Example: No One Knows My Plan by They Might Be Giants Chords, Melody, and Music Theory Analysis - Hooktheory
When tabs are like this, it makes it extremely hard to read chords at first glance. Even when I zoom in, it is impossible to tell that those yellow chords are Fmaj7/A. So, I just have to click each individual chord just to see what notes are in each chord.
Imitating the rhythm of a song like that violates the Contributor Guide. You can just go ahead and fix it whenever you find a TheoryTab like that.
In general, there’s tension between the transcription that is the most useful for analysis and the transcription that produces the most accurate playback, and we should prioritize the former. I often omit some passing chords and others that, as Alan Pollack would say, “don’t deserve Roman numerals,” and I should probably be omitting even more than I do.
That tension is not as serious for melody as it is for harmony. Our tabs’ harmonies are contributions to the chord search database and other HookPad features, and melodies simply don’t matter as much. That said, I think caution is still needed when transcribing melodies. I sometimes come across transcriptions that try to match a singer’s phrasing as closely as possible. Even if the transcription timing is a closer match to the sung timing, it sounds awkward to me on playback. “Squarer” timings that are closer to an originally notated melody typically produce better playback and are probably a little better for analysis, too.
Oh my god tell me about it re: transcribing vocal melodies. Sometimes I have to recognize when a singer is embellishing in a way that probably wouldn’t’ve been written into the song’s original sheet music. Certain melisma or grace notes I omit for the sake of simplicity. I like to think of this website’s transcriptions as general guidelines, not opportunities to show off how cool and complicated you can make the transcriptions look/sound.
With melodies it’s obviously somewhat debatable where to draw the line exactly, but I personally think unlike sheet music a TheoryTab should account for the quirks of a performance to some extent, even if it’s just to avoid any audio-visual mismatch.
For example a lot of singers do this thing where they anticipate the next note half way through a syllable (e.g. measure 5 of the Pre-Chorus and Chorus to Cancer by My Chemical Romance). You usually won’t find details like that in a piece of sheet music, but I think in a TheoryTab it sometimes makes sense to include these.
That being said, I find myself wondering whether to transcribe certain performance quirks time and again and I totally understand that some people will disagree with me on this.
Yes, melisma like that can be a real challenge. I have a draft of the verse for Alison Krauss’s cover of “Losing You” that I haven’t finished because there’s deliberate scooping on tons of notes and I couldn’t decide how to transcribe it.*
I like the way you handled the MCR passage since it’s so rhythmic and the breaks come sharply on the eighth notes. Those are very substantial. Lots of melisma is less than a sixteenth note, and it’s probably for the best that that makes it impossible to transcribe.
In my previous post, I had in mind instances where there’s no question what notes to use, but the phrasing is so free that the exact start and end points of a note are difficult to nail down. I hadn’t consciously thought about it, but I tend to transcribe breaks like that only when they are made with some rhythmic intent, so to speak. By that metric, I’d put the MCR passage on the high end of intent. On the other end, some singers slightly shift timing when a lyric is more conversational or dramatic, and transcribed microadjustments of a sixteenth here and there tend to sound clunky.
Sometimes it’s just impossible: on playback, the verse of “Guilty” has a melody that sounds lousy and unmusical in places. I thought I handled it about as well as I could, though, since there weren’t obvious alternatives. (Still worth it for those glorious dissonances!)
(*Side note on Krauss’s melisma: I adore this piece describing her performance on a bizarre polka cover of a Bobby Darin song.)
