Steven Universe: Live from Beach City!

Okay this was purely an arranging project, lest I give the false impression that I wrote any of this wonderful music. With author Hannah Sage Campbell, I transcribed and arranged the lovely songs of Steven Universe (by Rebecca Sugar and Aivi & Surasshu and many others) for the advanced-beginner-to-intermediate musician to play at home, on a piano, guitar, or ukulele.

The task was to take the very natural, expressive, sing-songy richness of Steven Universe and squeeze it into the restrictive garment that is Western notation, so that it can then be read by other people and hopefully turned into human music again. That meant making some sacrifices in terms of rhythm, ornamentation, and tempo (read: soul) for the sake of making the music at all accessible for less-experienced musicians.

With that in mind, there’s really no way to just read these transcriptions in a vacuum and recreate the songs with all their quirks and feelings, without getting to know them by ear first. That made me think about what the ideal use case would be for these transcriptions: let’s say a Steven Universe fan, who has the music already in their ear, comes upon this sheet music — I would want them to feel encouraged to reproduce the music in a way that matches with what they hear, but also benefit from the extra bit of structure and moral support from seeing the chords and lyrics and rhythms all in one place. All this sounds very Rebecca Sugar IMO.

Thanks again to Hannah Sage Campbell, who warmly and elegantly stuffed about a year’s worth of music education into four pages.