The Moving Room - Andrew W.K.
Released: October 18, 2023
Tags: Andrew W.K., Piano, Vocals
Piano has been something I've trained ever since I was very young. But despite how long I've been playing it for, my skill level does not in any way resemble that due to lack of studying. I wasn't the one to choose to learn to play this instrument, I've just been doing it because I was told to. So for a long time, I've always kinda been in a rut with this instrument. This changed in 2020 when I discovered Andrew W.K.. This artist is a classically trained pianist who primarily does rock music, and he is, without a doubt, one of the most energetic performers I have ever seen. I absolutely adore him, his message, and his style of playing. Despite the energy of AWK, my favorite song from him is perhaps a slower rock melody that closes off his more esoteric "Close Calls with Brick Walls" album.
This song starts with some really prominent piano chords, and so I looked around for a transcription of it somewhere because I really didn't want to do the work of transcribing it by ear. The best I found was this YouTube video that does a decent job of finding the notes of the intro song. I also found a guitar score of the song which featured a "Piano arrangement for guitar" of the intro. This apparently came from a Hal Leonard book called "Andrew W.K. - The Very Best 2001-2009 - Guitar Tab Edition", which obviously included a bunch of other scores as well. I found a copy of the book on eBay and was really excited to get to play it on the piano.
The transcription in this book was wrong.
It's not wrong as in it's playing the wrong notes and chords, but rather it's not playing what Andrew W.K. is playing in the actual score. So, I bit the bullet and wrote my own transcription of the song, using an official instrumental version of the song and some stem seperating program to help me out with the parts where the guitar completely overwhelmed the piano track. I transcribed it in a DAW called Studio One, and then transferred it into MuseScore 4 so that I could have a printed score of the track (which would then allow me to add fingering and whatnot). The score is available below, in PDF and MIDI format, and features two piano and vocal tracks.
