[pthreads]

When I was learning to play the saxophone my instructor had an old copy of the Real Book. The transcriptions of songs by some of the jazz legends would blow my mind. I thought the people being able to transcribe those were geniuses (still do). They had no sophisticated software to help them. It was all done manually by listening to countless hours of recordings over and over again. All those chord changes, harmonies, the extra fast tempo...

That also reminds me of Phil Schapp. He used to run (probably still does) a radio program at Columbia University. Most astonishing encyclopedic knowledge of jazz!! Have a listen sometime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Schaap

Edit: Added Wikipedia link.

[zimpenfish]

> They had no sophisticated software to help them.

Which is a shame because they sometimes make bad transcriptions...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFWCbGzxofU is a deep dive by Adam Neely into "Girl From Ipanema" covering how "The Real Book" neutered the blues countermelody because ... someone just didn't write it down in the 70s and everyone learns it from TRB now.

[lc9er]

Guitar tab sites always had the same problem with bad transcriptions. Fortunately, there’s a whole generation of musicians that do fairly accurate “how to play” series on YouTube.

[alexilliamson]

IMO Ultimate guitar has really great tabs for most reasonably popular songs. The ratings don't seem to be gamed as much as other sites as well. It's almost good enough to forgive all the shady UX patterns all over the site.

[achn]

The current version of this website is so shaddy and specifically geared to destroy the original concept of tabs being easy to copy and edit. This website is now the antithesis of where it started. It is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the modern web.

[Naracion]

Have the two of you given Songsterr a try? I've used it a couple times in its nascent years, and it seemed promising. But boy I used it again recently and it's improved a _lot_ and their library of songs has also grown substantially! I really love Songsterr now and check there before Ultimate Guitar if I need anything.

[biggieshellz]

Same thing with Blue Bossa. The syncopation in the original is completely missing in the Real Book chart, and now every high school jazz musician learns it the Real Book way and runs it into the ground.

[whimsicalism]

If you're just straight up reading from The Real Book and not listening to the records, you're playing yourself.

I was also lucky to have a piano teacher who would correct the wrong stuff in the real book for me.

[fortran77]

The software that helps is the ability to play and replay any part of the track, or slow things down a bit. The "transcription" is usually done by someone who knows music...

[GavinMcG]

Thanks for sharing that! What a great dive into the particulars—way beyond my music theory knowledge, but still accessible.

[leephillips]

This video is absolutely fascinating. Thank you!

[biggieshellz]

No sophisticated software, but you could take a turntable and play a 33 1/3 RPM record at half speed (16 2/3 RPM) and that would drop the recording by an octave but keep the notes the same.

[bori5]

Another way was put stacks of coins on the LP to slow it down

[jpitz]

I've spoken to a few professional arrangers, and I always ask "How many times did you have to listen to that to write it down?"

"Just once."

Genius indeed. Or 10,00 hours. Or both.

[dhosek]

I had the misfortune of having a friend in high school who could listen to something and transcribe it. I remember at band camp watching him with a cassette player and manuscript player transcribing an instrumental break from a Chicago song. He'd play a couple seconds, score it out, then play a couple more seconds until he was done.

I say misfortune because I assumed this was a binary thing: you either could do it or you couldn't, and I was in the latter category. Later in life, I found that it was a learnable skill (probably what did more than anything else for me in developing my ear was being part of the cathedral choir and doing a lot of sight singing in harmony) (another aside, having done a lot of church music over the years, it was interesting to see the level of musicianship of the cathedral choir, and I was in the larger amateur group rather than the smaller professional group—where in most church choirs, each section would have their part played at the piano and they'd sing it back, the cathedral choir would have all four parts played together at the piano and everyone would sing back in harmony. The professionals didn't bother with the piano part and just sight-sang everything, including some really tricky harmonies, like having the sopranos sing a high F against an E minor chord in the lower voices.) At my peak, I was able to work on writing music while walking without any instrument and come home and transcribe what I'd written including all the harmonizations. I've lost some of that skill from lack of practice in the years since and I had to use Capo to recover the chord progression of a piece I wrote where I couldn't remember one of the chords in the middle 8.

So bottom line, there are some people for whom this comes naturally but it is absolutely a learnable skill.

[JoshCole]

This is true of other skills that seem magical. One that stands out to me as being learnable, but often seen as magical, is 'savant like' memory capabilities.

People assume that these people have different minds and that is how they have such incredible recall, but the truth is our memories are really strong when the recall is a spatial query and the object being recalled is encoded well. People mistake their short term memory for their actual memory and they often don't do the work of encoding and decoding their thinking to improve its compression properties. This leads to the impression that our memory capabilities are much worse then they are.

If you properly encode the memory into a spatial context you can have rather incredible feats of memory. It just takes work to do the proper encoding and decoding and the creation of spatial contexts in which to store the things you want to remember.

That happens often with things that seem magical. Edward Tufte had an amazing observation about magic that really sticks with me: magic is an art of misinformation wherein the objective is to hide the work that was done. Oftentimes magical things are things which take a lot of work, but that work is hidden.

[homarp]

for 'savant like memory', see the book ' Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything' HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528807

and on the memory palace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2395739

and on spaced repetitions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24857437 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13151790

[sethrin]

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio. The "memory palace" technique is pretty useless to a person with aphantasia. Some people do, in fact, have different minds.

[pwnasaurus]

Mozart became famous at the age of 14 by transcribing Allegri's Miserere from memory after hearing it performed in the Sistine Chapel. It was a piece of music that had been composed about 150 years earlier, and which was not permitted to be written down or distributed, only to be performed once a year during Holy Week services in the Chapel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri)

[tjr]

I would think definitely some 10,000 involved. I have done transcriptions for years, but not very frequently. I don't have 10,000 hours, but I have more hours today than I did 20 years ago. And I'm definitely better at it. Ive reached the point where some music I really can just hear and write down, but there's still plenty that I need to work at meticulously.