PIYW #3: "Play 'Autumn Leaves' Your Way" is now live!

rsl12 · 2025-10-15T11:00:00+00:00

PIYW #3: Play "Autumn Leaves" Your Way (Oct 2025) Play It Your Way is a quasi-monthly event for beginners, professionals, classical, jazz, or pop pianists a...

kanadajin

Simonb My interpretation is but a very pale imitation of this one:

I have yet to transcribe the middle section from about 2:28 to 3:25 where she goes crazy on the keyboard. A challenge for another day … And after such time and effort, I then will actually need to try and play it myself!!! I omitted it for the time being keeping in mind the Oct 15 target date 🙂

Simonb

Hi kanadajin

I'm not familiar with the Pianist, but that's a great version she plays.
That section from 2:38 will take a lot of work!

Transcribing isn't something I do, though some influences come out in my playing. Though I'd never claim to be able to play like any of them, Oscar Peterson, Keith Jarrett and Michel Petrucciani are probably my 3 biggest Jazz playing influences. And I could list dozens more who've inspired me over the years, and not just Jazz Pianists. Elton John was a huge early influence, and I play Bennie and the Jets in a band now.

Sorry, that's not got much to do with Autumn Leaves :-)

Cheers

rsl12

kanadajin Thanks for reminding me about Sanga Noona. Since my main focus is on solo piano, with a little singing, I should really study her, since she does almost exactly what I'd like to be able to do, and I enjoy her performances. Any issues with transcribing her?

kanadajin

Simonb Yes a LOT of work - I will need to gather my courage before even attempting to write it out. And then to try to play it half decently … doable but ….. uuuffffff….

I am with you on KJ and Petrucciani, huge influence on me too as is Oliver Jones. I have transcribed some (not that many) of their songs and indeed, depending on complexity and intricacies, in certain cases progress can be infuriating sloooooowwwww wherever there are complex rhythms combined with high density of notes.

I consider myself a better transcriber than improviser (sadly). I am envious of what for example you, rsl12 and PianoMonk can come up with when improvising (the latter does not even read music - wow!!!!!!). I often wish I would be less of a « paper man » i.e. relying on written scores. To me generating a score is usually the path of least resistance (also known as laziness - lol) given that I learned to read /write music at the same time as read/write (alphabet) so it actually comes rather naturally. Both a curse and a blessing it seems ….

kanadajin

My final instalment.

HeartKeys A fun listen indeed! I like the way you incorporated all kinds of other well known melodies from various styles such as Bach prelude, Chopin Fantaisie-Impromptu, Gershwin’s Summertime, Phantom of the Opera and countless others, all in a fairly seamless way. You are obviously enjoying yourself and communicate it well.

rsl12 Quite the opening line followed by some grandiose moments! Your walking bass and improvisation section flows nicely, and contrary to what you seem to suggest actually comes through quite well I thought. Having heard some of your earlier improvs, you have certainly progressed. And the more ballad style final part brings a nice conclusion to your effort.

Fruitboom I love all those jazzy chords you use in the LH, many of them rootless I do believe. Nice sequence in your walking bass part too. The classical-like intro and ending blends well and I love that surprise modulation to major on the final chord. I hope to hear more from you!

diretonic

Greetings to all - I enjoyed listening to everyone and will shower praise once I get back on my feet with a contribution of my own - but don't hold your breath; an inflammatory condition only recently identified leaves me uncertain every day, so e.g., today aiming to recover whatever facility I lost yesterday. Tomorrow - who knows? I mention this to explain my unreliability, not to garner sympathy.....would prefer no comment TBH!

Last week took delivery of a P525 for appraisal and which has a reputedly 'light' action. Might help after playing the VPC1 had felt like a slog. So far, so good....

WieWaldi

diretonic With you good luck that your inflammatory gets better. I'd like to listen to yours.

Do you really think, a P525 is so much better (=lighter) than a VPC1? I know P525 is considered to be light for a Yamaha, but as Yamaha built up the reputation of making heavy digital actions, this probably means now they are just in the middle.

What about beginner pianos like the Kawai ES-120? I've often read, they are amongst the lightest in the market.

diretonic

WieWaldi I'm fairly sure the P525 is lighter than my VPC1 but perhaps not by so much, particularly since mine is old and puts up less of a fight after more than a decade of thrashing. Also a while back I removed the 88 gimlets responsible for Kawai's dreadful implementation of let-off (escapement) which, while not affecting down/up weight, would have reduced the overall resistance to travel (ok, but not by much!). I've done some non-rigorous testing here with a little tower of nuts (of bolts) and the Yamaha definitely wins both the up and down weight challenge but it's close. Add to that my digital caliper suggests the P525 key dip is fractionally less than the VPC1 which also gives the Yamaha the edge.

I don't think I'd want to go for the lightest available action just yet. Maybe later...

kanadajin

rsl12 I cannot say that I personally like everything she does at the piano, however there are a few songs here and there which I think are well done and catch my ear, but this is personal taste and a very subjective comment obviously. She is indeed very good at what she does and I can certainly see she would no doubt have many followers.

I am not sure I understand what you mean by issues transcribing her. I am a big fan of Transcribe! as a tool to help me go faster when transcribing in general and not discourage myself or give up along the way. And of course, just like you I am heavily focused on solo piano as well.

rsl12

kanadajin I am not sure I understand what you mean by issues transcribing her. I am a big fan of Transcribe! as a tool to help me go faster when transcribing

~~Ah, I've never tried that kind of application.~~ (EDIT: Never mind!! I misunderstood what Transcribe! does. It sounds almost exactly like Amazing Slow Downer.) The only tool I have is Amazing Slow Downer, which makes it easy to listen to snippets very slowly over and over until I can figure it out! I figure it's good for me to learn by ear, but I can't transcribe more than a few measures at a time. (And by "transcribe", I mean the jazz sense of "figure out the notes without necessarily writing it out".) Her recording quality is very clear and in general there isn't a lot of pedal blur, and her style normally isn't 1,000,000 miles an hour, so I'd imagine it shouldn't be that hard to transcribe by ear but sometimes there are surprises.

rsl12

kanadajin I cannot say that I personally like everything she does at the piano, however there are a few songs here and there which I think are well done

I think I remember her saying she didn't consider herself a jazz pianist and it kind of shows, despite her talent at playing many genres including jazz. Her skillset seems honed for hotel lounges and YouTube study/relaxing playlists, and her song selections seemed carefully tailored to appeal to wide audiences. All of that might normally be negative points for me, but she does it in a musically interesting way, and is able to handle a variety of styles with ease, so I enjoy listening to much of her output. Sometimes she can be a little theatrical, but I get what she's trying to accomplish.

kanadajin

rsl12 Of course you are correct, the clear audio recording quality really helps when transcribing. Nothing worse than having a muffled sound stage with a lot of reverb on top and heavy percussion generating spectrally wide signal interference, aaargh! 🙂

I am not familiar with the Amazing Slow Downer but that is my understanding as well, that it is in many ways similar to Transcribe! Simply out of curiosity, I did dabble just a little bit with a demo version of an « automatic » transcription program; what a mess!!! (This was in a solo jazz piano context) IMHO they have a long way to go still, almost everything was off keeler, you name it RH/LH split, note length and rhythm apportionment, flagrant notation errors and omissions, etc. What a dog’s breakfast it was, pffff! The level of effort required to correct the garbage that came out was super high. It was much easier and faster for me to start with a clean slate and use my trustworthy Transcribe!.

Now perhaps for simpler songs the automatic score generator just might be good, I do not know I did not try it with Mary Had a Little Lamb ha, ha 🙂

« Previous Page