Music is in these two forms: Full Score, which shows each instrument's individual part, and Piano/guitar/vocal Reduction, an arrangement of the music for only piano and voice parts, with corresponding chord symbols (otherwise known as a Vocal Score). If you're playing this at home, you probably want the reduction.
This site won The Freeze Ray Award and The Bash In Minds Award at the Horrible Awards. Thanks for all your support!
Please let me know what you think, or if you have corrections, comments, suggestions, or requests. I'm happy to answer any questions; you can also talk to me if you need help adapting the music to your instrument. If you use one of these scores to make a tape or a video I'd like to see it! Also, if you use one of the karaoke tracks, please credit me and link back to this page. Thanks!
To the composers: My offer stands as far as working for free to prepare the music for publication. Thanks for all your hard work!
Call for players: Any string player Dr. Horrible fans in LA want to get together and read some songs arranged for quartet?
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2009-05-20: New Heist Incidental full score with minor fixes.
2009-05-20: Caring Hands karaoke and Heist Incidental instrumental audio tracks up.
2009-05-18: Heist Incidental full score up.
2009-05-09: Everything You Ever piano reduction revised.
2009-05-09: Piano-karaoke tracks up for A Man's Gotta Do, Everyone's A Hero, and Everything You Ever. Piano-instrumental for Everyone's A Hero and Everything You Ever. These aren't full orchestrations, but rather synthesized versions of the piano reductions.
2009-05-06: Moist piano reduction up.
2009-04-21: Moist full score and audio is up. Piano reduction to follow in the next few weeks.
2009-04-07: Heist Incidental piano/vocal is up. Full score soon.
2009-02-28: Everyone's A Hero piano/guitar/vocal score is up.
2009-02-25: Everyone's A Hero is in the proofreading stage. Email me if you want to see a draft. Here's the latest test track (link removed 2009-05-09).
2009-02-17: Check out the Horrible Awards. This site was nominated in two categories!
2009-02-17: Everyone's A Hero is coming along. Got a little sidetracked because my monitor's backlight inverter died, but I'm back on track now. I have a very incomplete outline of a piano part done. Here's a preview. (removed 2-25)
2009-02-03: Bad Horse updated scores, new karaoke and instrumental, and updated ringtone, now with drum track!
2009-01-25: Everyone's A Hero Guitar/vocal lead sheet posted, working on piano reduction now.
2009-01-16: Clarinet part for Slipping requested by Electronic Goat, now up.
2009-01-15: New My Eyes audio tracks! I've re-recorded them with the new score and an adjusted mix; it should be warmer and less rushed.
2009-01-15: Fixed 2nd chord in m. 40 of Ten Dollar Solo, it should be an E-sharp not a double sharp.
2009-01-13: Everything You Ever piano reduction is up. I think this might be the best reduction so far; I feel like it captures the essence of the original while being a piece of music in its own right. Give it a shot.
2009-01-12: New errata entry for So They Say, thanks to Andrew T. for catching two errors.
2009-01-12: Everything You Ever's piano score is done, I'm just sitting on it for a day or two in case there are any mistakes. But I have a treat for y'all: chords and vocals for "Ten Dollar Solo" from Commentary! The Musical! Sorry, no piano reduction, my efforts are still concentrated on finishing up the last song in Dr. Horrible which is Everyone's a Hero. But I do have it in two keys, one in the original G-sharp minor and one transposed up a half step to A minor which is a very easy key for guitar players. Enjoy!
2009-01-04: Everything You Ever is outlined, nothing to show yet but give me a few weeks and I should have a piano score for y'all.
2008-12-18: Piano/guitar/vocal score for A Man's Gotta Do is up. I may start working on the other songs before I come back to do the full score for this one.
2008-12-12: First rough draft of Man's Gotta Do done. As usual, email me if you want to see it.
2008-12-08: End Credits score and violin solo part are up! I'm considering whether it would be worth it to do a reduction, probably for violin and piano. Weigh in if you are interested.
2008-12-01: Oh <expletive deleted>! It's December! Oh, also I uploaded a new My Eyes full score with mostly orchestration/balance fixes. New audio coming soon too. Credits are almost done as well, email me if you want to see or hear the draft of that.
2008-11-28: Flutist Garrett B requested 8va alta transpositions of Brand New Day and On The Rise, now up! Also, first section of Man's Gotta Do is done.
2008-11-23: A Man's Gotta Do vocal lines done. Also working on the End Credits.
2008-11-14: Slipping full score and audio tracks are up, piano reduction revised. Next is A Man's Gotta Do.
2008-11-09: My Eyes updated again, pickup to m. 75 should be an E, not an F#.
2008-11-07: Slipping piano/vocal score now up. The full score has a lot of work to be done still, so I haven't posted that yet; no audio files yet either.
