The transcribing trap

I’ve been focusing on learning songs by ear and one thing that I think is worth separating is transcribing to be able to play something or transcribing to be able to write it down.

Because there’s a trap that some musicians will fall into.

You decide to learn a song. You start learning it and transcribing it by ear and it’s going super well. You start to write it down as you figure the song out by ear. And eventually you have the whole thing written down … and you then start to read the music from the page. You leave the recording alone and start to read the music off of the page.

You see the trap?

You start to learn the song by ear, and get through it a little bit, but end up relying on your reading abilities after starting. You leave out the whole ear training part of learning a song by ear.

If the goal is to just have a written copy of the song, then this is fine. If you’re hired to make a transcription for a gig this is fine.

But if you’re learning a song to work on your ear training skills and better be able to understanding music by ear, then this isn’t helping as much as it seems.

The alternative to this is to learn the song by ear all the way through first. Be able to play the song from beginning to end just by ear.

Then write it down.

But don’t write it down until you know the entire song by heart.

This helps you in a few ways. It forces you to internalize the sounds in the song and be able to reproduce them on your instrument. It also helps you memorize songs by how they sound, rather than the notes on the page. It helps with your internal sense of pitch.

I fell into this trap while in high school and college because it was so much easier for me. Music reading came much more naturally than learning by ear. So I ended up relying on that.

But if this sounds familiar to you try learning the entire song by ear first. At first this is going to be difficult. It’ll be hard to remember all of the chord progressions and all the sections and what order to play them in, but with practice it gets a lot easier. Keeping everything straight in your head will be hard to do, but that’s a skill to be improved.

After learning a few songs like this you’ll likely be able to pick up songs much more quickly. It’ll be easier to remember the order of the sections. It’ll be easier to figure out chord progressions. It’ll be easier to play everything in sequence.

ISJ