Final Book: Ted Talk Reflection

Well...I'm at the end of my journey. It has certainly been a long ride. First the Ted Talk.

Too put it lightly, it was a pretty bad experience. Feeling the anxiety for the whole day because your presentation is the last period of the day isn't a good feeling. It seems like, at least to me, the more you practice, the more anxious you get. Then having to wait for everyone else to present...yeah, not fun.

Surprisingly, they seemed to fade as I started presenting. Maybe it was the familiarity of myself with my topic, or how true my message was to me. But, going up there and presenting went pretty much according to plan (aside from missing a few slide changes). I had been intimidated by previous projects that had gone before me, but those feelings died down as I listened to my own transcriptions, seeing how far I have really come. When preparing for the talk, I thought that having to listen to myself play for a total of a minute was going to be sorta awkward, but it actually wasn't.

                                           

                                                    (for those who haven't seen it yet, here it is) 

With no musical ear, and being able to create this, was something that I finally accepted was definitely achievement (of some sort at least). This one of the few projects where after looking at my final product, I was genuinely impressed. This was one of those good conclusions that I based my Ted Talk messages about. In that sense, I guess I will be missing this project. Now I'm not saying that I want to be be up on stage giving a Ted Talk to a group of 30 or so people again, but maybe the success from this project will transfer? I sure hope so. 

From, 

your friendly neighborhood transcriber

Book 6: Vlog!

So here's my vlog. I go through my reasons for doing transcription, the progress from these 5 weeks, and also what I think transcription will do for me in the future. I have put my actual transcription along with the recording on the 3:10.67 mark, so if you want to just skip to that, I don't blame you.

Bloggers's being stupid, so here's the link to my vlog.
https://vimeo.com/209937724

Book 5: Interviews

So, as required by the assignment sheet of this project, I needed an interview. And what better person to interview than my piano teacher, Mrs. Lena (Don't ask for her last name. I only ever remember my mom referring to her by anything but her Chinese name, so that's all I know). I have the questions as well as the answers below. The answers mostly aren't all her direct quotes unless specifically put in quotations as most are just my notes from the interview in sentence form.

1. What is your history with music?

"I started playing piano when I was 8 years old. It was a special privilege to me as not many families even owned piano's at the time where I lived (China). I played often and didn't really think about practice as practice. Playing piano to me was more like playing rather than practicing. I went to college for music, before marrying my husband, and moving here. Then I began teaching piano and performing occasionally. Mostly I just teach now."

2. How did you get intro transcribing music?

"Back then, we couldn't go onto the internet and find sheet music for any song like you guys do today. Sheet music then was contained within expensive books that you had to buy. There often weren't many songs in there. So, I decided trying to learn songs by ear that I heard from either my teacher, or tunes hummed by people. I started writing down what I had heard. I didn't know that I was actually transcribing music until I moved to America.

3. What is the importance of learning this skill?

"I think that it was more important in my time because there wasn't really any other way to be able to plays songs that you wanted to play. But it is still important to you as it adds to your musical ability. Anything that can add to the ways that you can use the piano is good for you. This is especially good as it trains your musical ear."

4. Do you have any tips for new transcribers? 

Pick songs that you really want to play over songs that you simply think will be easy. "My first songs were simple tunes because they were all I had at the time, but you should be able to do much more." Find the melody first, as this is most of what you will remember from the song. By getting the melody, it will make getting the harmony much easier. Also, don't be too worried about getting all the details at first. Just go through the song. You can always go back and add what you want once you have the basic composition down.  

5. Are there any songs or types of songs that you would suggest beginner transcribers start out with?

Simple jazz songs usually are good. Really anything without many key changes and accidentals are good for beginners. 

6. Do you have any tips to improve the rate and quality in which I can transcribe something by ear?

Practice. "When I first started, it took me many tries until I got the tune from the piano to match the tune from my head. It will take some time, but it gets easier because you begin to develop a sense for the sounds."

Book 4.5: Road to Success?

