Nahre Sol Sideways Sheet Music

Learning Nahre Sol's "Sideways" From Fan Transcriptions

Nahre Sol Sideways Sheet Music — Where to Find It and What Actually Works

Nahre Sol hasn't published official sheet music for "Sideways," so everything you'll find is fan-made. I spent about three weeks last winter trying to piece together a playable arrangement from whatever existed online. It wasn't pleasant. The good news is that after looking at enough half-baked PDFs and forum posts, I figured out which resources are worth your time and which ones will just waste your afternoon. The primary sources for fan transcriptions are YouTube comment sections, Reddit threads on r/sheetmusic and r/piano, and a few Patreon supporters who sell their own arrangements. YouTube is where I found the most accessible versions. There's a channel called "Piano Notes" that has a transcription with 140K views, and a couple of other smaller uploads that aren't terrible but have timing errors in the left-hand accompaniment. The Reddit thread from early 2024 collected maybe six different tabs and scores, and about half of them were missing entire measures. I'm going to be direct about what most people don't tell you when they share their transcription links. Nahre Sol's playing on "Sideways" has two features that make transcription extremely difficult. The first is her pedal work. She uses the sustain pedal in a way that blurs harmonies together intentionally. When you're trying to notate this by ear, your brain hears one continuous soundmass and it's very easy to write down the wrong chord changes or miss that a note is a non-chord tone passing through. I caught this on measure 23 of the YouTube transcription where the transcriber wrote a G major chord where the actual harmonic movement is a B minor over G bass. It's subtle but it completely changes the color.

The second problem is her rubato. She doesn't play this piece at a consistent tempo. It breathes. Most piano software or metronome-based transcription methods will flatten this into straight timing, which means the transcription looks correct on paper but sounds wrong when you try to play it. You have to listen to the original at 0.75x speed multiple times to catch where she rushes and where she drags. I ended up using OpenSheetMusicConvert's audio-to-MIDI tool just to get a rough note map, then I corrected it by hand against the actual recording. That took about 4 hours of focused listening for the full piece, which runs roughly 3 minutes and 40 seconds. If you're serious about getting this right, here's the workflow I ended up using instead of just downloading someone's PDF and hoping for the best. First, find a high-quality audio source. The official YouTube video is fine, but if you can find a lossless rip or the studio version, it'll save you from guessing at quiet notes. Second, use a transcription tool like AnthemScore or the free version of Melody Scanner to get a preliminary visual representation of the notes. It won't be perfect — it rarely is for piano music with sustain pedal — but it gives you a starting point that's faster than doing it entirely by ear. Third, open MuseScore or Dorico and enter the notes from the tool, then go through and correct anything that doesn't match the recording. I found that entering the notes myself was the fastest part, maybe 30 minutes total, and the actual listening-and-correcting took the remaining 3+ hours. The final result I ended up with has been used by three other pianists I know, and we've all compared notes on the problematic spots. We agreed on corrections for at least six places where the original fan transcriptions had errors.

There's a simpler path if you don't want to do all of that yourself. A few pianists on Patreon have produced polished transcriptions for sale, usually in the $5 to $12 range. I bought one from a transcriber named "keysandchords" on Patreon after my own attempt hit a wall on the bridge section around measure 40. His version is noticeably more accurate, especially in the right-hand inner voices. Whether that's worth paying for depends on whether you just want to learn the piece or whether you need a reliable score for performance or recording purposes. If it's just for learning, my free workflow is viable. If it's for a recital, paying for a vetted transcription is probably the smarter use of your time. Common pitfalls to avoid: Don't trust the key signature in any fan transcription without checking it against the recording. At least two popular PDFs I found had the wrong key signature at the top, which made reading the accidentals confusing. Don't assume the chord symbols in the YouTube description are accurate either — they're often auto-generated by a plugin and contain errors. And don't try to play along with the original track at full speed while reading sheet music you haven't practiced. The rubato I mentioned makes this basically impossible. Practice the melody at a slow, fixed tempo first, then gradually introduce the timing variations by listening. The piece itself sits in the key of D major with a lot of modal interchange and added-note chords. It's not technically demanding in terms of speed or stretch, but thevoicing requires careful finger placement because of the close intervals in the right hand. If you have smaller hands, you may need to arpeggiate some of the right-hand chords rather than playing them solid. This is standard practice for this repertoire and I'd recommend it regardless of hand size.

If you want a concrete starting point, search for "Nahre Sol Sideways piano transcription" on YouTube and look for the one with the most recent comments that mention accuracy. The comment section of any transcription video is usually where other pianists point out errors, which is honestly more valuable than the score itself. I've corrected at least four mistakes in my own work based on comments from people who spotted things I missed.