I have been working hard on a harmonized transcription of O Come, All Ye Faithful as arranged by Willcocks, harmonies and everything. I have provided a screenshot of the project below:
I won’t mince words: I am pissed that all of my work has not been reflected in the final post. It almost makes me not want to transcribe for this site anymore, but only almost, because I know that the developers must be lovely people who can fix this issue. Please.
Harmonies are an important part of popular songs, from the Beach Boys and the Beatles to
Queen and Alice in Chains, to many modern examples like Jacob Collier and more. Please consider this, because having only the melody present does not reflect the true artistry of their songs, does it?
Thank you for reading this and addressing my concerns. Happy holidays.
To be fair though, what you did in the intro section is completely defeating the purpose of a harmonic analysis. I agree that secondary voices should be displayed on TheoryTabs, but leaving the chord staff blank and putting all of the harmony into the melody staff is just nonesense.
Secondary voices are useful for sections where the individual voices are highly independent or form dissonaces with the underlying chords, but for homorhythmic chorale textures like this where the lower voices are just accompanying the top voice, secondary voices are absolutely unnecessary.
I’ve added chords to the first line of the intro section so that you can see what this section should look like. Please go ahead and add the rest of the chords yourself.
To be fair, the sheet music did not indicate the organ chords, only the choir chords, so while I could have transcribed the organ from the audio, I decided not to transcribe it. Plus, that adds suspense for the more reharmonized sections afterward. So in short, it was intentional.
Theory Tab analyses are always only a reduction of what is happening in the song. It’s impossible to get all the details. Important things like sound design, drum arrangements etc. are always left out. But still we have the feeling that one melody and a chord progression can cover the most important basics of almost all pop songs in a very easy and understandable way. So Theory Tabs are always a compromise between readability and details.
I’m sorry you found out about the voice restriction in our tabs only after you have done all the work. Perhaps we should make that clearer to prevent the pain of useless extra work.
