I came across a brand new song, released just a few days ago, on Rhapsody. The song is "Hold On (To Love)" by Angie Ewing.
Now what happens with me is that when I hear a new song, I first judge it by the music style and the chords and harmonies. If the melodies and harmonies are interesting, the chords are creative, and the style fits my tastes, it's only then that I take a closer look at say, the words. This one immediately caught my attention.
The easy part was listening to it several more times to transcribe the words. (No, I can't reproduce them here.) The theme is about holding on to Love (Jesus/God, though never explicitly mentioned in the song) and Faith through life's storms, and that Love will hold on to you. It was written in remembrance of Hurricane Katrina, now almost three years ago.
The next task was to transcribe the chords. That's always been the time-consuming part. I'm not an auditory learner. I'm much more of a visual learner. So listening and transcribing is the reverse of what I believe my skills are.
I spent a good deal of Sunday afternoon searching the web for any automated method for extracting chords (and even individual parts) from a recording. I did find several pieces of software that claimed to do just that. All of them were available as demo copies, either limited in song duration or in total use. Full versions for purchase ranged from $39.99 to $129.99.
I downloaded each one and ran some tunes (MP3, WMA) through each. Let's just say I was impressed that they were even able to get some of the chords correct, but I was not impressed enough to think they were going to save me any time. Maybe they would work on simpler tunes with more clearly defined parts and chords. For the tunes I used, they missed and got wrong more chords than they got right.
It turned out time and my own ears were much better at extracting the chords and the melody than any software solution. Perhaps in a few years the software will catch up, but I'm not holding my breath... yet.
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