Transcribing Piano Music
If you want to learn how to play piano music by ear then transcription is a great way to do it. The main reason for this is that it trains your ear to listen to the musical patterns in a piece of music and then recreate them on an instrument. However, it’s important to understand that transcribing is just one part of the process of playing by ear. You also need to practice improvising and understanding the idioms of the genre you are trying to transcribe.
If a musician doesn’t read music well then they will be much slower to work out how to play something by ear because they won’t be able to look at the sheet music and see what notes are being played. This is why it’s important for musicians to make reading music a priority and spend a lot of time learning to do so.
The other reason is that 80% of music is never written down, so it’s important for serious musicians to get good at working things out by ear. In fact, even if a jazz musician doesn’t read music they will inevitably need to do so at some point (like when they are asked to play with a singer who only sings lyrics).
Is Transcribing Piano Music Hard?
When a musician is learning to play a song by ear, it’s often easier to start with the chords and melody and then build up to transcribe the bass line. This is because the outermost parts of a piece of music are the easiest to hear and it’s possible to see where the inner voices are by looking at the intervals between the notes. For this, it’s helpful to have a good grasp of solfege so that you can recognise the difference between a major third and a perfect fifth.
If you are having trouble with a specific note it can be useful to write down the beats for each bar and then count them out loud as you listen to the piece of music. This will help you to capture the rhythm of the music and is quicker than writing down every single note. For beginners, this method works well when listening to classical music and using a standard notation style like Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik as an example.
Of course, this type of detailed notation isn’t always needed if you are only interested in transcribing a song to help you learn it by ear. If you are aiming for a complete note-for-note transcription of a piece of music then it may be worth investing in some software such as Sibelius or Finale to help you.
When you are trying to transcribe a piece of music, it’s also a good idea to listen for things like the root of the chord, the tone of the bass and whether it is major or minor. Identifying these features can give you clues about the style of music that you are listening to and help you to decide which instrument you are going to transcribe it on. If you are transcribing a vocal piece of music, then it can be a good idea to listen out for any sung accents. These can sometimes be tricky to pick out on an electric keyboard or acoustic guitar.