2008-11-02: Caring Hands now up. It's only voice, strings, and piano, so there's nothing to reduce.
2008-11-01: A couple details in Horrible Theme fixed. Also, I have a pre-draft piano reduction of Slipping-- if you want to see it, please email me.
2008-10-31: Sorry to neglect y'all for so long. Still working on Slipping, but I just put up the Horrible Theme (main title).
2008-10-12: Real life sort of took over for a while, but I'm back at it and I'm done with the bass line for Slipping. Still working on the rest of it.
2008-09-30: I have the chords and melodic lines outlined for Slipping, still need to add orchestration and drum parts. Should be another week or two.
2008-09-27: Brand New Day full score and reduction updated. The changes are a couple chords in the piano part and changing the word "time" to "times" in the second verse. See errata for details.
2008-09-26: Popularity stats! Most popular is My Eyes / On The Rise with 508 downloads in the last three weeks. Freeze Ray is a close second with 455. Brand New Day is next with 225 (only in the last week, since it's new, so it's actually very popular), followed by Penny's Song with 222, Bad Horse with 200 and So They Say bringing up the rear at 192.
2008-09-25: Got a request for the violin solo in the end credits. If you want it, email me and I'll send it to you. It's a draft, so I don't want to put it up to expose it to indexing.
2008-09-21: Brand New Day piano reduction up. Metal on piano is a little bit of an iffy proposition, but I did my best. It sounds pretty good, but it's just not the same without those guitars...
2008-09-19: Brand New Day full score, synth-instrumental and karaoke track up. I'm doing the reduction this weekend.
2008-09-16: Brand New Day draft done! Expect the final this weekend. Here's a little preview. (Edit 9-19: preview taken down)
2008-09-14: My Eyes solo piano and piano/vocal updated yet again (missing notes in m. 60).
2008-09-12: Made some small but crucial improvements to the My Eyes / On The Rise solo piano arrangement. If you downloaded this before, download it again. Biggest improvement is m. 52, other improvements throughout. UPDATE: Accidentally took out a crescendo in mm. 80-81, fixed.
2008-09-11: My Eyes solo piano arrangement is up by request. Still working on Brand New Day, sorry it's taking a while, lots of things going on in real life. (What real life? Haha.)
2008-09-07: New URL! The old one still works and is redirecting to the new one. Please update your bookmarks.
2008-09-06: I've taken down the bass line for Brand New Day, starting on the middle parts now. Also there's been some interest in a piano-only version of On The Rise, I've worked a little bit on that but it's not done yet.
2008-09-03: Got a request from leyosura on the LiveJournal community for a clarinet part for Freeze Ray, thought I'd make it available to the world!
2008-09-02: Thanks to Cyrne for the spiffy table! BONUS: New site icon! You get an extra point if you can tell me what the heck it is.
2008-09-01: Soundtrack released! Go buy it on iTunes! It's crystal clear and will definitely make it easier to transcribe the songs, so this should go faster now. Great job folks! UPDATE: Brand New Day vocal line done.
2008-09-01: Perfect Story piano/guitar/vocal reductions revised. Also new: Penny's Song karaoke track. UPDATE: Notes/Errata now in a separate section, also new note on Perfect Story.
2008-08-28: Perfect Story full score, mp3 and karaoke track up. New piano reduction this weekend, Brand New Day next.
2008-08-27: On The Rise revision 2 uploaded and linked. Also: This page is getting long and unwieldy. Anyone want to take a shot at redesigning it? Just take my code and organize it in some fashion and email me the results.
2008-08-26: Errata entries updated for Perfect Story and On The Rise. Perfect Story score is in the final stages of copy-editing; I'll also be making a reduction of it to replace the current piano-vocal score.
2008-08-24: Perfect Story full score draft done, now editing. I think this is going to be a great karaoke track. Your challenge, then, is to sing all the parts. At the same time. As a start, you could use throat singing techniques. You could also clone yourself or use a time-turner.
2008-08-24: Yesterday this page passed 2000 unique visitors and 10000 hits. Thanks for the interest and support everyone!
2008-08-22: Perfect Story first verse and chorus done. Brand New Day first verse and chorus vocal line done.
2008-08-20: The fans have spoken: Brand New Day is next. Working on the full score for Perfect Story now, and have some fixes for On The Rise, but after that it'll be Brand New Day, which is the last remaining song in Act II!
2008-08-16: Adjusted the Freeze Ray mp3 to bring out the vocal line, and by request added karaoke tracks for On The Rise with only one vocal line muted.
2008-08-15: My Freeze Ray is basically done, most of the notes are fixed and I just need to fix layout issues. Should be up by Saturday or Sunday. UPDATE: Surprise! Got done early and it's now up.
