Transcribing/Typesetting

Get the sound you want

I can play almost anything by ear quickly and accurately, and have worked as an official transcriber for Beyoncé, Paloma Faith, Regina Spektor and others (see below for samples). If you play me a track I can tell you what chords/scales/riffs are in it and then show you how you can use them in your own track. I'm equally at home in Pop/Rock, R&B, Jazz and Classical.

So you could use me to:

write an instrumental part to fit an existing song
transcribe a melody you sing to me
copy a sample without paying royalties
etc.

I can also play keyboards.

If you drop me a line, perhaps with a link to some tracks and a description of what you'd like me to do, I can tell you if I can help. Please note that I'm not a sound engineer, so I can't program synthesizers or recreate particular acoustics.

My rates are £20/hr. If you're not happy after the first half hour there's no charge. I usually work from my flat in Notting Hill but can travel to studios for longer sessions.

Pop/R&B

Here are two recent examples of transcribing/arranging work I did for Music Sales. They were mostly written on one train journey.

[click on images to see the scores on sheetmusicdirect.com]

Jazz

It's probably easiest to show what good transcribing is by giving an example of how not to do it.

Below are my corrections to a page of Hal Leonard's "The Herbie Hancock Collection", HL 00672419, from the publisher's "Artist Transcriptions" series. The series is supposed to be the most accurate collection of notated jazz available, and the book claims to feature Herbie Hancock's solos "note-for-note".

[click image to download PDF]

The transcriber's main mistakes were:

putting too many notes in the left hand voicings
not "spelling" chords correctly, and
simply missing things out

This suggests that the transcriber:

couldn't hear all the notes of a chord, and
had a poor grasp of jazz theory

If I transcribe a piece I can guarantee I get every note, and understand where each note fits in the music's structure.

Classical

This is my arrangement of the Prelude to Act III of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. My methodology was to transcribe the music from a recording first, and then to check my arrangement with a score. This way I was able to make a much better approximation of the sound of the orchestral original than a note-for-note transcription would have produced.