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Need advice about my sheet music transcriptions


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Since this is my first post, I"ll give a little bit of background on me. I started subscribing to Keyboard Magazine in 1997 and since have moved onto Electronic musician. I"ve been reading the forum since 1997 but I just decided to sign up. Why yes, I do need advice, how did you guess? LOL. BTW..I did use the search function but I didn"t find the answer to this question.

 

Playing piano has been either my number 1 or 2 hobby for the past 40 years. The next song I would like to learn is Dr. John"s version of Delicado. I have two of his instructional videos and unless I missed it somehow, he doesn"t do this one. I did some online searching and came across a company called My sheet music transcriptions. You send them a MP3 file, they transcribe it, and they email you a PDF or MIDI file of the song.

 

Here"s my question. Is my sheet music transcriptions a reputable company? I did a google search and it came up goose eggs.

 

Thanks in advance. I have learned so much from reading your posts and I hope that continues.

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You might also consider PMing forumite Josh Paxton who was hired by Hal Leonard 20 years ago to do tons of transcriptions of Dr John, James Booker and other New Orleans pianists. I bet you could commission him to do it.

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Looks like the guy I had in mind doesn't have that tune, at least not among the ones listed on his site, but he might be worth contacting anyway:

 

https://www.tomrobertspiano.com/transcriptions

 

He's a serious player, a stand-up guy, and his transcriptions that I've seen have been dead-on accurate.

 

I don't have the time to take on such a project right now, but if that changes, there are always worse things than having more Mac to transcribe...

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Josh, i would love to see a list of your booker transcriptions. I have been working on "life" and "malaguena". Your youtube video of Malaguena is great. Did you happen to write any of that out? Your hal leonard book of booker songs got me hooked on anything booker. I cannot thank you enough for that book.
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Your hal leonard book of booker songs got me hooked on anything booker.

I can't say that I can play anything Booker, but Josh did get me hooked on him. Have you seen the documentary?

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thanks for the help, everybody. this weekend i'll sign up for paypal and I'll contact mysheetmusic transcription and TomRoberts. he doesn't have Delicado but he does have Mac's boogie which is another song I've been wanting to try
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  • 1 month later...
Not to derail: Josh, did you do Geoffrey Keezer"s Nearness if You for Open Studio?

 

 

Geoffrey probably wrote it out himself. He's pretty involved with that website, and they absorbed all the content he had previously been selling on his own site.

Kawai C-60 Grand Piano : Hammond A-100 : Hammond SK2 : Yamaha CP4 : Yamaha Montage 7 : Moog Sub 37

 

My latest album: Funky organ, huge horn section

https://bobbycressey.bandcamp.com/album/cali-native

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Is it safe to say that Dr. John's LH patterns on Delicado, Big Mac, Saints, and The Nearness of You were copied from Booker? The Dr. never seemed to talk much about Booker. I always appreciated that Harry Connick Jr. did his best to keep Booker's memory alive.

 

Man, you must not have heard the right Mac if you don't think he talked about Booker! His segments in the "Bayou Maharajah" documentary are excellent. It's especially moving near the end when he talks about Booker's death, and you see him get emotional, stop talking, and just kind of lean into the keys of B3 he's sitting at, like words aren't sufficient and music is better for him to express what he's feeling.

 

Some of his left-hand patterns certainly stem from Booker's, but Mac always did his own thing with them. Booker tended to have two distinct parts going at once in his left hand, a bass line and a chordal accompaniment. With Mac the lines could get a lot blurrier. He'd still have all the motion and fullness, but you might not get the kind of contrapuntal sense that Booker would evoke.

 

A good example is pattern he uses a lot in the tunes you mentioned. In the key of F, Booker might play a pattern like: root on the downbeat, fifth on the "and," third and seventh together on the "two and." So F, C, Eb-A, Eb-A. Mac's take on that is to play the first two notes the same, but then on beat 2 he'll start by hitting the Eb and A together, then slide from the Eb down to a D like a grace note. Then that leads back to the C on the "and" of two. So it's F, C, Eb-A with the Eb sliding down to a D, C. That can be a surprisingly tricky pattern to play, but the trick is not to think too much or try to articulate the slide. Just think of it as, you've hit the Eb and A, now your hand is moving back down to get the F on the next downbeat, and along the way your index finger slips off the Eb and lands on the D and you don't care. It's not even something you deliberately make happen; it's just something you don't stop from happening. If it ends up not happening sometimes, don't sweat it. Mac certainly didn't.

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FYI, for others reading this thread. There are a few software transcription packages available now which will take an audio file and attempt to transcribe it into sheet music. I just looked into this last week, and ran across AnthemScore and tried out the eval - it worked pretty well for a couple of songs I tested out.
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On the subject of transcriptions- I've looked for transcriptions of Ray Charles's songs and only came up with ebay offerings that cost hundreds of dollars. That can't be right-

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On the subject of transcriptions- I've looked for transcriptions of Ray Charles's songs and only came up with ebay offerings that cost hundreds of dollars. That can't be right-

 

Here's my overly-in-depth review of a book that came out about five year ago:

 

https://forums.musicplayer.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/2366903/New_Ray_Charles_transcription_

 

Edited to add: Geezus! I just looked it up again on Amazon, and saw that it's now out of print with people asking over $250 for used copies! It's good, but it's not worth that!

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So it's F, C, Eb-A with the Eb sliding down to a D, C. That can be a surprisingly tricky pattern to play, but the trick is not to think too much or try to articulate the slide. Just think of it as, you've hit the Eb and A, now your hand is moving back down to get the F on the next downbeat, and along the way your index finger slips off the Eb and lands on the D and you don't care. It's not even something you deliberately make happen; it's just something you don't stop from happening. If it ends up not happening sometimes, don't sweat it. Mac certainly didn't.

 

Thanks! I've been playing that LH pattern but not as a slide at the end, and not with that fingering. It makes a definite difference. It IS a little tricky sliding with the index finger but I'll get used to it.

 

RE DR. John talking about Booker, I only based that on a few interviews through the years. I haven't seen that documentary but I bought the CD some years ago.

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