Topic by wws

  • Avatar
  • wws
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 21-02-2023
  • Posts: 41

Topic: Dictation / transcription resources

I think I have to add dictation / transcription to my regular piano practice.  That is, hear a melody, write it down in staff.

Does anyone know of good self study resources or approaches?  A book with accompanying music?  Something else?

I love my teacher for lots of reason, but I feel like she is a little too laser focused on memorizing pieces for recital performances.

(Recitals are  something an amateur would never actually do outside of the test environment -- I might lead sing alongs, volunteer at a dance, etc, but all those require reading, hearing, and improv skills which are completely ignored in the recital approaches.  Really, I want the skills of a bourgeois 1880s housewife who likes to throw parties, and I don't need to reach the pinnacles of a "real" pianist...)

(Oh -- if anyone tells me to google it or look on youtube, I will hunt you down and yell at you!  I am only asking here in hopes that someone has actual experience with a suggestion...)

Thanks!!

Reply by RalphF23

  • Avatar
  • RalphF23
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 24-01-2023
  • Posts: 6

Re: Dictation / transcription resources

My approach to ear training is to find snippets of songs that I can readily identify and then assign them values. Here’s what I put together after dinner. Hope this helps. I did record a MP3 file of this but i can't figure out how to post it. if  anyone knows how to do this, LMK

Minor 2d—Jaws
Major 3d and minor 3d—Beethovan's 5th
4th—Yes, Yours is no disgrace
5th—My girl, song for my father, Rikki don’t lose that number
Root-minor 3d-4th--- Led Zeppelin, Misty Mountain Hop.

Reply by RalphF23

  • Avatar
  • RalphF23
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 24-01-2023
  • Posts: 6

Re: Dictation / transcription resources

I put the MP3 file in the shared files section. still dont know how to upload it here

Reply by kanefsky

  • Avatar
  • kanefsky
  • Member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 25-09-2022
  • Posts: 49

Re: Dictation / transcription resources

We can probably break this down into several categories of tools or information that will help you learn:

1. A tool to make it easy to listen to the music you want to transcribe over and over, with features like the ability to slow it way down, set different start and end points, mark different sections/measures/beats, loop a section over and over, transpose keys, etc.  For this I would recommend Transcribe! from Seventh String Software: https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/download.html

2. Ear training software you can use to practice identifying notes in a scale.  An app that I really like is Functional Ear Trainer:  http://fet.kaizen9.com. This app also has some melodic dictation training.  There are also some really full-featured ear training apps that try to teach you everything, like EarMaster.

3. A source of material to transcribe.  One thing you could do is find a bunch of songs in MIDI format that you could both display as notation and convert into audio using Pianoteq (or other software, but this is the Pianoteq forum after all ). Then you could transcribe the audio and check it against the notation.

Alternatively, you could use commercial recordings of songs you like and either search for free transcriptions or go to one of the many sites that let you buy sheet music transcriptions for popular songs.  You can also buy books of sheet music of course.

4. Notation software.  If you're going to write down your transcription, you might as well learn to do it in an app for music notation (e.g. MuseScore, Finale, or Sibelius). Almost all of these will let you play back your notation and it's usually pretty easy to tell if you've got things right even if you weren't able to get notation as described in #3.  It's pretty easy with melody and rhythm anyway.  Recognizing whether complex chords are exactly right by ear is much harder (at least for me), especially when trying to transcribe from one instrument to another.