CHAPTER
12
Transcribing What You Hear
In This Chapter
Understanding why ear training is important
Discovering how to actively listen
Developing your tonal memory
Learning how to transcribe songs from recordings
In an ideal world, everything you need is served up to you on a silver platter. As a musician, that means you’ll always get perfectly noted pieces of sheet music from which to read, with all the chords and melodies and rhythms clearly and correctly written out.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world: you won’t always get sheet music for the songs you have to play; sometimes you’ll be expected to “play by ear” and figure out the music on your own.
How do you write down a piece of music, note for note, based on a few listens to a recording? It’s a particular skill, that’s for sure; one that involves a technique called ear training. That means you have to train your ears to recognize certain rhythms and intervals, and be able to transfer what you hear to the written page.
Training Your Ear
Consider the following: you’re in a band that plays the latest hit songs, and the band leader points you to an online playlist or hands you a CD and asks you to learn a new tune—by tomorrow night. No sheet music, no one to answer your questions, no one to practice with you and help you figure it out—you’re completely on your own, just you and the recording.
Or you’re working with a songwriter who doesn’t read music. Your friend sings a melody, and asks you to write it down so he can send it to a music publicist. He doesn’t know what key the song is in, or what notes he’s singing; he leaves those details up to you to figure out.
Maybe you’re playing organ in the church choir. The guest vocalist this week approaches you just before Sunday’s service, and says she’ll be singing “Amazing Grace,” in the key of G. She doesn’t have any sheet music for you—“You know the song,” she says—and if you don’t, you’ll have to learn it, fast.
Perhaps you’re playing saxophone in a pickup band at your local bar. It’s open mic night, and the next performer wants you to add some horn accompaniment to his tune. “It’s a 12-bar blues,” he says, “in the key of A. You have a solo after the second chorus.” No music, no nothing—just you, onstage, winging it.
All of these situations require you to think on your feet—or, more properly, to play by ear. You need to be able to hear a song and figure out what chords and notes are being played, without the benefit of any written music.
This might sound daunting, but it’s a skill you need to develop. You have to be able to hear a melody or chord progression, and then transcribe what you hear. With practice, you’ll be able to do this quickly and accurately; it can even become second nature. All you have to do is train your ears.
DEFINITION
Transcribing is the art of writing down melodies and chords by ear, without the benefit of any other written notation.
Transcribing music involves three distinct steps:
1. Listen
2. Process
3. Document
You begin by listening to the music—not for passive enjoyment, but more actively, so that you clearly hear every note. Then you process what you’ve heard, figuring out what notes and chords and rhythms are being played. Finally, you document the music you’ve processed, either by writing down the notes on paper, or using the processed music as a basis for live playing or improvisation.
With practice, you’ll move through the listen-process-document system almost subconsciously; the notes will come to you automatically when you hear them, without a lot of work on your part. So warm up your ears—it’s time for the training to begin!
NOTE
Ear training is a difficult skill to learn. Developing listening skills takes time and guidance, and for most people is best accomplished in a classroom setting or with an experienced teacher. If you’re serious about training your ears, a good place to start is with this book’s online audio files. You can then check your progress against the answers provided in Appendix B. You also can pick up a copy of Ron Gorow’s Hearing and Writing Music: Professional Training for Today’s Musician. Even better, head down to your local community college or university and sign up for an ear-training class. The personal feedback and guidance you’ll receive from the instructor will be worth the effort.
Listening—Actively
Before we get into ear training proper, you need to learn how to actively listen to music. This isn’t listening for enjoyment; it’s listening to remember, and to analyze.
Start by isolating yourself from the hurly-burly of your day-to-day life. Turn off the TV, close the windows, and block out all extraneous noises—the air conditioner, the refrigerator, the hum of the air pump in your fish tank. Create an environment in which you can focus on the music, without any distractions.
Prepare the music. This means setting up your computer or audio system with a good pair of speakers, or even a quality set of headphones. Make sure the music source can be easily accessed; you’ll be doing a lot of clicking backward and forward.
Now get yourself comfortable. Find a comfy chair, or a couch, or even a place on the floor, surrounded by pillows. Get comfortable, but don’t get relaxed; instead, remain alert and ready for input. When you’re fully prepared, it’s time to listen. Select a song, one of your favorites; then click or press the play button … and listen.
Begin by listening to the overall form of the song. Determine where one phrase ends and another begins. Figure out where the verses are, and the chorus, and even the bridge, if there is one. Get a feel for how the song is constructed, for its internal logic, for the way it flows from one point to another.
