You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 7 Secrets for Transcribing Solos - #7

Episode Date: February 6, 2018

Transcribing solos is one of the most effective uses of your practice time, but it can be one of the most arduous parts as well. Follow our advice and you'll be learning the solos in no time. Then you can thank us as you relax with all that new hip knowledge! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Peter Martin. And I'm Adam Manus. Welcome to the You'll Hear It podcast. Today we're going to give you seven secrets for transcribing solos. So we know how important, Mr. Adam, transcribing solos is, but I guess we're actually talking about learning solos, right? Indeed. Yeah, we're talking about being able to listen to a solo that you like and play it.

Learn how to play it. Right. How to play it exactly how that person that you're learning it from plays it. Right. And we're not going to get too deep into why we do that because I think most of you know, but I mean all the benefits for accumulating vocabulary, the analysis for that solo, bringing in some of the conception of that solo into our own playing. But we're going to jump right into giving you some secrets of how you can get through the transcribing process a little bit easier

because it's a very arduous task at times. It's very difficult. It can take a lot of bit of time, but we think we can help you a little bit. Yeah, like all things good, it can be a little daunting, but it's worth it. It's worth your time for sure. Absolutely. Okay. So number one is the simplest, but it's the most overlooked, and that is to pick a solo you already know. I can't stress this enough how important it is and how many times I've seen people screw this up, students screw this up, and trying to learn a solo that you've just heard and that you're so excited about, but you don't really know it. So what you're going to want to do is only pick solos to transcribe or to learn that you already know. Now, what do I mean by already know? That means you can sing along. pretty much with the whole solo. You know it. You've heard it. You've listened to it. You love it. You're passionate about it. I mean, it's very hard to learn something as difficult as somebody else's

improvisational solo if you don't like it and really know it. It's just hard to do. So, I mean, why try it? I mean, there's so many great solos out there. Find something that you that you love and that you've already listened to most likely over and over again because you like it. I mean, it's like trying to learn to cook something that you don't like. That's going to be hard to do. You can follow the recipe. But if it's something, that you've eaten many times and you already know how it's supposed to taste as you learn to cook it, I think that you'll be able to do it. So it's as simple as that. Pick a solo you already know. Yeah, and that seems like an obvious concept, that if you don't like it, you're probably not going

to put in the energy and the love into it that needs to go into it. So as you start to learn this solo that you already know, and you've already heard a bunch, learn it by ear first. You don't want to get pen to paper until much later on in this process. First start out by, actually a lot of people say first start out by singing it. Be able to sing it along with the record. I like that. Before you even sit down at the piano or get a horn to your mouth, be able to sing it out loud

and sing all the little intricacies that your vocal technique will allow you to do for some. It doesn't have to sound great. No. This is just for you. And for most of us pianists, it's not going to sound great. Exactly. Learn it by ear, be able to sing it. And then once you can sing that whole solo

all the way through from memory with the recording, transcribe it later, if necessary. If you want to analyze it, transcribe it at that point. But always get it by ear first. Okay, so secret number three, and this is, apologies, this is only for pianists, but Adam and I are both pianists, so we got a little bit of a bias here. But this is to omit the left hand, at least at first. So as you're learning a solo, you know, we want to be super thorough, and if you've got a lot of type A personalities out there, you're going to be like, I've got to get every note exactly right. and yes, of course, to transcribe and to learn both hands is great.

I've done that on many solos and learned a lot. But when you're starting out on a solo, just learn the right hand because it's going to keep you from getting so overwhelmed and so caught in the weeds and so segmented by measure. We want to get right into learning complete phrases and even complete sections a little bit quicker. And the left hand, I mean, you can literally spend hours trying to get one voice incorrect and still not even know if you've got it right. That's right.

And maybe that's a whole other task that you take on another day, is just transcribing the left hand of another solo that you like the way that that musician comped for themselves. But that's a whole different thing than learning an actual solo. Yeah, and I would say for this number three, since we didn't really include others besides pianists, let's kind of extend this and just say, don't get caught in the weeds.

So, you know, if you're a saxophone player and you're learning a John Coltrane solo, you know, I hate to tell you this, you're never going to, even if you get every note, you're never going to sound exactly like John Coltrane, and you're probably not even going to ever get every note. What you're trying to get is the spirit, the vibe, the phrasing, the swing, the feel. So, I mean, you know, lower your standards to a solid A, maybe 92%,

