# Transcribing from ear to score



## d.healey (Apr 14, 2016)

I can hear a melody and almost immediately play it on piano, might take me a few wrong keys to get the first note but once I've got it I can get the rest - relative pitch.

What I can't do is hear a melody and write it down, I can get bits of it but not reliably. Does anyone have any practical tips or techniques to make this easier? or is it just a case of practising until I get it?


----------



## patrick76 (Apr 14, 2016)

Practice. Sight singing and dictation. Unless you're talking about perfect pitch, in which case I have no idea... I don't think it would take you a lot of time if you are able to figure it out quickly on the piano. 

Once you can recognize every interval, you can write stuff down reliably. I always am thinking of music that is burned in my brain for recognizing intervals like star wars - perfect 5th, wedding march - perfect 4th, old NBC theme - major 6th etc.


----------



## d.healey (Apr 14, 2016)

Thanks, yes I've heard of the mnemonic method for recognising intervals, I want to avoid that if possible though because I think it may cause me issues if I am trying to hold a piece of music in my head and I have to think of other pieces of music to get the different intervals. What do you mean by dictation?


----------



## givemenoughrope (Apr 14, 2016)

here's a tritone for you:


----------



## patrick76 (Apr 14, 2016)

d.healey said:


> What do you mean by dictation?


Melodic dictation - just hearing a melody and writing it down.


----------



## d.healey (Apr 14, 2016)

patrick76 said:


> Melodic dictation - just hearing a melody and writing it down.


Aha same as transcription then


----------



## hawpri (Apr 14, 2016)

If you practice sight singing using solfege I think that some concurrent ear training will develop your dictation skills, too, albeit at a slower pace than sight singing. At least, that's been the case with me.

The training to recognize intervals based on music you're familiar with shouldn't interfere with your ability to get a tune from your head written down- I think that's really only to help students get started on learning to recognize intervals.

I learned intervals with solfege, folk songs and popular movie themes, but I don't think of it that way when trying to dictate now.. Except for tritones. I always know one when I hear it, but I still have to think of Back to the Future to sing one.

Sitting at the piano makes it much easier to get melodies out when dictating on paper, so it seems like practicing without an instrument will challenge you and help to develop your skills more rapidly.


----------



## Gerhard Westphalen (Apr 14, 2016)

At my university there's a basic musicianship course that teaches this. I skipped it because I already had the skills from growing up but I sort of know the things they did. It focuses a lot on solfege (with movable "do") so you gotta know that well. They use a book for melody and one for progressions. Practice and learn to sight sing the melodies. You can start off by writing in the syllables. With the chord progressions they just sang the progression like do me so me do fa la do la fa...
And then they also did dictation where the teacher would play something and you'd have to write it down. But that skill comes from having a good internal ear which you develop by doing the previous exercises. Growing up I remember most of my ear training being based on knowing the intervals so play a note on the piano and then sing a major third above or below etc. and then have someone else play an interval and be able to identify it. I've always found the intervals below to be a lot trickier. I think that I also developed a lot of my skills by working as a transcriber. Try transcribing an orchestral piece (even sitting on the piano).

Having said all of that, tonal ear training will only get you so far. The musicianship course that I took last year focused on atonal melodic lines using fixed "do". It gets a lot trickier when you don't have the influences of tonality to help you so you need to work based solely on intervals.


----------



## Hannes (Apr 14, 2016)

I think it's very important to have the relation to the root in your head/ear. I also had to learn the solfège in an ear training class - and it helps to get a feeling of the function of the different notes in a melody.
When you e.g. hear a jump from "d" to "b" in C major, try not to hear it only as a major 6th interval, but also as a jump from 2 to the 7 (Re - Ti). Also if you only listen to the intervals between the notes and you do something wrong in the beginning, the rest will also be wrong

You don't have to learn the solfège for that, but you should always think of the relation to the root with each note.

cheers


----------



## givemenoughrope (Apr 14, 2016)

Do you sort of 'visualize' the piano when you sing the intervals? I learned intervals via the saxophone so my fingers tend to move to the keys when I'm thinking about an interval. Might help to associate it with an instrument that you play anyway.


