Advanced Pop Transcription wrap-up

I just concluded my first semester teaching Advanced Popular Music Transcription in NYU’s new pop theory and aural skills sequence. The students transcribe recorded music into notation, and also analyze production techniques and timbre. Learning by ear is an essential skill for pop musicians. Even when you are using charts, accurate ones are rarely available. There are some AI tools that promise automated transcription, but so far, they are hilariously terrible. So students need to learn to rely on their ears.

I previously wrote about how the class was going as of mid-semester. Now that the class is over (aside from a lot of grading), I can do some reflection on the second half. The class continued to do weekly(-ish) projects, some of which involved notation, some of which didn’t. They went as follows:

De-Syncopate Willie Nelson

Listen to the vocal melody to the first verse of “I’d Have To Be Crazy” as performed by Willie Nelson, from 0:16 to 1:00.

You are going to remove all of the syncopation from this melody. Make it as square, corny and on-the-beat as possible while still conveying the feel of the song. Stick to quarter and eighth notes. You can do this in notation, record yourself singing it, or isolate the vocal and move the notes around in a DAW. If you do make a chart, please include the lyrics.

To prepare everyone for this assignment, I used Ableton to de-syncopate the melodies of a couple of Beatles songs, and the results sounded breathtakingly horrible. The students’ Willie Nelson projects were also horrible, and they knew it; they titled their MuseScore files things like “an angel loses its wings.” I wanted to drive home the fact that the rhythmic subtleties of a pop song are not decorative; they are core structural features. This fact has practical consequences. Lots of well-meaning music educators are trying to introduce pop music into their ensembles, but notated versions of these songs usually simplify the rhythms, especially in the top-line melodies. This is understandable! Sixteenth note syncopations are hard to read. However, they are very not optional.

Rap Verse Transcription

Choose a rap verse and transcribe at least eight measures of it into standard notation. Include lyrics. Show the pitch contours to the best of your ability.

The image at the top of this post is part of a transcription I did of “Follow The Leader” by Eric B and Rakim as an example for what I wanted the students to do. Here’s another excerpt. The colors show rhymes.

I didn’t assign this project because I think that Western notation is the right tool for the job of analyzing rap flows. Quite the opposite! This was an opportunity to critically assess notation as an analysis tool, to show its strengths and weaknesses. I also wanted to motivate everyone to apply some close scrutiny to rap vocals. Most of my students love rap, but they tend to keep it in a different mental silo from their in-school musical lives. I love this project because the rhythms are often really hard to convey, you have to exercise a lot of editorial judgment about how much to show precisely and how much to quantize. But because everyone was working with songs they chose and that they care about, they were more than motivated to put in the effort.

Beat Recreation

Choose a pop, dance or hip-hop instrumental and recreate at least four measures of it using the DAW of your choice. Replicate the pitches, rhythms and timbres as accurately as you can.

My NYU colleague Kevin Laskey originally created this transcription course. He recognized that if you’re analyzing pop music, it’s not enough to talk about the pitches and rhythms; you also have to think about timbre and production techniques, especially in music from recent decades. Kevin also had the insight that making your own tracks in a DAW requires a significant amount of aural analysis, so it makes sense to have the students do some production, not just write notated charts. Recreating existing songs is a time-honored technique for developing your DAW chops. Some of my students were novice producers, while some came into class already making hip-hop and techno at a professional level, so I knew there would be a wide range in the accuracy of everyone’s recreations. I was looking for good-faith effort over perfection, and I got it; people clearly sweated the details.

Daft Punk Instrumental

Using the DAW of your choice, create a new instrumental for the acapella stem of “Harder Better Faster Stronger” by Daft Punk (2001) that supports and complements the vocal harmonically, rhythmically, and stylistically. You can download the acapella stem here:

WAV | MP3

The tempo is 123.50 beats per minute. I set the start point so the first word comes right at the beginning. (The actual song has a very long intro, which you are free to omit.)

Many of my students use Logic and GarageBand, and I didn’t realize that those programs hate non-integer tempos. If you enter 123.5 as your session tempo, both DAWs will cheerfully accept it, and then just round it up to 124 without telling you. So people struggled to keep the vocals aligned. Next time I’ll stick to a round number.

Tempo issues aside, everyone rose to the challenge admirably. I did the project myself as a motivator for everyone’s creativity, and once I started looking for tracks that worked well, I couldn’t stop. I ended up making a dozen or so, here are the best ones.

The students were similarly inspired, and the submissions ranged from extremely experimental ambient to reggae to disco to 80s electronic Latin to drill to contemporary classical.

Final Project

As with the Daft Punk assignment, you will be creating a new instrumental for an existing acapella: “Nobody Has To Know” by Ajuni, a former songwriting student of mine. The tempo is 140 bpm.

Download the acapella here.

Briefly present your finished track to the class, explaining production and arrangement choices and techniques.

This is essentially the same project as the Daft Punk one, but I wanted to use a song that no one would have any prior familiarity with. I chose Ajuni’s track for its Phrygian dominant feel. I encouraged the students to alter and edit her vocal as they saw fit. I also had everyone talk through their creative choices, their production techniques, and their source material (loops, instruments, software instruments, plugins, etc.) As with Daft Punk, the stylistic variety in their projects was dazzling. People clearly enjoyed seeing their peers’ creativity in action, and for me, listening through the submissions was like Christmas morning. And I will of course be sharing all the tracks with Ajuni once I’m done grading.

Thoughts

Teaching in the pop sequence has been the most fulfilling experience of my academic career so far, something that I was rehearsing for decades without even realizing it. A student emailed me: “I’ve never taken an aural class, or really any sort of class, like this pop transcription class and it totally rocked. Thank you for opening up the floor for discussion, encouraging creativity, and advocating for your students and popular music education!” The pleasure was mine. Next semester I’m teaching lower-level theory and aural skills, and I feel like I have plenty of kinks left to work out in both of those subjects. But this class couldn’t have gone any more smoothly, and I’m looking forward to my next chance to teach it again.