Transcribing is good for you, so I figured I should do more of it.
The other day I was listening to an old Stanley Turrentine Record – The Man With the Sad Face.
The first track is ‘Evil Ways’. So I thought it would be cool to learn it and be able to play it more like Mr. T. And in the process I knew that I would learn a lot.
So I took a digital version of it from the record.
Started with the first minute and a half or so of it. Then I slowed it down with Transcribe (Transcribe for Windows Transcribe for Mac)
Part of the time I worked on just getting the notes. For the melody this is simpler since it centers around certain ideas that repeat some.
Nailing the rhythms is a lot tougher since you have to pay a lot closer attention.
Getting the articulation, phrasing, etc right is also a challenge.
Also worked on just playing it back by ear since that’s helpful too.
Good exercise!
Hey Neal,
Me and my buddy actually used to do a lot of transcriptions of video game music we liked (yeah, we’re geeks). I don’t think we ever slowed the music down, although that would certainly have helped. We just typed the notes we heard into a composer program and kept playing it back until it sounded right.
It was interesting, because he was better at it than me, even though he wasn’t much of a musician. I don’t think he was even particularly good at reading music; he certainly didn’t get the hang of key signatures.
I tended to try and “recompose” the music according to classical theory, whereas he just had an intuition for where each note he heard sat on the stave (melodies and harmonies).
But yeah, it’s definitely good for improving general musicmanship skills 🙂 satisfying when you can play back a nice track you’ve heard but would never get the music for too.
– E
Hey Eldon,
That’s cool. Definitely a good idea to both read and learn music by ear in my opinion.
I was thinking about learning some more video game music too, don’t play much these days, but there’s some good music in them!
-Neal