accurately transcribed popular piano music for advanced players

Hi group,

occasionaly i hear a song with a nice piano part on MTV or elsewhere and do some googling to find the sheet music. Being a rather advanced player (several years of classical training, hardly any musical theory or cord scheme knowledge though) i am mainly interested in sheets that resemble the original piano part as close as possible.

If you look around on the internet the results are usually pretty disappointing. If you don't know what i mean do some googling on 'allicia keys falling piano sheets' 'evanescence my immortal piano sheets' 'mad world piano sheets' etc and you get the point. More than half of the results are forum posts by desperate 14 year old girls who need the music ASAP and if you would please mail them if you have the music. The odd case that you do find the sheet music it is usually an oversimplified version of the song, that consist of an approximate accord scheme written out with the lyrics converted to the right hand melody. Official sheet albums released by the record companies are usually not much better.

No offence to the people who transcribed them (it would have taken me some hours to achieve the same and probably would have given up half way), but these things are simply not good enough for me. I might sound very demanding, but i know i cant be the only one who wants the real thing. I also dont want to reinvent the wheel for each new song.

I know that at least for guitar there are floating are around some really accurate tabs, usually transcribed and corrected by music freaks that nitpick over the last note. Any suggestions on how or where to get the same quality for piano sheets? For older songs there are usually some good midi files, but they are hard to convert to paper.

I am almost inclined to start a web site myself with only guarenteed accurate material (could cause some legal trouble though).

Cheers, Bas

Bas,

What one usually receives is called a 'lead sheet' which consists of the chords and melody, and/or words of the song. In the world of pop music, these sometimes include the guitar chord fingering also. Fake books have been around for many years which consist of lead sheets.

What you are looking for is known as a 'transcription' of the actual notes played on a recording. These are sometimes available. Use the word 'transcription' in your search.

For example, I own a book of Thelonius Monk transcriptions, published by Hal Leonard. I don't know about these other people you are asking for, but perhaps you will find transcriptions available of their music?

good luck,

You're certainly not the only one, but you are probably a smaller class than you might think. Consider that most of the piano you hear in pop songs is played as part of a band, not solo piano. If someone did produce a note-for-transcription of what the pianist played, it would sound very odd in most cases without the rest of the band. So the results would be of limited use - and hence, there would be a limited market for this. Of course, music that really was originally done as solo piano music, or perhaps piano as the solo accompaniment for voice, would work just fine this way, if someone were to go through the trouble of transcribing, and indeed, I've seen that sort of thing on occasion.

Not if you contact the publisher to get permission (they may well want royalty payments, of course).

A few yrs back, Guitar Player magazine was really in the accurate tab mode for lead guitar parts. I think Keyboard Player magazine was starting to follow suit as well. (However, it's been quite some time since I've picked up either magazine.) If it's still the case, you might want to pick up an issue or two and see who publishes tabs/transcriptions. You might be able to search Google or contact them for custom music you'd like to see

If you can specify some particular artists or pieces, then some more specific directions might be forthcoming.

Unless the artist is a keyboard soloist, such arrangements are usually pretty tedious. Even Elton John and Billy Joel don't always play melody lines for their vocal pieces. There a number of books available that have more advanced arrangements for the solo piano, but availability is pretty uneven and what may be available in one country may not be in another. I generally search in US, UK, Australia, France and Japan for good coverage of available markets. Accurate transcriptions of pop music are more widely available in Japan than anywhere else that I've explored. Some good arrangements of popular music are available through European publishers but these are not sold in English-speaking countries despite Warners or another media giant being the parent company. Some websites which distribute scores electronically will not show/ship you certain music if your domain or credit card address is in the wrong country. Whenever I travel abroad I comb the local music stores for material that I can buy over the counter but which would be denied to me otherwise.

