Transcribing

Helpful Tools

To help you hear bits of the pieces better, you can use any free DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) like Audacity or GarageBand to help with slowing parts down or separating the EQ. This means you can apply filters to amplify or attenuate high/low parts to make it easier to pick out hard-to-hear lines.

Filtering out higher frequencies in Audacity makes it easier to hear bass lines

Another useful tool is Transcribe!. It has extra features such as the ability to mark the measures on the audio files, note guesses/spectrograph, and chord guesses.

Can’t hear some instruments. Pls halp.

Sometimes some instruments like viola, clarinets, or bass can be hard to hear. Before you do anything else, try your best to find a good quality audio file, it goes a long way. Let’s take the bass as an example. When there is a part where you cannot hear the bass, there are three things you can do. The first two methods might help with the third.

1. Find parts before the part where you can hear the bass and tune your ears to the timbre of the bass. It usually helps you pick out the bass when it goes into murkier parts of the piece.

2. Try and “feel” the chord. Or analyze the progression leading up to the place you can’t hear and find a logical note. For example, If I have a progression that goes C->G/B->Am, very likely, the next chord in line is G since the bass is climbing down from C to reach G, which is usually a good resolution chord (in the case of C major).

3. Use a DAW’s or Transcribe!’s EQ effect to boost the bass (~C2 region). Don’t forget to lower the treble (~C6 region); counterbalancing can sometimes help the low notes poke out a bit.

Common configurations (extend to other instruments by generally boosting the common ranges of the instruments): - Bass: C2 up, C6 down - Clarinet/Viola: C4 up a little bit - Horns: C4~C5 up a bit, C3 down - Cello: C3 up, ~C5 down