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For some budding musicians (and even old professionals), the mere sight of sheet music can trigger a fight-or-flight response, evoking painful memories of strict piano teachers and high-pressure recitals. George Colliera 20-year-old music transcriber, is doing his part to change that.
Collier, a student at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, takes video clips of live performances by well-known artists such as Wynton Marsalis and Celine Dion, or bedroom musicians who have posted clips online, and adds detailed instructions of what to do. is playing. Juggling harmony, melody and rhythm, she turns sounds into tremendously detailed notations and shares the results with an audience of more than 882,000 subscribers on her Youtube channelwhere his most popular videos have between 5 million and 18 million views.
“Music can be a little tense, particularly in the whole field of music theory,” Collier said during a break between lectures, chatting by video from a light-filled campus building where the sounds of bustling university life swirled. around it. In her videos, made with the help of a team of transcribers, she deciphers fascinating cadences, barbershop quartet arrangements, funk improvisations, and jazz solos in an entertaining way that softens sheet music’s reputation as academic and unforgiving. .
Your video”When you make the trombone sing” addresses a soaring Frank Lacy trombone solo from a 1988 performance with the Art Blakey Big Band. Another clip, titled “He practiced 40 hours a day for this”, captures a virtuoso Mozart piano cadenza performed by Mitsuko Uchida. While Collier specializes in jazz, he also presents performances from the classical world, as well as everyday people with impressive talents. A clip titled “When your family is musically competent” features a version of “Happy Birthday” that turns into gospel-laden improvised riffs. Your video”Professional musician improvises with a street performer on the subway” comments a saxophonist on the London Underground while spontaneously engaging a guitarist on a cover of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”
“Transcriptions serve to understand the musical decisions made by the performers,” Collier said. “It doesn’t really matter how famous you are. If you do good things, people will want to listen to you.”
Laufey, the Grammy-winning cellist and multi-instrumentalist, has been the subject of Collier’s videos several times and she appreciates her broad taste. “I think it’s a celebration of true musicianship,” she said in a video interview, “and it elevates artists who aren’t necessarily the most popular.” She noted that her channel is also a powerful source of discovery: “I get a lot of comments, especially on YouTube, where people say, ‘I found this song in George Collier’s video.'”
Collier grew up about two hours north of London, in Cambridgeshire, a low-lying county known for its pastoral beauty and historic universities. After learning to play the piano and trumpet at age 8, he began to show a great interest in jazz. In 2020, when the pandemic hit and in-person music came to a halt, Collier, then 16, began expending his musical energy online, uploading his first transcriptions to YouTube as a just-for-fun side project to combat boredom. confinement.
One of these early uploads was a particularly beautiful voice and piano interlude from “Hajanga” by Jacob Collier (no relation) during a performance with the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble. The video attracted a modest view count at first, but in February 2021 it connected with YouTube’s elusive algorithm, racking up 200,000 views in just nine days.
Collier is now a philosophy and politics student – “Hardly related to music,” he joked – but he is also the musical director of his university’s founding a cappella group, the Leamingtons. Some of his key musical influences often appear as subjects of his transcriptions, including Jacob Collier, guitarist Cory Wong and the funk band Vulfpeck.
Navigating student life full-time, as well as recently starting his own web development agency, has made it difficult for Collier to adapt accurate music transcriptions to his era. To keep her channel up constantly, she works with transcribers from the United States, Germany, Hungary, Austria and beyond, and sometimes incorporates an online music transcription service. Far from being a pandemic hobby, her project is now monetized and functions as both a business and a hobby. Collier balances himself with YouTube payouts that depend on view counts, but, in keeping with his channel’s ethos of accessible music education, he leaves the transcripts free to download.
Collier emphasized that he wants his audience to “have fun watching the videos, whether it’s being amazed by the interpreter, whether it’s being surprised by how someone can transcribe that, or whether it’s being surprised by some of the silly comments in the transcription.” When traditional notation can’t reflect the raw energy on screen, Collier and her team improvise.
“While standing on one leg” is marked in a transcript of a solo flute by Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson, as his limbs become increasingly erratic on stage. “Induce stinking face in First Lady“ is noted in a transcription of Trombone Shorty’s performance of “St. James Infirmary” at the White House in 2012, as Michelle Obama’s face contorts in approval at Shorty’s grunting solo.
“It can be very intimidating to approach music at that high level without some kind of in,” the professional musician and YouTuber Adam Neely saying. By watching Collier’s videos, “they give you permission to laugh and find community with people you wouldn’t normally think about.”
While perfecting transcripts is Collier’s priority, he wants his videos to be seen as widely as possible and has learned a lot about YouTube’s algorithm. Many of her videos are titled in “when you” format, such as “When you hit puberty twice”, which transcribes the surprisingly low vocal performance of a deep bass, or “When you practice 40 hours a day,” which follows an incredibly fast performance of George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” by pianist Hiromi Uehara.
“It’s not just the hyper-musical nerds who click,” Collier said. “These are people who may not even be musicians, who may not even understand the transcription, but they click on it to see the title and stay to see the music.” In turn, her videos have accumulated more than 300 million views. “It’s just democratizing, making it accessible to everyone and everything free,” she added.
Laufey agreed with this assessment. “I think social media has been that kind of great equalizer,” she said, calling Collier’s channel a “great way for my fans to learn my songs, too.”
Despite his ever-growing subscriber base, Collier is hesitant to make YouTube his full-time job. “I don’t want something I enjoy as a hobby to be at risk of becoming a job,” she said. But until he moves on (or the algorithm does), he will continue to enjoy being able to help inspire beginners to learn an instrument and veterans to dust off theirs.