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.