Hey, guys, It's Marc back here again with you from JazzGuitarLessons.net. And in this episode, I want to talk about the transcribe before not to transcribe. And in this video, I'm not going to provide a sure fire answer, but I will encourage you to think about certain things and broaden your perspective on what it is to transcribe, what's the usefulness, what's the desired outcome, and also perhaps alternatives or ways of thinking about transcription that you haven't considered yet.
Welcome to Jazz Guitar Lessons, where we help guitarists learn jazz faster, express themselves more fluently, and have fun along the way. My name is Mark, and if you're looking to learn jazz, form better practice habits, and especially if you enjoy a French accent, make sure to subscribe. So in a nutshell, when jazz musicians say transcription, what they mean is actually picking up a record.
So it could be a vinyl, could be a cassette tape back, my desk could be a CD, or it could be now Spotify, and we'd better learn something off the record that we want to learn integrate in our playing. There is an old school approach, definitely that older players will tell you. You definitely have to transcribe. It's the only way you'll be able to learn.
Yeah, okay. So things have evolved. Now we have YouTube, we have CDs, we have books, we have Berklee College, we have Marc from Jazz Guitars. Is that right? We have these forms. We can ask questions, we have like everything at our fingertips. So I think it used to be that a lot of the information that we would require to become good improvisers and coppers would only be available on records.
And it's a really valuable, incredible way to get information, not only the information but also the phrasing, the inflections, the how to do it and honestly absorb a lot of the language. Now just a quick caveat before you transcribe anything, and if you've ever done it, I would really weigh the pros and cons. I'm not going to tell you what to do, but if you're looking to only discover which notes cover or were over, what chords for a John Coltrane solo or a John Scofield solo or any other John that you want to transcribe from?
Yeah, for some reason, John's There may be other ways to uncover that. What I love about transcription for me is more into how I rather than no choices. So it's you're still at the point where you want to figure out if Scofield used the older skill to diminish skill. There may be other ways that are more faster, more conducive to results than just doing painstaking transcriptions.
Right. I'll get back to that in a moment. To tell you what I personally got out of transcribing. Also, I would weigh in the pros and cons, meaning what's your end goal? If you're attempting to be an incredible professional provider and you want to trailblazer leave a mark, I'm like, Well, definitely, yeah. You want to sit down with the recordings and know exactly what these guys have done and how they've done it and how well and phrasing and whatever is super important for me.
I would say that complete transcriptions, I've probably done around ten or 12 of them and they were really contrasting in nature. So. John Coltrane. John Scofield. Yeah, my John's. Pat Metheny. So at least three things Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Charlie Parker and Herbie Hancock. Wes Montgomery Of course, I did some with I did the Laver the Half Note, but I didn't finish a full solo.
So there's also that thing to consider. I've done this because I was aspiring professional musician and it was required while I was studying. And also there's this whole idea that you can debate, like whether you want to learn it, learn it, or that you want to write it down. And there's a there's a bunch of ambiguous outcomes. So number one, can I decipher what the guy's doing?
And I sort of ear training like, yeah, I can decipher what he's doing. I'm going to play it back. If your training is your goal, amazing. If learning to play back something with the recording is your goal and also that's what you'll achieve by doing it. If learning to write music and reading music is your role, then I'd say, Well, awesome.
But doing transcription is probably a really painstaking, slow, hard process to do. You could do other like use other avenues for learning to write and read music. Just for the record, a case in point would be my guess would be the Berklee method, you know, the William Levitt sort of page one and just do the whole thing. You learn to read sort of as sort of like a guitar as you're read.
Goodness, right. So consider what's your end game with the transcription if and if it's worthwhile to, to get that much effort in a direction where you you may have the result of going like, look ma I can play the badminton solo and then you look good. Now what's next, right? It's good to like walk into someone else's shoes, but even better would be to say, take a small fragment of it like a lick or something and then dismantle it completely and go, Oh, that's what's up with that line.
Like, it came from another motif that the player added chromaticism around it or whatever. So those findings can only be done in slow motion, which again, there may be other avenues that are more fruitful or require less time to see results than doing with the transcriptions. Also asking yourself, Should I write it down? Should I not? Then that's going to be another avenue going at if if it takes you ten times as much time.
Personally, I would weigh in the 8020 pros and cons going to like I could either do ten solos or I could do just the one. If I write it down, I would definitely do the volume of ten solos. My $0.02 Biggie, Biggie. Biggie for me is that often we get discouraged. We as a people doing transcriptions will get discouraged by the sheer volume of work it requires.
So a good thing that I did is to set up it myself. This is Sonny Rollins using tenor man, this solo. I just want 24 bars. What's that? It's a 12 bar blues. It's twice. That's it. After I'm done that, then I'll be fine. Typically, as jazz solos, we just have a lot of ambition and we're like, I'm going to do the whole solo or even like I'm going to transcribe the whole record.
No, you're not unless you're prodigy of sort, right? So I've never done the whole record of transcriptions. I've played all songs on a record for sure. Like I knew the changes, whatever, but not like learn. Oh, so that's pretty intense, right? So giving myself a little bit of a milestone, super important. Also knowing that through repetition and using software to slow down things, video surgeon songs are an amazing slow down or transformative.
