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.