Hey guys. I have quite a lot to share since my last blog post and decided that putting it all in next week's blog wasn't good idea.

Anyway, in the span of about 1 hour, I decided that The Mario Bros theme song was really annoying and I didn't want to do it anymore. Yes, I change my mind a lot. Instead, I decided to do a song, like a real one. One that didn't consist of annoyingly high pitched notes blaring out every second (the song was driving me insane. Don't believe me? Listen to it around 20 times, because that's how many times I listened while trying to transcribe it). Instead, I went up to my pal Kalle and asked for some songs. Now I wasn't really expecting him to give any good ideas, so I only half listened for the first few seconds he talked. Some time later, when I did decide to listen, I heard a song that sounded pretty good, which was Stay With Me. Going through the same process that I used to choose a song before (I showed the process in my last blog post), I made the decision to go through with Stay With Me. Now I guess I do have to thank you Kalle. So, if you're reading this, thanks buddy.

So this here is the intro of the song (basically the section that leads to the main chorus we all know "stay with me...yada yada yada"). I started by transcribing the melody, which was relatively easy. The song is slow, steady, and mostly uses the major chords. Now transcribing what do for the left hand was actually not too hard. I found a Youtube video that gave this really short explanation for transcribing simple harmonies. Basically you bang around a little until you find the main chords for the left hand. Most songs use the same chords over and over. Thank god this was one of those songs. 

Here we have main portion A, which is just a name I gave to the main part of the song we all know. I used the same process as above, but it was faster as I already had most of the chords and knew the most used chords in the melody. 

Again, the same process as above. Oh yeah, and I guess this is the part where I mentioned that I kind of cheated. The song is actually longer. But in reality, it just repeats itself over and over again. I decided that I didn't really want to rewrite the same notes over and over again (like I mentioned before, this program is tedious to use). So, I just glued on the ending. But technically this is still the whole song. If you really want to play the whole the thing that bad, when you reach where I marked "End of Main B", go back to "Start of Main A" and play it over again. That'll get you most of the song. 

Now here is the completed version of the song. I just made some minor adjustments to some parts (fillers, rests, and all that good stuff). The changes aren't major, and I didn't want to take another picture of everything, so here is the final version. 

Book 4: Rocket Science

Since my last blog, things have been going pretty fast...for the most part at least. I have come up with the song that I wanted to try transcribing through pure luck. After some time spent wandering aimlessly, I happened to gaze upon my old Wii. Now I haven't used this thing in ages, and I have no idea why I even looked in the direction, I wasn't even watching TV. But, sitting next to my Wii was my stack of games. Sitting on the very top was a bright red colored game labeled "Mario". I had that sudden moment of realization that I could probably start with the Mario theme song. Here was my thought process.

a. The melody repeats itself a lot of times.
b. There doesn't seem to be many complex chords.
c. Who doesn't love a song made about an Italian plumber?

And so I got started. It was all fine and dandy at first. The melody seemed pretty clear, so just by continually pausing and trying out notes, I was able to work my way through the most of the intro. Now this is where I ran into some problems, slightly major problems. The note taking website I used also allows me replay the music I made, so I decided to listen to it from start to end while comparing it to the actual theme song. Things were similar, but not exact. That's when I realized that I had completely forgotten about the harmony and had just been transcribing the music based off the melody. That was why my notes seemed off, because they were meant to be two or possible three notes overlapped instead of just one note. 

Basically, I was missing an entire portion of music. Not only this, but I soon realized I had no idea of how to recognize the chords. There seemed to be so many options not just within the notes within the chord, but also the notes making up the chord. It took so much extra time per measure that I decided that I must have been doing something wrong and decided to consult the internet once again. What I found was a basically instructions telling me that there really wasn't an easier way but pure memory and recognition of the chords. I have a few charts that I think can help me identify them and have been playing some sort of chord recognition game. It seems like its kind of helping? I don't really know. Major chords are easy to tell, everything else is kind of just jumbled up. I'll post what I've been using below, but I think that'll be all for now, my brain hurts. 

