Accurate guesses of the notes that make up a chord

[wildetudor]

Hello everyone,

What's the most efficient method of accurately transcribing a piano melody that you hear (no visual cues)? It's easy to tell what chord you are hearing at one point, reasonably easy to tell apart the lowest and the highest note in a certain chord, but it's harder to tell exactly what notes make up each chord (for example, is the C major that you hear made up of C-E-G-C-G or C-G-C-E-G).

I used "Transcribe!" to transcribe the attached piece, but no matter how many times I will listen to each chord in a loop, I just can't figure out with enough certainty how many - and what - notes it consists of. The software isn't very helpful in this case because the low clarity of the piano sound in the recording makes the note guesses be very vague, i.e. it tells you that your selection contains a B chord, but it's unsure which (and how many) notes of the B chord are actually contained in there. You could, of course, just play all the notes in the B-major series, but that wouldn't sound like the original piece at all.

In this piece it's quite obvious that the song starts with eight B chords, followed by six Bsus2 chords etc, but what I'm not getting is how I can find out, with reasonable certainty, the exact composition of each chord. For instance, I can't tell whether the B chords have a different bass (lowest) note than the ensuing Bsus2 chords, and whether the C# note is played in the same place (C#4) in all 6 repetitions of the Bsus2 or whether there's also a C#5 in there. Because of the noise, I can't even tell whether the two chords that are played at 0:06 are the same or whether they differ by one note, and also whether they are the same as the first eight B chords.

It's just that, whatever transcription I make, when I play it on the piano it just sound slightly different from the recording, by one or two notes.

Can anyone please suggest how a task like this can be done faster? Do you just have to loop&listen until you go blue in the face, or is there a more efficient way of going about this? Many thanks in advance!