Reverse Engineering a Song

During my younger years, I remember that a number of musically talented friends have this uncanny ability to be able to transcribe music after hearing it a few times. Some of them were more proficient, being able to play sections of the music immediately after the first few listens. Some of them take some time to slowly extract note by note for the whole song. For myself since I'm lazy and not really confident of my ear, I usually use the internet to find MIDI songs and get the sheet music from there.

I used to have this joke that when we are trying to get the song back without the notes it becomes the process of reverse engineering. If you are in a computer program development field, you know that reverse engineering is the closest you can get to that process in Music - in which I don't know what it is called exactly. To me, I find using the computer is the easiest way :P

During the last month at my music class, my saxophone instructor told me that he wanted me to join one of the bands in the school and play a song at the annual "end of the year talent show". I was kind of relunctant to accept that considering that I started to play the saxophone just as a relaxing hobby and I didn't have time to schedule practice with other people considering my rather loaded workload.

Since my instructor said that there isn't any need to join a band, I decided it might be possible to play a simple piece. Initially I thought about finding a midi/music backing track, turn off the saxophone part and play over it. That would be simple as the notes are already there, so basically I had the sheet music of the song.

After taking some more to decide, I wanted to play a minimum piece in which had the fewest instruments on it. After deciding for a while, I got stuck on a piece called Forgotten Saga from the fusion jazz band called T-Square. A video is embedded below:



After a few listen, I wanted to play that piece. The bad news is that I don't have the sheet music. I decided then to start extracting the notes by ear. After a few hours of frustration, I managed to extract nearly the whole song (some slight mistakes there nad here), though I excluded the whole ending improvising session which I plan to end the piece before that part in my new simplified version.

If I ever happen to record the piece, I'll place it back here again.