The Importance of Transcribing Solos

by Scott Lyle Raymond

As an undergraduate, I took a course titled The Logic of Chess. I was a relative newcomer to the game; I knew how to play, but wasn't any good. One of my classmates, a USCF-rated player, was clearly taking the course for the pure love of the game, and perhaps for an easy math credit. He once asked me, Do you want to improve your rating significantly in just a week? Of course, I answered. Then take a copy of Chess Life, find a transcription of a game between two Grandmasters, and memorize every move. That evening, I began applying his advice. Sure enough, my game improved within days. I might not have understood every move to its fullest, but by studying an annotated transcript of a game I felt one step closer to thinking like a grandmaster. If you've ever taken a foreign language, say French, you might have learned that it doesn't just pay to know French, you've got to think in French. When you bypass the translation routine in your head, your fluency improves dramatically. In Music, as in Chess and Language, to express yourself as a master you must learn to think like one. This is why we transcribe. Transcription is the act of deciphering, note-for-note, what occurs in a piece of music. Most of the great musicians we admire transcribed music played by the greats before them. Sonny Rollins studied Coleman Hawkins, Eddie Van Halen studied Eric Clapton, Pat Metheny studied Wes Montgomery; for every great musician, there are a number of others that inspired him. Do not confuse inspiration with mere impression. If you admire an artist because he impresses you, that may be enough to motivate you to pick up the instrument and play in the first place, and that's important; but your path to mastery is paved by periods of inspiration, during which you are actually inspired to study an artist's work very closely. Many guitarists mistakenly cite artists that impress them as influences, when the list of artists that have actually inspired them is much shorter. When an artist inspires you, a fitting response is to transcribe some of his work. Let's get something out of the way right now: Some know-it-alls will claim that learning other people's solos will only make you sound like other people, and hinder you from developing your own unique style. If you believe that, you doom yourself to mediocrity. No one ever developed a unique style without first being familiar with other styles. The process of learning to be a musician involves first building a foundation of basic proficiency, then basing any personal innovation on that foundation. The ability to listen to music and either transcribe it on paper or perform it enhances all other creative musical skills. If you can hear a phrase and play it back, you are better equipped to write or improvise original music. Your possess an internal ear that ought to know how something sounds before it's played. Whereas listeners first hear, then process, musicians process, then play. In other words, just as subtraction is merely addition with one sign reversed, transcription is performance reversed in time. It is an act of reverse engineering; in transcribing, you place yourself in the head of the original performer. You learn how a master thinks.

Three Approaches to Learning Solos:

Most people think of single-note solos when they think of transcribing, but you can transcribe anything, depending on what you want to learn. Want to learn more about arranging? Transcribe works by Gil Evans, Oliver Nelson, John Scofield, Wayne Shorter, The Beatles or Frank Zappa. Want to learn about solo phrasing? Where better to turn than to the solos of Miles Davis, Billy Gibbons, B.B. King, and Pat Metheny? Do you aspire to shred? Then look to Paul Gilbert, Steve Vai, and Yngwie Malmsteen. Rhythm Guitar? Jimi Hendrix. Fingerstyle? Chet Atkins. Chord/Melody improvisation? Joe Pass. Experimentalism? John Zorn, Marc Ribot, and Mike Patton. Some of these areas of interest are mostly dominated by single-note melodies, but others involve complex chords, full-band arrangements, and studio recording techniques, all of which are pretty important, too. For the purposes of this article, let's focus on what you'll probably spend most of your time with -- single-note solos. There are three ways to learn how to play someone else's solo: 1. Learning from Sheet Music or TAB. This places the work of transcription in the hands of someone else. Your task is to listen to the original work, read the music, and work up the performance. This approach is convenient because it requires the least work, but it is the least effective in developing your permanent skills. Knowing how to move your hands in a way that produces a piece of music is adequate for mere reproduction of that piece; but if you could understand the logic behind every note in the piece, you possess real musical power, which could manifest itself in some remotely connected way later. A B.B. King lick I learned in 1986, though I may never play it verbatim again, is very likely to have seeded dozens of fresh ideas I currently use. If you must learn something for performance only, sheet music is a possibility; but don't rely on it exclusively. 2. Learning by Ear. Figuring out a solo by ear saves you money in sheet music, but adds time to your practice sessions. Longer sessions, however, are not a problem; they're a bonus. The more you play, the better you get. As you hash out each idea over and over again, making sure it matches the recording, you're getting it under your fingers -- you're developing muscle memory that facilitates even faster learning in the future. So you're working both your hands and your brain. What less would you settle for? 3. Transcribing onto paper. Since you're already learning how to play a solo, why not write it out? This does three very important things: First, it reinforces the solo in your memory. Second, it works your notation chops. If you want to work with other fine musicians, the ability to pass them accurate, legible scores is a major plus. Finally, it forces you to check your sense of rhythm. Playing a phrase is one thing, but can you explain how to count it? And what about arhythmic phrases? How are you going to handle them? This third approach to learning is not only best for you, but it can result in a collection of printed transcriptions that you can share with students and colleagues. Think of each of the above approaches to learning as increasingly rewarding. You should almost always be working on level two or three. Each level becomes more challenging, but the very fact that you're a musician means that you crave a mental challenge, right?