2008-08-13: My Freeze Ray is done in draft-- I'm now at the copy-editing stage.
2008-08-11: Revised score and reduction uploaded for On The Rise.
2008-08-11: Vocal line for My Freeze Ray is done.
2008-08-10: On The Rise piano/guitar/vocal reduction is done. It's hard enough that I personally can't play it, but should be okay for real pianists. In other news, ArsNovaChris caught some mistakes in the drumset part so I'll be checking back on that and updating the full score shortly.
2008-08-09: The full score to On The Rise is now up. Special thanks to ArsNovaChris on the forums for catching a bunch of things I missed. I still have some work to do on the piano reduction, so that's not up yet. But the good news is that the computer rendition of On The Rise came out very well, so I've gone ahead and uploaded that so you can sing along to it while you wait for the piano reduction! Here it is with synth vocals and with no vocals (karaoke style). (links updated 2009-05-10) jtauber also has a very cool synth version on his website.
2008-08-08: On The Rise is almost done. I have it in a draft form and listening through multiple times to catch mistakes. I haven't done the piano reduction yet, but I can already tell it's going to be difficult, lots of big jumps across the keyboard, but effective. After all, it's gotta substitute for itself, a bass, a drumset *and* a mandolin.
2008-08-06: On The Rise is coming along. I have a draft of the entire song except the drum track. So I have to finish doing the drum track and then go back and listen to it a bunch of times and catch all the mistakes.
2008-08-05: A lot of people have been asking about On The Rise. I've started it and I have the vocal lines down and a draft of Billy's verse in score, but haven't gotten to Penny's verse or the duet yet. Might take a while, the orchestration is fairly dense.
Playing suggestions for On The Rise piano reduction: Here are some hints that may help when playing the piano part: 1) Pedal whenever possible to get the legato, guitar-like feel we're going for, but don't pedal when playing the countermelody bass line in mm. 29-32 (or subsequently). 2) In the treble staff in mm. 13, 15, 17, you can play the low E with your left hand (in an octave with the left hand note). 3) Do the chord rolls for Penny's verse fast. It sounds wimpy if you roll them slow. 4) Play the hell out of any bass notes, those are drumset kicks. 5) Starting in m. 49, just count in six. The 4-beat bar will come naturally because the voice parts are singing in 4 and also because we are just all trained from birth to count in 4.
Errata: Fixed in rev1: in bars 50 and 78, the chord should be G, not A. Fixed in rev2: Billy's last note in m. 18 should be an E, not an F-sharp. Tom beats missing mm. 29-32. Tempo marking updated to 128 after timing with digital metronome. Fixed in rev5: Skipped to rev5 to keep numbering of all instrumentations the same. Pickup to m. 75 should be an E, not an F-sharp. Further tom beat details.
Note about rhythm: For easy reading, I have the introduction entirely in half notes and whole notes, but technically the piano changes chords on Penny's fourth syllable, not the fifth syllable. But since that part's all rubato anyway, I just notated it the easiest way to read.
Errata - fixed in rev1: mm. 18, 32: Missing C in the second chord in piano reduction. m. 21: "All the time" should be "All the times".
Note for reduction: Feel free to use any sort of beat you can come up with, it doesn't have to be clap-snap. It could be stomp-clap, stomp-snap, beatboxing-- anything to keep the beat. The reason I put it in at all is because the piano part is almost entirely on offbeats, and it's easy to lose the downbeat without the drums.
Errata: Fixed in rev1: Lyrics in m. 12 should be: "So they say that it's real love" (not "true love" as written). Not fixed yet: Penny and Billy erroneously have each other's notes in m. 57. In m. 62, Penny's line "or is this" should have the rhythm eighth-eighth-quarter instead of eighth-quarter-eighth. (Thanks to Andrew T.)
Errata: Fixed in rev1: First half of m. 7 should be a rest. Added instructions in m. 67 for voices "prominently" and "lightly". Clarified triplet markings mm. 73-82. (Thanks to Christian Cosas)
Errata: Fixed in rev1: 2nd chord in m. 40 should be E-sharp (not double sharp).
Orchestra version (the better one)
MP3
or
iTunes/iPhone (Right-click
to Save)
or
MIDI
Synth version MP3 if you prefer a more 90s-sounding ringtone
(Also, I only noticed after the 5th or 6th time that when the phone rings there's actually a little drum track backbeat during the polyphonic ringtone. If I get time I'll update my ringtone to have that.) Update 2009-02-03: done!
Update 2008-08-05: The awesome James Tauber has posted his version of Bad Horse, complete with neigh and gunshot. Whereas there were no Bad Horse ringtones just last week, now you have three to choose from!
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