simple; the best music preparation, whether its digital or print, streamlined and efficient workflow, and clear, consistent communication with our clients. We stay in our lane, and leave the rest of the road to you!

Welcome!

2/6/2017

Here at Engraver’s Mark Music, we wanted to share some thoughts, best practices, experiences, triumphs, failures, and everything in between about what it’s like on the inside of a music preparation business and how we interact with our clients. Enjoy!

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