They all work, you know, find your file, pick your match like it's got to be something that works well for you. One thing that I realized is that I was more after the inflection and the tendencies rather than the no choices. So that's a big thing to dismantle for you if you're into getting into transcription. As I said much earlier in this episode's going, if you want to find out formulas like what do I play over these chord changes, they're easier ways to do that.
And the main benefit for me was the how like how is it performed, how swinging is this, how laid back is this, how well is, how fast, how is it picked? Is it like Cameron's and it like that's what I get out of it. Also, I'll give you an example of a phrase that's from a famous record that you'll recognize for sure, right?
That's a bass riff on the Cannibal Armies. And you play that along with the bass. It's G Minor six, right? And yo is it's or is it is it swinging? How much is it swinging? How do I find out? Put the thing on open Spotify CD whatever it puts Spotify on and play along to it and go, Oh, that's how much it swings is a straight now It's absolutely straight is a swinging deeply.
Is that a shuffle blues thing? How much then? That's a thing I picked up from it. Also, while I'm on that topic, you'll all recognize a song, but you may not know exactly what I'm doing, but I'll go like this. Boom, dude, dude, I was something like, What's that? It's Miles playing Autumn Leaves. So most of us will wind up with a real book and go, That's the song.
And I'm learning the melody. Like, what's better place to learn how to play a melody than one of the best jazz artists of all time? Ms.. Davis How did you come up with that thing? How how well did you phrase how laid back? How does he push or beat is? This is transcription. Yes, it is that I have to write it down like laid back here.
Push here. What it No, I just put miles on and I just found out how he was playing Autumn Leaves. This is so valuable and people often think this is not really transcription because I'm not like writing a bunch of eight notes in a solo and not like analyzing. It's like, No, but the spirit, the stuff of the record to how that's not possible to put on paper other than the feel of it, is what I picked up from that because I already knew Autumn leaves.
When I came across this record, I could play it, I could play the changes, I could improvise on it, kind of I could. But then I heard I'm like, Whoa, I'm floored. Why? Because how they they did in French, we say interpret, interpret as you know, they performed it in a way that became this timeless record. Man, that's awesome.
So I'll leave you with these thoughts. There's more to be gained from transcription than strictly doing, like jazz solos written out, and it could be just a part of it with a certain muscle to extract what you want. It can also be that you're after the phrasing of it, or smaller motifs and also transcribing the head. The theme how the band plays the head in the head out is a valuable exercise and it's much faster and again, it's free.
You pay for Spotify for ten bucks. And I have to admit there's what's the song? Is it How Deep is the Ocean or There's a soul standard that I found out was played by Kurt Rosenwinkel, and I didn't know exactly what he was doing, but I'm like, Am I a real book version? Like my Facebook? Not quite it.
So I just made myself a chart, my charts, My my real book chart that I made by hand is just a reflection of that recording, which is exactly how the real book was written. It's like this thing as performed by Duke Ellington Orchestra or whatever. So in my mind I'm like, What a valuable way to use recordings instead of spending, I don't know, six months learning every line that KURTZ did.
I just went like, what's his entry point into that song? I think this chord is different from my real book. Let me slow it down and go like, Oh no, it's it's B5 minor, okay, Got it right. And then I sort of extracted the generalities from the song. How did you approach it? Yeah, it's this much bar. That's the tempo.
That's the melody. Sort of like he's augmenting around it. That's the changes. That's what the bass player is doing. And I made myself a chart that's probably the best bang for your buck. You can have to look at just how people approach a song or even listening to a guy like in my case, like Ed Bickert. How did he come up?
There was a version of a wave played with Paul Desmond. It's like he sits behind it, behind the head, and just like men, I'll never have all the voicings and all the subtle ways he's doing it. But just the groove, the feel for his comping is something I can extract so I can more or less generalize. So rather than picking it out notes by note, voicing, by voicing rhythm by rhythm, I can just get a general idea and as I hear more of that and I try to emulate it, I just try.
I don't go like, Oh, I don't have the right voicings, so I can't like that. Just give it a shot. And by the way, this is how I learned to play guitar in my little room, how my parents were patient Metallica, AC, DC, Megadeth, whatever. Pat Benatar hit me with your best shot, right? And I would just sit there with my old cassette cassette tape thing.
I played back and I would play along with it, so I didn't always have all the right notes, but I picked it up by looking at it generally broad strokes. So if we do broad strokes with jazz for sure, you carry all your nines vocabulary and all the beautiful stuff, but at the same time you can just get a general idea and move faster than if you were giving yourself to constraint of just transcribing solos.
So on that note, I hope this helps. This is just thoughts about transcriptions. Again, my name is Mark from Jazz Guitar Lessons. Please like in subscribe, I'll see you on the Free fellowship on the other side. And if you're listening to us in the podcast format, know that you can leave me a review. This really helps the algorithm, and you can also watch the video portion of this on the YouTube channel where more free lessons, standards, chord melody and improv stuff, and I'll see you in the next video.
Thank you.
