Free Guide

How to Transform a Bad Transcription of a Pop Song into a Functional, Musical Score

Transcriptions of pop music are famously terrible.

If you’ve ever tried to learn a pop song from a score you’ve bought on SheetMusicPlus or MusicNotes.com, you probably know the experience: the song sounds stylish and natural when you listen to it, but the sheet music is a clunky mess that doesn’t capture what made you love the song in the first place.

Luckily, there’s a way to transform these terrible scores into functional musical guides that you can use to engage with the actual essence of the song. It just takes another musical language.

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In this guide

Break free from the confines of music notation and rediscover the essence of your pop song.

Popular music relies heavily on the natural rhythms of language, and the energetic flow of a phrase in a pop song is often more important than the exact mathematical proportions that separate one note from another. Traditional music notation isn’t designed to represent that approach to music. Reducing a riff to chunks of eighth notes and sixteenth notes quite literally robs us of an entire musical dimension! Even the best pop music transcribers must make compromises to accommodate this deficiency in traditional notation.

We’re going to rewrite the rhythm of your pop song using WordWaves, a visual musical language designed specifically to show the energetic flow of both language rhythm and musical rhythm at the same time.