I agree that music companies may be missing on an opportunity to market popular titles. There's a few vocal and instrumental pieces I have seen requested over and over again for years, if not decades, and which have never been published. Even publishers of classical music have little interest in making available rarer pieces in their archives available to the public. I once had an email conversation with the late great Ted Perry of Hyperion Records about this problem: renting scores for unusual pieces is so expensive, that making a recording of the piece - and thereby creating a demand for subsequent rentals or purchases - can only be done if someone subsidizes the recording. Tens of thousands of copies of a CD may have to be sold just to recoup the score rental costs for a couple of rehearsals and a recorded performance. Composer, performers and public alike are ill-served by the Scrooge-lie behaviour of the publishing companies, who would rather make no money from a 'property' than see less than the pound of flesh they desire.

I think that (once again) technology will overtake music publishers on this matter. Widely available MIDI files are already beginning to substitute for published scores (although it would be better to see Music-XML replace this format) and improvements in signal-analysis will eventually lead to user-friendly software that will take audio files and create scores directly. Current software still requires too much work to be of use to the casual user.

accurate material (could cause some legal trouble though).

I know someone who did put up some of his own excellent transcriptions/arrangemments of unpublished popular & film music, but the lawyers closed in on him several years ago and made him remove everything from outside of the public domain. Even sadder is that the rights-owners didn't take the opportunity to publish these arrangements to produce a win-win situation for them and for consumers.

Other sites with archives of long out of print classical music have also been closed down.

I wouldn't say I'm an advanced player, being someone who can't play the rhapsody in blue or rach's piano concerto no 3. But I'm certainly someone with classical training but hardly any music theory. So I think I can answer your question.

You'd be suprised how easy it is to transcribe these pieces yourself. Can you hum the tunes when you're listening to it? Can you hum the accompaniment? That's all you need to start. You don't need music theory. I've done both my immortal and mad world myself. Start with mad world, it's as easy as it gets.

You'll need some software to help you. Rip the song from the CD into mp3. Then get one of those music notation software, eg overture 3. I was given this, but I know there is a very cheap one from the finale people. Play a section of the mp3. Hum it to yourself. Try to find what notes they are on the piano then put it into the notation software. They all have playback function, so you know whether you've got it right. Repeat the same section of music and listen for the accompaniment this time. It's very easy, and gets easier with practice.

And once you've got the melody and accompaniments (chords) down, you can start embellishing the tunes with other stuff. Like adding 3rd, 6th or octaves to the chorus, or turns and trills, etc.

I can't play be ear, so I need to do trial and error with the notation software. I think lots of accomplished pianists actually can listen to the music and then play it straight on the piano. And that's probably why there aren't any advanced arrangments out there.

on the internet, the best way to get transcribed stuff is via midi. try a search for 'alicia keys midi' and see what you get. then you can open thee midi file with a midi notator which is very common and easy to find. the notation has something to be desired as it usually looks like it was written by an appliance but if you are advanced you should have no trouble with it. or if you want to be very daring

Actually, for the songs he listed, it's unlikely you'll find lead sheets (or transcriptions). The fake books I've seen are never any good for new music. The Alicia Keys one is from 2001, my immortal is from late 2003, and mad world is the christmas no 1 in the UK 2003.

But your mentioning of the lead sheet reminds me of what I missed from my earlier post. Instead of picking the riffs and melody by ear, he could purchase a PVG arrangment. Then use it as a lead sheet. I do the same with my own 'transcription'. I only put down the bare melody and the accompaniment pattern, adding other 'fluff' when I'm actually playing it. As Marc said in his post, a 'real' transcription is no good since pop is usually accompanied by a band. You have to add things to the music for it to sound good.

I missed the examples the OP originally gave, but I did find someone's piano arrangement of Gary Jules' version of 'Mad World' somewhere on the net around June last year. Melody's OK but the rhythm is a bit off. I just googled again for 'gary jules' 'Mad world' 'Sheet music' and found it very quickly: http://membres.lycos.fr/mithy/sheetmusic.html

One reason that these things are hard to find is that they have to be created after the fact. Most pop musicians have only an outline written down, and create the rest of the arrangement live and on the fly. I have played on a few recording sessions, and the final product usually has little or nothing to do with the sheet we start with, assuming we even start with a sheet. When I am finished, I don't know exactly what I played and probably couldn't duplicate it off the top of my head a few weeks later.

I would say: listen and transcribe it yourself