alex weinstein

An Intercontinental Transcription

A few months ago I transcribed a song for a twitter friend living in Copenhagen, Denmark. Who knew that it would end up as a story on Denmark national radio. This was a lot of fun.

Thanks Lea! (@leakorsgaard)

• Harddisken Radio Show

Here’s the translation of Lea’s story, then mine follows.

Once upon a time in 2009 a song glued itself to my brain. It’s called Little Person and is written by Jon Brion for the film Synechdoche New York. It’s a very beautiful song.

I listened to it on repeat, again and again. It came to a point when listening to it wasn’t enough anymore. I had to learn how to play it myself. I had to learn how to play it on my old piano.

But it was impossible to find the sheet music. Not in music shops, not online shops, not in any forums. For many months since I heard the song for the first time, I was searching, searching, searching for that sheet music. But it was nowhere to be found.

In my desperation I cried out on Twitter: Can no one help me get the tabs for this Jon Brion song?!

And the helpful Twitter friends answered: Look in this and this and this forum, maybe they can help. But I had already checked those places. With no luck. And I really wanted to play this song on the piano. My heart pleaded with me. All hope is gone now, I thought. If not even Twitter can help me. I give up.

But when my prayer had been sitting in the internet for 1 hour and 54 minutes I got an answer from Alex in Brooklyn. He is @bk_whopper on Twitter and we don’t know each other in real life. Alex is a composer and makes a living writing music for commercials. ‘Nothing like a good reason to procrastinate’ he wrote. ‘Here you go’. He had figured out the chords for me!

Far away in New York he had scribbled the chords on a piece of paper and photographed it. Probably with an iPhone, we do belong in that segment. He sent the picture to me. I printed it, and finally I was able to play the song on my old piano!

Since then I lived happily ever after. And that’s a true story about how social media works when it works.