Transcribe, Transcribe, Transcribe!

Transcription is a central aspect of literacy. Literacy means being able to communicate, with yourself or others, in written form: writing and reading. Being able to write and read means that you can store more than will fit in your head, and means you're no longer totally dependent upon your memory to store things: we all forget, and without the capacity to make organised notes, what is forgotten is lost.

Sound Design

If you want to learn your way around a synth, Transcribe, Transcribe, and Transcribe some more. The idea is this: if you work your way through the factory presets, or some preset pack, noting down every setting required to recreate the patch, (which you can verify by recreating it using only your notes), you gain a few things:

1. After a while, you'll have seen multiple example uses of almost all of the synth;
2. You'll have got good at observing settings;
3. You'll know where every setting on the synth is and what it does;
4. By forcing the details of patches through your head on a regular basis, like learning a new language, you learn to think in terms of the facilities the synth offers.

Then, as you go on, you can distil what you learn into more notes, in this case general recipes and techniques and such. Then, you can commit such things to memory so that, faced with the synth and no presets and notes, you can create the sounds you want as you go. Then you avoid the problem of trying to audition 1000 bass sounds to find the one you want.

Melody and Harmony

One reason it is good to be literate in sheet music, is it gives you an effective way to write down various musical ideas. Then, you can practise listening to a tune and writing down what you hear. (A related exercise is to hear a melody or melodic pattern and then to play the corresponding keys on your keyboard. I did, a while back, write a simple patch in Max/MSP to play a sequence of notes and then check that I played them back correctly. See here for a demo video of this.)

Related to transcription is sight singing and sight reading. In the case of sight singing, even if you are not a good singer, if you learn to sing a melody you see (maybe not in the same absolute pitch as you see, but at least with the relation between notes the same), then the mental machinery used to do so is valuable in other aspects of thinking about melodic patterns. The same can be done with chords, though with chords one can often just write down the chord name, unless you have a particular voicing in mind, in which case traditional musical notation is again useful to know.

Brain Training

The thing with transcribing is that you are training your brain in various ways. This is akin to someone in a gym getting benefit out of moving lumps of metal around, even of those lumps of metal end up exactly where they started. The general philosophy of learning is that you have to drill in things you want your brain to learn, and drilling in means structured repetition. Structured repetition takes time, so you want to structure your practice so as to drill multiple related skills at the same time. Transcription exercises give you great scope for this sort of thing, provided you properly explore the possibilities within them, rather than just mindlessly copying like a Victorial schoolboy.

Literacy vs Videos

Tutorial videos are popular. But there is a problem: if you want to recall something from a 20 minute tutorial video, but can't remember exactly where it is, then you have to spend another 20 minutes re-watching the entire video. If you take condensed notes, and you do a good job of it, then you can skim the notes of a 20 minute video in a minute or less, and hopefully that's enough to jog your memory. If you write notes in order of what's in the video, then you can more easily work out whether the bit you're after is earlier or later in the video. This cuts down search time. Moreover, if you find something you wanted isn't in your notes, then put it in your notes for next time. In this way, your notes and your learning grow organically based on the demands you place upon them. For example my notes on some Kenny Gioia videos are here. And if you deliberately write notes, as a student would do when watching a university lecture, and revise your notes, as a diligent university student does, then you will learn better. And if you learn better, you will produce better.