Trolling Music Transcription Services with Skrillex
And these are just the people who bothered to write back!
Animated Sheet Music: “So What” by Miles Davis
I wasn’t going to go looking for the drum notations (sorry Jimmy Cobb), but I did find the sheet music for Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers.
So What (Intro & Melody)
Here’s a super secret preview of what I’m working on right now.
Everything is cool.
I bought a new transcription book and it’s going to be awesome.
Confirmation by Charlie Parker
Charlie hits some hilariously good phrases in this solo, and the melody is great. Transcription is from the Omnibook, as usual.
In this week’s challenge, both Youtube and Vimeo failed to completely satisfy this animation of Bird’s “Confirmation.” That’s because they’re dumbing down the stream to a low quality 360p or 480p, BUT if you set it to play the HD feed, you’ll basically get the original 720p file that I exported from final cut. AND I just realized you can SET THE EMBED TO DEFAULT IN HD!!!!
Au Privave by Charlie Parker
A standard of the highest jazz order, this was one of the first Real Book tunes I memorized. Transcription is from the Omnibook.
Animations can be pretty demanding on the transcoding of internet videos. Last year I uploaded a version of Giant Steps to Vimeo, but under their encode every note seemed to drag a frame or two behind the audio. Video streaming just isn’t built for this kind of exacting sync. HD has helped.
Both sites handled Bloomdido pretty damn well, but for this Youtube just can’t seem to interpret the keyframes correctly. Vimeo has taken the lead in my personal standings.
CODEC NERD UPDATE: You can set youtube embeds to default to HD (&hd=1), and that solves this display problem. Youtube back at the head of the pack!
Bloomdido by Charlie Parker
I dug through my transcription books and pulled out Jamey Aebersold’s amazing Omnibook, which has an obscene amount of great Charlie Parker notation.
The only challenge was settling on which song to animate, as there were literally a dozen that I really wanted to play with. I settled on 3, Bloomdido being the the first one.
New Animations Coming.
Giant Steps by John Coltrane
This is what John Coltrane’s landmark tune and solo look like when they come to life on paper.
If you try to play along, you may notice that the transcription for the head is transposed for C and the solo’s in Bb. Weird, I know, but the transcription book that I based this on was in concert.
You can buy the sheet music here.


