Transcribing Piano Music Hard
The best way to transcribe is to use music that is already written in standard musical notation. This is the universal language for describing how long a note should be held and which note is played. It also describes how the notes are arranged on a staff, which in turn is referred to as a “system” and how many systems are on a sheet of music (piano scores have about 2’systems’ per page). Once you have the music transcribed you will have a document that can be used for a variety of purposes such as transposing to other keys or playing along with a recording.
The first step is to listen to the music closely and divide it into sections in your mind, like the intro, first verse, bridge and chorus. This will help you figure out instrumentation and start to get a feel for how the song is put together. The next step is to learn intervals. Intervals are the distance between two notes and are important when learning how to read music, especially if you are going to be a composer.
There are a number of different ways to learn intervals, but a good way is to just listen to a piece of music, sing the first two notes of the tune and then try to find the interval between them on the piano. If you are able to do this successfully you will be able to work out the rhythm of the piece and understand what is happening musically.
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Is Transcribing Piano Music Hard?
Once you have done this it is a good idea to go back over the whole piece and identify any small details that you may have missed or not noticed before. This can be anything from a simple fill to the accent on the drums. It is important to have a complete transcription as this will be incredibly useful to you in the future, however you don’t need to transcribe every single detail and you should not be too hard on yourself if you miss something!
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Piano transcription can be very difficult, but it is not impossible. The key is to choose your music carefully – it has to be easy enough for you to hear the details clearly, but complex and challenging enough to challenge your ability to do so. Beginner classical pieces and pop/theme-tune arrangements are usually very good choices.
Another great technique is to take tiny sections of a piece of music and transcribe it into all the major keys. This forces you to think of the music in relation to the key and will make it much easier to ‘translate’ when you are learning other songs. It also allows you to see how the harmony and progressions are ‘used’ in the song. This can be a really rewarding process and will give you a huge head-start when trying to write your own music. Good luck!
