You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - You've Transcribed a Solo. Now What?

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

Today, Peter and Adam answer a SpeakPipe on how to put the info you learn from transcribing into practice. Wanna send a SpeakPipe of your own? Sign up for You'll Hear It Premium to access our SpeakPipe hotline! Go to https://www.openstudiojazz.com/yhi for more info.For more lessons at the piano with Peter and Adam, check out our brand new course: Jazz Piano Technique. In Volume 1 of this series, you'll get a 4-week bootcamp entirely focused on improving your ability to play pentatonic scales. For more info, go to https://www.openstudiojazz.com/jazz-piano-techniqueLike those You'll Hear It shirts Peter shows off on the podcast? Want some YHI swag of your own? Take a visit to our store! Just go to https://teespring.com/stores/open-studioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Peter. Hey. You've just toured Europe. Now what? Ooh. Let's get on a burn across the pond again. Were you going to Arkansas? Yeah, exactly.

The Black River. I'm Adamannis. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear podcast. Daily Jazz advice coming at you. Still coming at you from two continents. This is a bi-continental. podcast. Did you know that?

I did know that because you are on my computer, not in front of me. And also, we're not recording video, which has really been nice because I'm taking my shirt untucked, don't have to worry about my hair. Right. Well, you know what? I mean, well, I'm on your computer, but that doesn't mean I could be right around the corner,

but I'm not. That's true. We're close to those days where you're just going to be over at Blueprint, and you're like, all right, let's record some you'll hear it. That's right. You'll be at the other blueprint. We're like, yeah, we can't make it that close. Yeah. Yeah, so we are, we've been having fun.

We, we, you know what? I really enjoyed your solo episodes last week. Oh, thanks, man. Yeah, yeah. What is that? What was it? It was like a rhetorical question. No, it was, it was, how does that work?

Oh, how does that work? I can see you pay attention closely. No, I mean, you know, relatively. No, yeah, yeah, how does that work? Sorry, well, that's similar to what is that. But I kept thinking of like, you know, how does that work? like a rabbit runs across, you know, like, how do you explain something that just is naturally occurring in nature, but you applied it to jazz? That was a lot of fun. Well, there was a two-part thing

with that title. First of all, people were asking me for maybe some kind of, you know, beginning theory stuff. And so I thought I could, I could do that and how does that work apply to that? But it's also, there's that terrible, those two terrible people from the insane clown posse who made some kind of video. Remember this, Andrew? Andrew's laughing because he knows exactly what I'm going to say. But they were talking about magnets, and they just couldn't wrap their heads around magnetic force fields. And so they made something called magnets. How the F do they work? And they couldn't, they just were, it was, it's, you got to check it out. It is a, I mean, you'll lose faith in humanity, but. Maybe that should be your next series, though. How the F does that work? Dominic

courts. You know what? I want a guest on one of them. How the F does that work? Drop two voicing. It's going to be mine. All right, man. So, okay, so I did miss a little on your title, but I'm going to throw up back at you. I don't know if you knew. I had a couple solo episodes that just dropped a few days ago. What did you think of those? I've not listened to those.

I'm sorry. So you don't even know how to make fun on the title because you don't know what it is. Well, check those out when you get a chance. I will. No, actually, don't. Don't bother. Don't bother. No, but it's good to be back together.

And then we're going to, we're going to do some live coming up soon, but we're still, still going remote. So we're having a little bit of fun, a little bit of fun. For sure. So today we got a speak pipe from Paul. And this is why I said, now what?

Because the title of this episode is going to be, you've transcribed a solo. Now what? How does that work? Got it. Magnets. Bam. So here's Paul on the speak pipe.

Hi, Adam and Peter. This is Paul from Winnipeg, Canada. I love the podcast. Seven stars. to both of you and everybody else involved with the production. My question today is on transcribing. I would like to know how you guys go about using the information that you take from anything that you've transcribed and developing it into language that you would use every day. I think I'll leave it at that.

and keep up the excellent work, and I'd love to hear what you think about it. Take care, guys. Bye-bye. Awesome. Yeah, Paul. Great question. Yeah, shout out to Winnipeg, too. Thanks for listening, Winnipeggers.

