Lately I've been feeling rather...insecure(?) about my transcribing skills. Given...I only do easy stuff...and I reduce to lead sheet...but in that regard I'm merely talking about copying down pop melodies.

It's like I've somehow gotten worse at transcribing. I used to be a lot better, I think. I got a 5 on that part of AP music theory in high school, and you only got to hear an 8 bar phrase twice. Now, when I transcribe this anime tunes, a 4 minute pop song can take me hours and hours and hours. Lately I've been trying to listen to 4 or 8 bars at a time and really try and memorize the phrase but this does not seem to be working.

What's your method?

Just doing a lead sheet for an anime pop song takes me between 1-2.5 hours. My method is that I see how much I can do without listening to the song for help, and then I go and memorize short 3-5 note phrases.

If you want to transcribe more efficiently then I suggest using something like audacity so you can place the cursor anywhere and play it from there without guessing the position of a song with a seek bar. I wrote a guide for this, and it's the way I do it for accuracy and efficiency.

I don't memorize note for note except for chord analysis since that's easy. Like photographic memory, I take an "aural snapshot" and immediately play it on the piano then write it on the score and move on. Memorizing takes much longer for me. For a full song it takes a couple days to finish (1-3 hours a day).

A full song (4min) takes me 2 days if I want to transcribe it perfectly. Tv-sized takes me a few hours.

I also use audacity to pinpoint specific areas of the music. I'm like Spiritsoul, I can do a full song over a couple of days.

Also, I don't understand all of this about memorising. When I transcribe, I have the song open in one window and Sibelius in the other so I can listen to either the bit I'm doing or how the transcription sounds so far as often as I need to. I only do piano transcriptions and know what is possible and what is not so don't need to be at the piano to transcribe. When it's finished, I take it to a piano and play around with it because some things might sound better than others. It's all perfectly playable though.

Depends on what I am transcribing and what setup I am doing it for. I can usually transcribe piano music, from video games and anime, in about 30 minutes +. However, if it is something you want orchestral it is a multiple tier process.

I condense my score transcripts into several grand staves.

A woodwind grand staff
A Brass grand staff
Timpani staff
2 percussion staves
Harp Grand staff
Piano Grand staff
Strings Grand staff

This is what my opening transcription score looks like AFTER I have done a basic model transcription on piano to be my guide to orchestration.

Though it is a process if I dedicate about 3 hours a day I can do, for example, and orchestral version of Aerith's theme in a bout a week with my own style added in to transition it to add some variation when needed.