Now listen to the song again, but this time focus carefully on the melody line. Listen hard, and listen critically. Note where the melody goes up, and where it goes down. Note where the melody changes, where the verse ends and the chorus begins, and where any variations occur. Listen to it as many times as you need, until you’re sure you can sing it back, verbatim.
Return to the start of the song, and this time don’t listen to the melody. Instead, listen to the bass line. Listen to the tones played, and to the rhythms. Note how the bass notes relate to the melody, and to the other parts. Listen to the bass part and memorize the bass part; then play the song back again and sing along with the bass, from memory.
Again, return to the start of the song. This time listen to another part—the lead guitar, or the piano, or the saxophone. It doesn’t matter; pick a part, and follow it from start to finish. Listen critically, and hear how this part fits with the bass and the melody and all the other parts. Listen until you have the part memorized.
Repeat this process until you know all the parts of the song. Get to the point where you can sing back any given part, without prompting. Let that song get inside your brain; become one with the music.
TIP
When you’re isolating the bass line, you might want to turn up the bass (and turn down the treble) on your audio system, to better hear the low notes.
Finally, listen to the entire song again and try to figure out where the chord changes are. There might be a new chord every 4 beats, or 8, or even 16. Figure out the time signature (probably 4/4), and then try to lay a map of the chord changes over the form of the song.
This is how you actively listen to a song. You’re not listening for enjoyment (you can do that separately); you’re listening to learn—and to remember. Once you can recall a part exactly, from memory, you’re one step closer to figuring out the notes behind the part, and transcribing it to paper.
Developing Super Hearing
As part of your active listening, you have to be able to discern the component parts of the music. You have to be able to hear discrete pitches and intervals, hear different rhythms, and even hear the individual pitches within each chord. Sound difficult? It is—which is why you need to practice
!
Hearing Pitch
Lesson 1, Track 2
The first part of the music you need to hear is the pitch. You need to be able to listen to a pitch, isolate it, and then replicate it. In plain English, that means you need to be able to sing back any specific pitch you hear in a song. To do this, you have to develop what is called tonal memory, or pitch memory. This is simply the ability to recall a specific pitch, outside the context of the song or melody.
You can develop your tonal memory with this simple exercise. Take a half-full glass of water and hit it (gently!) with the edge of a spoon. The glass will produce a distinct pitch. Listen to the pitch, and fix it in your head. Wait until the glass stops ringing, then wait a few seconds more, then sing or hum the note that you heard. While you’re singing (or humming), hit the glass again; if your tonal memory was on target, the second tone generated by the glass will be the same as the tone you’re singing. If not, try it again—and pay more attention this time.
NOTE
When you hear notes or melodies inside your head (in your inner voice), you’re internalizing the music.
Repeat this exercise, adding more time between hitting the glass and singing the note. The longer you can hold the note in your head, the better developed your sense of tonal memory will be.
Next, try to find that pitch on an instrument. (Use whatever instrument you like—piano, guitar, trumpet, whatever—it doesn’t matter.) Hit the glass, wait a minute, sing the pitch, and then try to play that pitch on your instrument. Don’t worry if you can’t find the pitch right off. You might need to poke around a few related notes until you find the one that matches what you’re singing. That’s natural. With practice, you’ll be able to more quickly identify individual tones.
Obviously, you want to verify the note you’re playing with the source—the ringing glass. Play the note on your instrument while you hit the glass; if you have the right note, they’ll be in unison.
You can extend this exercise by generating different notes with different objects. (You can also fill the glass to different levels to produce different pitches.) When you’re comfortable with your progress, fire up a track and pick a single note from the melody. Repeat the exercise, this time trying to reproduce that melody note. Replay the track to check your accuracy.
NOTE
Interestingly, about 5 percent of musicians (just musicians—not the general population) have something called absolute pitch or perfect pitch, which means they can, with no prompting or assistance, correctly sing or identify any given pitch in the scale. Some people claim to be able to help you develop this skill, but in general it is virtually impossible for anyone over the age of five or so to “learn” perfect pitch. (Not 100 percent impossible, but almost.) In any case, you don’t really need this kind of long-term pitch memory to transcribe music. You can get along fine with the short-term pitch memory that we all possess, along with a good interval memory, which we’ll discuss next.
Hearing Intervals
Lesson 2, Track 11
If you can hear and reproduce a single note, what about two of them?