----------



## SillyMidOn (Apr 15, 2016)

d.healey said:


> Thanks, yes I've heard of the mnemonic method for recognising intervals, I want to avoid that if possible though because I think it may cause me issues if I am trying to hold a piece of music in my head and I have to think of other pieces of music to get the different intervals.


 That is not an issue - you HAVE to be able to recognise intervals if you want to transcribe straight to paper, pure and simple. To get going, you can recognise intervals by associating them with the opening of something famous/something you know well as Patrick76 correctly pointer out, that's all. Once you've mastered that, you don't need to think of the piece you used as a reference point to identify the interval. This is like any learning - for example little children start to learn to add and subtract by using their fingers. Once they're got that down, they don't need to use their fingers anymore as a reference point.

Here use this:
http://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-interval


----------



## d.healey (Apr 15, 2016)

SillyMidOn said:


> That is not an issue - you HAVE to be able to recognise intervals if you want to transcribe straight to paper, pure and simple. To get going, you can recognise intervals by associating them with the opening of something famous/something you know well as Patrick76 correctly pointer out, that's all. Once you've mastered that, you don't need to think of the piece you used as a reference point to identify the interval. This is like any learning - for example little children start to learn to add and subtract by using their fingers. Once they're got that down, they don't need to use their fingers anymore as a reference point.
> 
> Here use this:
> http://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-interval


Thanks for that resource, I'll check it out. I'll reinvestigate this mnemonic idea too. Thanks everyone for all the other tips - great response, I appreciate it!


----------



## SillyMidOn (Apr 15, 2016)

d.healey said:


> Thanks for that resource, I'll check it out. I'll reinvestigate this mnemonic idea too. Thanks everyone for all the other tips - great response, I appreciate it!


Oh yes, the other thing is to be able to sing those intervals - really important. So think of a perfect 5th, then sing it. It does not have to sound great, but something happens when you can sing an interval, it's like the brain, your fingers on the keyboard, and your ears all somehow start connecting musically.

Once you get better at that, take a simple tune and try and sight-sing it. Bloody had at first, but this is what you have to do at music college. Man, I dreaded those sight-singing exams (and just to confirm, I am not a singer!)


----------



## JJP (Apr 15, 2016)

All good advice here. I'll add that there are some benefits to using solfege over scale numbers.

the syllables are easier to sing than numbers (singing "seven" is just a pain because it has two syllables and creates a rhythm )
numbers don't give you syllables to sing for chromatic notes (now sing "flat-seven"! )
learning and recalling intervals becomes a bit easier because solfege syllables don't have any other associations like numbers do.
An example for #3: If you say to someone "five one" are you talking about the scale degree five to scale degree one, or are you talking about the five chord (V) moving to the one chord (I)? Most trained musicians would assume you're talking about chords. Say "sol do" and everyone knows you're talking about scale degrees -- individual pitches. It's a minor distinction for personal learning, but it can affect the way you think, learn, and hear things in your head and make the whole process easier.


----------



## prodigalson (Apr 16, 2016)

Agreed that practicing solfege is the tried and true method for this.

In addition to hearing intervals, you can focus on hearing the behavior of notes too for quick references. For example, notes have varying degrees of tendency to resolve one way or another. e.g. 4 (fa) wants to resolve to 3 (mi), 7 (ti) resolves to 1 (do), those are obvious. But also 6 and b6 resolve to the 5th, 5th to the root, 2nd to the root etc. If you start by really hearing the strongest tendency tones in your mind's ear then everything else is easy to find.


----------



## Theory Man (Jun 9, 2016)

Just wanted to expand on something SillyMidOn said about using famous tunes for interval recognition. You can also do this for virtually all aspects of melodic dictation: rhythmic patterns, intervals, starting pitch, range, metric placement, etc. Dictating melodies that are already in your head is a great intermediate step because you can capitalize on your familiarity with the tunes. Once your skills are pretty fluent, move on to unfamiliar tunes. Check out this book for dictation:

Building Better Dictation Skills


----------

