Go to the Theory Tab of Let Down by Radiohead. When you listen to the piano version, the rythym of the harmony keys is off and cannot be fixed. There needs to be an option where one note is struck and held for when the singer is singing slightly out of time, which Thom Yorke almost always does (on purpose).
Hey Robbie1299,
thank you for your feedback. There is always a discrepancy between a melody played on a piano and the same melody being performed by a talented singer.
The singer does many things which a piano cannot do:
- He can fade in a note add vibrato etc, the piano only has the possibility to hit a note once and cannot influence the note again.
- The singer most of the times does little portamento slides between two pitches, which can also not be played on a piano.
- A singer has to perform text and to deal with syllables, so if a word starts with a voiced consonant, the consonant is often sung before the beat and the vowel will be on the beat as the vowel is often more important than a soft consonant. You can hear that in chorus when he sings “llll-et turn”
So in practice what will happen is that you have a melody which is notated (if it’s notated at all) more or less straight forward and when the singer performs the melody he/she will make small variations in the tempo to put all his syllables on the right place and give the text meaning and emotion.
But this is nothing we have to worry about in a TheoryTab. There we should notate the melody without most of the performance “issues” as we cannot notate them anyway. The goal is to transcribe the melody in a way that it sounds like the same melody in piano as its sung.
So for Let Down I would just notate the melody on the beat and everything will be fine.
Right, but you didn’t answer my question. And what you suggested doesn’t fix the problem in the theory tab for that song. Can you please tell me how I can change the harmony to only strike the key once and hold it down. I know there’s a way. I just need to know how to do it.