That’s right: the next step is to develop your tonal memory to decipher and reproduce pitch intervals.
Before you begin your exercises, you need to develop an internal database of relative interval relationships. That means internalizing all the different intervals within a given object—remembering what each interval sounds like.
The best way to do this is to sit down at your instrument and play each interval until it’s burned into your brain. Play a minor second, and a major second, and a minor third, and a major third, and so on, until you have each interval committed to memory. Can you sing a minor third? If not, you need to study some more.
Of course, there are shortcuts you can take. If you can remember specific snatches of melody, you can associate those melodies with particular intervals. The following table provides some melodic shortcuts for your interval training.
Intervals Found in Popular Melodies
Interval
Song-Specific Phrase
Ascending
Minor second
Theme from Jaws
Dum-dum … (bass line)
“As Time Goes By” (from Casablanca)
YOU MUST remember this …
Major second
“Frere Jacques”
FRE-RE Jacques …
“Happy Birthday”
Hap-PY BIRTH-day to you …
Minor third
“To Dream the Impossible Dream”
TO DREAM the impossible dream …
Brahms Lullaby
LULLA-BY and goodnight …
Major third
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”
HAVE YOUR-self a merry little Christmas …
“When the Saints Go Marching In”
OH WHEN the saints …
Perfect fourth
“Here Comes the Bride”
HERE COMES the bride …
“Amazing Grace”
A-MAZ-ing grace …
“We Wish You a Merry Christmas”
WE WISH you a merry Christmas …
Tritone
“Maria” (from West Side Story)
MA-RI-a …
Perfect fifth
Theme from Goldfinger
GOLD-FIN-ger …
“My Favorite Things” (from The Sound of Music)
RAIN-DROPS on roses …
“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”
TWINKLE TWINKLE little star …
Chant of the Wicked Witch’s guardsmen in The Wizard of Oz
YO-EE-oh …
Minor sixth
“Sunrise, Sunset” (from Fiddler on the Roof)
IS this THE little girl …
Major sixth
“NBC” chime
N-B-C (first two notes)
“Jingle Bells”
DASH-ING through the snow …
“It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”
IT CAME upon the midnight clear …
Minor seventh
“There’s a Place for Us” (from West Side Story)
THERE’S A place for us …
Theme from Star Trek
Doo-doooo … (first two notes)
Major seventh
“Cast Your Fate to the Wind”
(first two notes of the melody)
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”
SOME-where O-ver the rainbow …
Octave
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”
SOME-WHERE over the rainbow …
“A Christmas Song”
CHEST-NUTS roasting on an open fire …
Descending
Minor second
“Joy to the World” (Christmas carol)
JOY TO the world, the Lord is come …
“Spinning Wheel” (Blood, Sweat and Tears)
RIDE A painted pony …
Major second
“Three Blind Mice”
THREE BLIND mice …
“Mary Had a Little Lamb”
MA-RY had a little lamb …
“Yesterday” (The Beatles)
YES-TERDAY, all my troubles seemed so far away …
Minor third
“Jesus Loves Me”
JE-SUS loves me this I know …
“Hey Jude” (The Beatles)
HEY JUDE …
Major third
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”
SWING LOW, sweet chariot …
“Good Night Ladies” (from The Music Man)
GOOD NIGHT ladies …
“Summertime” (from Porgy and Bess)
SUM-MER-time, and the livin’ is easy …
Perfect fourth
“Born Free”
BORN FREE …
“My Girl” (The Temptations)
MY GIRL, talkin’ ’bout my girl …
Tritone
European police siren
Perfect fifth
Theme from The Flintstones
FLINT-STONES, meet the Flintstones …
“Feelings”
FEEL-INGS, whoa, whoa, whoa, feelings …
Minor sixth
Theme from Love Story
WHERE DO I begin …
Major sixth
“Over There”
O-VER there …
“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”
NO-BOD-y knows …
Minor seventh
“Watermelon Man”
Water-MEL-on MAN …
Major seventh
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”
And HAVE YOUR-self a merry little Christmas now …
Octave
“Salt Peanuts” (Dizzy Gillespie)
Salt PEA-NUTS, salt peanuts …
Exercise your interval memory the same way you did your tonal memory. Start by listening to a song and picking two adjacent notes in the melody—the first two notes are often the best to work with. Wait a few seconds; then try to sing the two notes. Verify your accuracy by playing the song again.
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