Thread by @TaliaRinger

One weird fact about me is that I can't physically play piano very well (I am uncoordinated and mess up a lot), but I can write piano music, and I can transcribe any song I hear, even if it isn't meant for the piano. My housemate who plays well but can't do that appreciates this

Here's a song I wrote in 2010 for example, but I kept messing up when I tried to play it, so eventually I just took the sheet music I wrote and used it to generate a midi file, which is what is on my SoundCloud: m.soundcloud.com/talia-ringer/t…

Here's the sheet music PDF, if anyone who is actually coordinated wants to play a song I wrote in 2010: drive.google.com/file/d/0B7TVz-…

When I was 10 I had this piano teacher I loved who let me play with writing and faking, and I liked it a lot. We even recorded a song I wrote at age 10 (it wasn't very good)

My piano teacher after that was much more traditional, but I was really impatient playing other people's songs. I knew I'd mess up, and it felt like too much pressure at a recital to get everything right. So eventually she caved and let me write music and perform that instead

This was really fun. At recitals, when it was my turn, they'd pass around the sheet music and note that I wrote it. Because of that, there was no pressure to get everything right. People didn't care that it was perfect, they cared that it was mine

I love it and still like to write music, but it does take me about a month to write a song, and I don't always have the patience anymore to actually finish writing the song

A lot of people when I tell them this are curious what it's like to write music. Usually I hear something in my head, and it feels like the song is already there. So I try to play it on the piano, but I often mess up. Messing up is actually good, though

Each permutation from each mistake changes the song a bit, and then the song I have in my head adapts to that. I let myself play around, usually, and just record myself playing around, and bits and pieces will be good to integrate into the song

After that I usually wait a day, then listen again, and if there are parts I really love, I write them down as sheet music (pencil and paper). This is slow, and this is the point at which I start to care about details

Then I build on that by just doing what feels right, and keep adding to the song until it feels done ✔

Transcribing I think is a necessary or at least very useful skill to writing, because otherwise it's hard to concretize ideas in your head as sheet music. So if you want to write music, I think it's good to start by transcribing songs you like

For this I sit with a computer or my phone, and listen to the song over and over again in small parts, decomposing what it sounds like, and trying to replicate it on the piano. When I replicate a measure successfully, I write it down

Eventually you get good enough at this that you can sometimes do this from memory, and that's a cute party trick, to ask people to tell you a song and then you just play it

Here is the beginning of Apres Moi by @respektor

An early attempt at Голубой Вагон

A soft acoustic interpretation of Through the Fire and Flames by Dragonforce

"add some shit" is Italian for "improvise"