94% accuracy, and just keep charging ahead. So that brings us to point number four, and that is learn phrase by phrase, not bar or chorus by chorus. So think musically. Take each musical phrase and learn that first. As you start to learn this by ear and by singing it, you know, you can hear the musical phrases. Don't try to do too much. I mean, you're naturally going to going to go to what's comfortable for your level of ear training for your level of knowledge of what's going on. But don't try to take on too much, too big of chunks at one time. Just try to learn phrase by phrase. Be musical about it. I love that one. Okay, number five, I want you to learn phrasing and dynamics of the solo as you go. Don't wait until the end after you've got

all the notes. Sometimes, you know, and this is another thing that's great if you can stay away from writing it out until later the actual transcription, just learning it and playing it by ear, because that'll focus you more on all the parts of the music, the notes, the dynamics, the phrasing, everything, not just getting the physical notes onto the page. A lot of times I see people doing that. They miss the dynamics and phrasing, and then they have to go back and add that in later. It's kind of like with arranging or composing. That's all part of the music. So put it in as you go. It's a lot less efficient to try to add that in later. And it just focuses you on the things that you love about the solo anyway in terms of the phrasing and the dynamics. So make sure you're getting that as you go

just like you're getting the notes. And one little part of this that can help is as you're learning the solo, play the phrases. If you've just learned the first two phrases of the solo, and that's what you're going to do for that day, play the recording and play along with it. Don't put the headphones on. Have some speakers blasting around you and where it's pretty loud where you have to really, you know, play to keep up with it. And then play those phrases that you've learned, not looking at the page, but play along with the recording and try to match up your phrasing and dynamics naturally. When you have the headphones on, it's harder to hear what you're doing. You're more focused on what they're doing, the soloist.

But play along with it, because that's always going to be your easiest way to get those phrasing and dynamics. It's matching the original. I love that because that also coincides with when you actually play with other people in a real space, you have to react in a real space, not in your headphones in most situations, unless, you know, it's a studio situation. So that really helps with that technique. And I love the learning phrasing and dynamics as you go as well because, you know, this is not all about the notes and the notes in the core. The licks. The licks or whatever.

This is about how they're played. I mean, how many times we heard great licks played terribly and it's not effective. You know, you've got to learn how to think. How many times? 47,000, 330. Okay, I lost count. That's right. So speaking of Licks, so it takes us to number six.

And this is really going to be beneficial if you haven't done this yet. Learn other instrument solos. This is especially good for pianists because we get so caught up in the piano and the technique of the piano, but learn saxophone solos, learn trumpet solos, learn bass solos, learn drum solos.

I'll tell you a story. When I was in high school, I was having a real hard time playing with some drummers live getting lost in their solos. I just didn't understand what they were doing. I didn't understand what was going on. I started transcribing some Art Blakey solos

and that really sort of unlocked, Oh, that's what going over the bar feels like. I understand that now. That can all help you be just a better musician in general. And from an arranger's standpoint, the more you can transcribe with other instruments, the more you're going to understand how those instruments work. And then if you ever want to write an arrangement for trumpet, you understand the range of the trumpet. You understand what sounds good.

Same thing with bass and saxophone and the other instrument. Yeah, and I think that one's learning other instruments besides your own souls. That secret is great. That actually saved me a lot early on because I started learning. I got very excited about McCoy Tyner and Thelonious Monk when I was a teenager first getting into jazz, and I learned some of their solos, and I got so burnt out on just trying to get every note right, and was having trouble hearing, and was getting very frustrated. And so I was listening to a Miles Davis recording Baggs Groove,

and actually trying to, it was going to learn Thelonis Monk's solo on there. But I love Miles' solo so much in his phrasing everything, and I basically said, well, this is certainly going to be easier than learning more a month. So let me go the easy route, but then I got a whole other kind of element to soloing a whole other conception about playing over that same tune. It turned out to be a great thing for me. So that's a great one. Now we get to number seven, the last one. We have to hit on some what I would call cheats.

Of course, these are good secrets, but basically these are using different tools in order to speed up your transcription. process. And I think it's okay to do these, but I wanted to wait and have them last because I want you to try all these other techniques we've given you first. So these include actually buying or downloading online sheet music transcriptions of solos and just learning it from that. And I would say if you're going to do that, and it certainly can save you a lot of time, let's be honest. But if you're going to do that, first of all, make sure you get a really high quality transcription of which there's a lot of low quality stuff out there. There's a lot of low quality stuff out there. There's nothing that's ever going to be 100% accurate because you can't represent

everything in a Miles Davis solo on the page. There's just not enough nuance to the printed page to do that. But I do think that if you listen a lot, really know, go back to that number one is picking a solo that you already know, really know. If you would combine that with then looking at transcription, that could help guide you along. But if you do that, just use it as a guide. Try to learn it first by ear because you're getting so much from the ear training in the process of learning. And then if you get stuck on something, use the transcription as an aid

as opposed to actually guiding you through it. And then there's a lot of other stuff, like slow down techniques and stuff, which I think is fine. And it's the same thing. I would say try to learn it in real time first because that's the way the music is played and presented. And if you need to slow it down,

and there's a lot of great tools that you can do that by keeping the pitch the same, it's no problem. Go ahead and slow it down and just try to get it back up to real speed as quickly as you can as your ears develop. Yeah, but it's important to note what you kind of alluded to there. All of these are kind of references to, you double checking on what you've already hopefully learned by ear,

because that's the most important part of this. That's what you're really going to get out of this, is real time using your ears in a space. It's going to have more benefits than just what are these notes they're playing over this chord. Absolutely. All right. Well, that's all I got on my end. You good? I'm good. All right. That's it for today's episode of the You'll Hear It Podcast. For more information or to hear more of these podcasts, go to openstudionetwork.com

slash podcast.