[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by hakkolu

…Should I be worried about this? Is this a skill serious musicians have? If so, how can I improve it?

Hi hakkolu

I began transcribing songs when I was 8 years old, sitting on the edge of my bed while wearing my accordion, with hand-drawn staff paper (I used a ruler and pencil) and listening to the radio for my favorite tunes to 'write' them down.

When one of the songs came on I wanted to learn, I'd hunt-n-pick-out notes on the accordion and write them down on the staff paper (melodies & sometimes harmony). The next time it came on, I'd figure out what notes were right (or wrong) and start assigning chords they were using to the melody, and write the chord names above the melodies.

By the time I was through with a song (which could take a week or two), I had melody line, harmonies, and chord progressions with lyrics. When I was 10, I bought a small battery powered reel-to-reel and refined the process. It got easier and transcription became much faster.

And my ear got better. Instead of generic chords, the place they were being played became more important (especially with guitar voicing).

I was a music major in college. Theory was my passion, so ear training was a course I took…which improved my listen-remember-organize-transcribe skills a ton more.

I still transcribe…sometimes on the back of a chord chart, or on my iPad using a drawing program and free handing measures for other musicians on our worship team who are trying to figure out progressions, chord inversions, passing tones, or lead lines (or singers needing a harmony note).

And I can hear the inversions of chords (which notes are on the treble strings, and which on the bass). In fact if you know the top and bottom notes of an inversion, and can identify the chord, the inside notes are pretty simple to fill in.

I use a form of solfeggi to associate pitch with key (I use alpha-numeric assignment of notes in the root-key of the piece instead of Do, Re, Mi etc). And I use a sliding Root (the Root note of the scale of the key the song is in is always '1' to my ear). I think of chord progressions in Roman Numerals, capital Numerals for major chords, and lower-case for minor chords.

As with any musical skill, the more you use it, the easier identifying, dissecting, and applying the info gets, and the more auto-pilot certain aspects of it become.

It may sound complex, but I arrived at the point I'm at now after 62 years of practice…not in a week or a month.

Hope this adds to the discussion…