Book 3: Minor Obstacles

So, by the end of last week, I was feeling ready to start the actual process of transcription. However, I needed a song to begin with. Up to this point, I had 0 experience actually transcribing anything, so I didn't really know how hard of a song I should be choosing. I didn't want to pick one that was hard t the point that I wouldn't even be able to do it. But, on the other hand, I didn't want to pick on that was easy enough that it looked...lame. While wandering through random transcription forums, I saw many people also ask the same question I had. Most of the replies I saw either said to pick a song I really enjoyed, or to pick a really easy (I'm talking happy birthday/twinkle twinkle little star easy). Since Ii doubt I would be able to successively do any of songs I genuinely like, I decided to just listen answer #2 and start transcribing Happy Birthday. Just to be totally clear, I don't enjoy listening to Happy Birthday, especially not after having to replay it 20 plus times.

(Happy Birthday?)

Now I know you guys are probably thinking, "Dude, Happy Birthday's like 2 lines using like the same 4 notes each time. You couldn't even get it on the 5th replay?". Let me tell you, that was exactly what I was thinking. In my head, my brain told me, "Chop chop, lets get this done in 10 minutes so we can take that nap we've both been thinking about." So by the 25 minute mark, I finally realized that this would be just a weensy bit harder than I thought it would be. 

(This is what gave me my drive to continue)

I did end up finishing it, just 30 minutes behind schedule ( I didn't end up getting the nap in. There happens to be a glitch where whenever I try to set the time signature it adds an entire new line of rests that can't be deleted. Pretty sure its not my fault. I'll try and get my sheet music up as soon as I can). But wait, I will say that it wasn't totally my fault. After really getting myself in the zone, I realized I had no where to actually write notes out on. 

So, I went online and fount the first online notation site that google gave me. It happened to be unnecessarily difficult (in my opinion). I don't really want for this turn into a rant so I'll just list a few things that I personally thought were annoying.

1. You can't just delete something, you have to replace it.

2. It's easy to change your mistakes. All you have to do is go back and replace the note...which also happens to screw up the order of EVERY SINGLE NOTE AFTER IT.

3. It has a cleverly hidden new draft button which I am still yet to find. 

But uh....I finished right? So yay. I'm planning on getting into a real song next week. Wish me luck. 

Book 2: The Struggles Are Quite Real

If you haven't been keeping up with me (like you should have), I made a schedule within my first week of this project that outlined what I wanted to accomplish. Basically, I had myself learning everything I needed about transcribing and the program that I would be using to assist so I could get into the real work as soon as possible. Looking back, I might have overshot a little. I'll get more     into that later.

(Here's what the software looks like by the way. It's called Transcribe!, I know, what a creative name. I thought that you guys might want to know what I'm actually working with before I really get down into it.)

Transcribe!

This program is a nifty little thing. Now when I first came up with this idea, I had this misconception that I would somehow be able to simply listen to things and write down exactly what I heard, despite the fact that I definitely wasn't born with a musical ear.

(That's Beethoven by the way. Did you know even he used Transcribe?)

After exploring for a bit, I figured out that I was very very wrong. Even those who are experienced with transcription don't just transcribe by ear. Instead, they use software, much like mine, in order to be able to alter the music to make the transcribing process easier. After looking around for a bit online, I found that Transcribe! was widely suggested, and decided to get it even though it won't last me the entire duration of the genius project (I'm going to have to pay the subscription fee :( ).  Now here comes the problem, Transcribe turns out to be kindddaaa difficult to use.

When I first started, I couldn't understand a thing. I knew that it was supposed to allow you to do all sorts of cool stuff (bookmarking points in music, taking out vocals, slowing things down), but I couldn't figure it out. However, after some experimenting, and many Youtube videos, I think I'm getting the hang of it. I should be ready to start with the actual transcriptions by about the middle of next week. I have some of the videos that helped me below.