How to Transcribe:
I hope I impressed upon you the importance of transcribing. I personally hold in in high enough regard that I spend a majority of practice time transcribing solos or Jazz heads. I'm not alone in this attitude: A friend of mine, saxophonist Jason Goldsmith, met with another saxophonist of considerably higher stature Ed Petersen. Mr. Petersen's first question for Jason was, How many solos have you transcribed? And he didn't just mean how many Jason figured out, he meant how many Jason could actually play right then, on the spot. So how do you transcribe solos? The best answer to this question is simply, Just start doing it, and then worry about how to do it better. Seriously. You need to work your ear. Start now, and don't assume that just because you got through a solo you've done it right. I still find mistakes in solos I've transcribed a while back. As with all practice routines, be your own worst critic. But there are some pieces of advice I can offer to ease your efforts: 1. Pace Yourself. Start with something that sounds like it would be easy. Simple rhythms, a clean mix, and a short overall length are your first clues. Know your limitations, and work within them. Trust me, you'll tend to overestimate your ability to play another guitarist's solo, even if it's relatively simple. All players have idiosyncracies in their playing, and when you're learning someone else's licks, you're adjusting to his particular approach to the instrument. Something you can sing is a good candidate for your first attempt at transcription. If you can already mentally picture how some of the solo is played, that's another good sign. If you try to tackle complicated material before you're ready, not only are your chances of inaccuracy increased, but the time and effort you spend may discourage you from further transcription. 2. Be Resourceful. There is plenty of technology available that can make your job easier. Free programs like Audacity (Windows), ReZound (Linux), and GarageBand (Mac) allow you to select a section of music and slow it to half-speed. If the mix is muddy in the low-end, you can apply a filter to isolate the mid-range. If half-speed doesn't help, maybe you can hear a few notes better if you slow the recording down without adjusting pitch, a feature most audio editing programs contain. Wondering how best to finger a passage? Look for YouTube videos of the artist performing the solo. 3. Remember What Instrument You're Playing. If you're transcribing a Dizzy Gillespie solo, you'll probably run across ideas that work for the trumpet, but don't lay well on a guitar fingerboard. That shouldn't discourage you from trying to adapt. Great guitarists like Jim Hall and Frank Gambale have said they were inspired by saxophonists. I personally draw inspiration from pianists and banjo players. Sometimes a technique that works well on the source instrument has to be adapted. Does a saxophone scoop always translate as a guitar bend? Not necessarily. You may find that a slide is more appropriate, or a rake. What about a trumpet shake? Do you slide between the notes, or trill? Or, if you want to be unorthodox, could you get away with a whammy bar shake? These are all artistic decisions. Then there are more technical decisions. You'll almost never translate a horn player's tounging patterns directly into picking/slurring combinations. The key is to preserve the vibe of a passage, and not mess up the flow as it was originally intended, but at the same time adjust articulations so they're comfortable on the guitar. Sometimes you may want to sacrifice comfort for sound. For example, if a lick sounds better when you perform awkward string skips than it does when you sweep or slur it, then go with the method that sounds best, as long as you're not making unreasonable technical demands of yourself. 4. Subdivide. The key to deciphering rhythms is subdivision. Count out the phrase you're working on by the smallest note value in the phrase. So for example, if you're working on a phrase whose smallest notes are sixteenths, try to feel the pulse in sixteenth notes. It may also help to feel the phrase in eighths; your perception of which sixteenth notes are accented may aid

your error detection. When working with triplets, the first and third of a group are the easiest for your brain to detect, so focus on them first, then grab the middle one. The overall point here is to adjust your perception of the pulse from one phrase to the next, to help you focus. It's like using Google Maps: sometimes you need to know the exact location of the Lake Street parking ramp entrance, sometimes you just need to know about how many miles it is to downtown Madison. Zoom in and out on those rhythms. 5. Use Mental Tricks. You can take advantage of the way your brain processes musical sounds to get through tricky parts. For example, focusing only on the first or last note of a run while subdividing the measure in eighths or sixteenths will help you nail down the exact starting and ending points. If you're having difficulty figuring out an individual note within a phrase, try stopping the playback at exactly that note. The aural impression of the note in question will linger in your mind. If a flurry of notes seems to defy rhythmic analysis, could it just be a tuplet? Even if it isn't, would you really fail in representing the passage accurately in print by using a tuplet? I notated the run at measures 74-75 of John Coltrane's Moment's Notice solo as tuplets, even though they might not be totally rhythmically accurate:

It would be maddening to try to get rhythms like these perfect, and any student learning from the transcriptions wouldn't be counting phrases like those anyway; those type of phrases are mostly a matter of getting through the run as quickly as you can, and ending in the right spot. But don't fall back on tuplets whenever a run is tricky. I've seen a student make that very mistake, by notating this phrase from the Eurythmics' Would I Lie to You...

as...

If he sang the phrase to himself slowly, while subdividing by sixteenths, he could have easily avoided this error. Another trick is to watch the peaks and valleys. Watch where the highest and lowest notes of a phrase land within the measure. That can help you get a handle on the rhythmic placement of all the notes in-between.

So there you have it. Get to work soon, and often. Your playing, and your understanding of music in general, will benefit greatly. Plus, you'll save money on books and magazines, and not be as tempted to rely on the godawfully inaccurate tablature corrupting the Internet.

Scott Lyle Sly Raymond performs and teaches guitar in Southeastern Wisconsin. For more information, go to www.wisconsinguitar.com.