1. What Does it Mean to Transcribe Music?

What I am talking about here is the process of working out how to play and/or write out a piece of music starting with just a recording of the piece – a commercially released CD perhaps. We would usually be talking about non-classical music as most classical music can be obtained as printed music.

You will also hear classical musicians speak of “transcribing” to mean adapting a piece of music written for one instrument to be played on another. Thus when John Williams plays Scarlatti sonatas (originally written for keyboard) on the guitar, these would be called “transcriptions” although he didn’t need to work them out from a recording because you can buy the published sheet music (for keyboard) in a shop. Non-classical musicians don’t often use the word this way because they customarily rearrange music for their own combination of instruments all the time anyway.

The Transcribe! application is an assistant for people who sometimes want to work out a piece of music from a recording, in order to write it out, or play it themselves, or both.

Conventional music players (whether hardware such as a CD player or an iPod, or software such as Windows Media Player or iTunes) are really designed for people who want to listen to whole tracks. They are very inconvenient for transcribing music as they are not designed for this purpose. If you copy the recording to your computer’s hard disk as a sound file then you can use Transcribe! instead. Transcribe! offers many features aimed at making the transcription job smoother and easier, including the ability to slow down music without changing its pitch, to analyse chords and show you what notes are present, and the capability of adding markers and textual annotations so you can easily navigate around the track. Transcribe! also has a piano keyboard displayed on screen which you can click to play reference notes.

It is important to understand that Transcribe! does not attempt to do the whole job, processing an audio file and outputting musical notation or midi – this would be nice, but is a currently unsolved research problem. The spectrum analysis feature is very useful for working out those hard-to-hear chords, but you must still use your ear and brain to decide which of the peaks in the spectrum are notes being played, which are merely harmonics, and which are just the result of noise and broad-spectrum instruments such as drums. If you have never worked out even a simple piece of music by ear then Transcribe! will probably not help you (see How to Transcribe), but if you do sometimes work out recorded music by ear then Transcribe! can make the job a lot quicker and easier.