![]() If learning by ear while transcribing is so beneficial, why aren’t more educators stressing this? Many times the focus of transcription in an educational setting is on the final written product. SAXSOLOS COM JAZZ TRANSCRIPTIONS OF THE MASTERS HOW TOEssentially, developing a skill necessary to all improvisers: learning how to play what you’re hearing. Not only will you immediately begin to memorize the solo, but you’ll begin to improve your ears learning to hear chord tones, progressions and intervals along the way. Instead of figuring out a line note by note and going directly to the paper, you should sing the line and play it on your instrument repeatedly. Truly hearing the intervals, chords, and articulation of a solo and internalizing them. The one aspect of transcription that vastly improves your musicianship is the process of figuring out the solo by ear. It’s not W hat you’re transcribing, but How you transcribe it Perhaps the question you should be asking yourself is: What do I plan to do once I have that line written out and how am I going to make it a part of my playing? The problem for me wasn’t that I was trying to learn solos, but the method in which I was getting the information and what I did with that information once I had it. Yes, you can get information from a record by writing out a solo on paper, but in the long run you’re gaining very little compared to what is possible. The simple act of writing down a solo note for note or learning a lick in one key will not automatically make you a better jazz musician. After running into stumbling block after stumbling block, I’ve found that writing down one line from a solo and expecting drastic results, like the above reasons, is a huge misconception. For years I’d been writing down solos and wondering why I wasn’t seeing improvement. ![]() These were all reasons that I gave myself for transcribing solos in the past. Are you transcribing as a quick way to become a great improviser?.Do you need an “outside” lick to insert into your solos?.Are you looking for something to play over the A section of Bb rhythm changes?.Are you writing down a solo to steal a line?.What do you want to achieve by transcribing?īefore you decide to transcribe, ask yourself why you are learning a particular solo and what you expect to get out of it: Not too far fetched, in that to transcribe, as shown by the above definition, directly implies something that involves writing.Īs I matured and began to seriously immerse myself into the music and study how the masters learned the music, I began to see that “transcribing” meant something much more extensive than the actual or implied definition of the word. I had repeatedly heard the word transcribe from numerous sources and immediately thought of a process that culminated with a written product. So who is right and why are there so many discrepancies if everyone is “transcribing”?Įven though we may not always believe it, the words and language that we use, have a direct connection to the way we think and the actions that we carry out.įor me, transcribing initially meant turning on a record, figuring out a solo note by note, writing down each note, and finishing satisfied with a solo notated on a piece of paper. On the other hand, I’ve encountered players that had dozens of solos written down, but didn’t seem to retain any of it or improve by doing so. I’ve had teachers that didn’t write solos down, but had numerous solos memorized to the point where they could sing them without their instruments. ![]() Throughout the years I’ve met amazing improvisers that claimed they’ve never transcribed a solo and have come across others that say they’ve transcribed hundreds of solos. Jazz musicians and educators constantly talked about transcribing, but it seemed that there was a conflict in what was actually meant by the word transcribe, as well as the reason behind doing it. I was curious to get to the bottom of what transcribing actually meant, a word that I had heard for years as I was learning to improvise.Įver since I became interested in jazz, transcribing solos was continuously touted as the “secret” to learning improvisation. This is the definition I found for the word transcribe when I looked it up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary recently. A: to make a written copy of, B: to make a copy of (dictated or recorded matter) in longhand or on a machine, C: to paraphrase or summarize in writing, D: to represent (sound) by means of phonetic symbols ![]()
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