musical thoughts

Transcription is an immensely profitable activity. Both figuratively and literally–if you can produce good charts, you’re not a sideman, you’re a “music director.” But it’s a great way to study music. Transcription is a learnable skill. And lucky for us, there are better tools available today than ever before to assist.

In this post I run down my repeatable method for doing a transcription. I’ll also hip you to some excellent software to help out.

I’ve found that by using a consistent approach to transcription, you can remove a lot of the intimidating aspects of staring at an empty page of staves while you listen to a piece of music flying by furiously. We attack the song a step at a time. I like to use staff paper. Click the music paper link on the right to get yourself a lifetime supply.

We’re going to accomplish this with successive listening passes. the first pass is entirely to notate the form. You will quickly find that four bar phrases are the norm, so a pattern of dividing the chart up with 4 bars per line works well. Start your roadmap on the second line of staff paper. This gives you room to go back and account for the intro or pickup on the first line. So the left of the second line should have a double bar line, since its a major division. Listen through the piece just for the form. If you decide that it’s AABA for example, write that in the margin at the bottom, and label your sections accordingly. It’s usual to put the letter in a box to avoid confusion with chord symbols. I personally do not use first and second ending notation. It just creates more problems than it solves. It is harder to read, and it tends to obscure the real form.

Ok, the second pass is to determine the roots of the chords. You will listen carefully to the bass line, and decide what the root of each chord is. It’s helpful to have a keyboard or other instrument here for quick checks, but if you get good at this you can leave your axe put away for this. If there are special rhythmic hits, you’ll catch them here. At the end of this pass you ought to have the root of a chord for every measure more or less.

For the third pass you go back and listen for the quality of those chords. Here’s an important technique: the third and seventh define the quality of a chord. If you’re at the keyboard, test these two tones against the recording to get to a quality quickly. Don’t worry much about extended harmony right now, we just want the major-minor-dominant distinctions in place. Often these become apparent just from the function of the chord too. (You’ll see the ii-V pattern a lot.)

For the fourth pass, go back and catch the melody. Presumably, this is the easy part. I don’t know if its really easier, but it’s the part of the song that our brains tend to grab hold of best, so it’s probably going to seem easier at least at first.

On the fifth pass, look for opportunities to decorate/improve the chord symbol based on the melody note. If you wrote a D7 and you see an Eb in the melody, you’ve got an extension that you don’t need to listen for. Then go back through and listen for any remaining chord extensions that are necessary to make the chart work.

And that’s it. we made this manageable by breaking it up into a bunch of small jobs. those smaller tasks aren’t as tough to get accomplished.

And the bonus for today: go and get Audacity, an excellent, open source sound editor. When I got started, if the piece was flying by at warp 9, the only hope you had was shelling out for an expensive Superscope tape machine that could slow down by 20%. Oh, but then you had to transpose back to the original key. Yeah, those were the good old days. (We walked to school uphill both ways in the snow too.)

Audacity gives you the ability to slow your piece down without altering the pitch, although there are limits. On the Effect menu, choose Change Speed and follow the prompts. It degrades the sound pretty badly if you stretch by over 20%, but it’s still a huge help. Audacity can load .wav, .mp3, or almost any other kind of sound file.

The other thing Audacity rocks for is looping. You can make a selection with the mouse (make sure you have the selection tool selected) by just dragging over an area of the displayed waveform. You can loop a chorus, or even a single beat to puzzle out those difficult passages. Once you’ve made a selection, holding the shift key and pressing play will loop the selection until you stop. This is invaluable. And it’s free.

Go get Audacity, and give transcription a shot.