Is it Winnipeggers? Yeah. Winnipegites. I doubt they would refer to themselves as that, but Manitobans. Manitobans, for sure, for sure. Yeah. It's a great question. You know, we preach the transcription a lot,

and this is what do you do once you have it? How do you use it, really? And, you know, I feel like I know we've answered this before, but perhaps, you know, back in my youthful days, I don't know if you remember young Peter, but I used to get a little bit abrasive when I answered a question and then I got asked it again. But now, as I'm becoming mature Peter,

and I would even say possibly mature Adam and in general the mature you'll hear a podcast, we like to reflect on ourselves and say, perhaps we didn't adequately answer the question. That is why it's being asked again. But no, I think that what this is is the reason it does keep coming up is that this is a difficult thing that people struggle with. So once you kind of get a breakthrough and some kind of concepts on this that work, it starts

to seem easy. But it definitely is an area that a lot of people struggle with. So I think you should feel, you know, you should feel like you're not the only one dealing with this, but I think it's something that we should maybe look at a little bit of a different approach than some things that we said before, which I went from what in refreshment, I'm forgetting something at it, but I think we basically would always answer this as like just be patient. It'll come out later.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe that's not quite enough. It might not be. Yeah, but it's, I mean, that's definitely important because this is like, this is like we were talking about interpents of the hands the other day. This is a big thing. But because this is kind of an ongoing asset that you can. get like in other words if you're constantly transcribing you're going to be constantly getting

things that you can apply to your play but it's going to be like a rolling effect so it's not going to be coming like right in real time as you transcribe that you're going to be able to incorporate that into your playing it might be months later that's where the patience part comes in but i do think that uh paul kind of hits on something when he says i think what he said was you know looking to language and how you can use it every day Like how do you take that information that you're getting out of the transcription and developing into language you would use every day? And so I think that some maybe a little bit more repetition than maybe we've preached before might be in order. I'm just thinking about like on this last trip I was in Italy, you know, we were there for about nine days and I don't speak Italian well, but I know a few phrases.

And I kind of pushed myself from a language standpoint this time of just saying some things without thinking about them, you know. like just sort of blurting some things out, at least trying a little bit of Italian. And after doing that a few times, it kind of started to work. I mean, very limited vocabulary or whatever. But I did have to get out of my comfort zone and try because you can travel somewhere,

especially if like you're an English speaker because it's a blessing and a curse that everybody around the world, so many people speak English, that you can just sort of fall into this thing of never even trying to learn the most basic of phrases. I mean, I'm talking about thank you and hello. And, you know,

and I see the menu and that kind of thing. And I think it's kind of disrespectful to not even try to learn some of those. But I found that I was really forcing myself to just say some things. And then after I did that a few times, you do kind of get to that point where you'll just say something in a language. Very basic, but it just sort of comes out. And all of a sudden you're saying it in a way that is so much more organic sounding. And even the pronunciation and the vibe of it kind of sounds good, you know, or at least passable. Got a belly full of pasta.

You're in there. Oh, man. A little Kianti superior. Who knows what you can say. So I think if you take some of these things, I know we're always saying like let it come out of you're playing organically and it should. But maybe taking a few phrases, especially as you're playing that exact tune.

And playing them, you know, maybe when you're practicing, maybe on the gig. I still don't like doing it on the gig. I think it's just going to sound contrived. It always does. Yeah. But if you say play some of those phrases when you practice enough that it just sort of starts to roll off of your fingers,

then it can become a part of your language. It's still going to become a part of your language, even if you just listen to a solo a lot. But the actual playing of it, and then what we talked about for sure is playing along with the recording. I think that's something that we've mentioned, but people need to be doing more of just, you know, after you learn the solo, play with the recording,

keep the headphones on, get the speakers going, play along with it, match the phrasing, match the vibe. Don't just get so excited that you move right on to the next solo. I love it. Another thing to think about with this, I love coming at it from a language aspect. And something that you can do, Paul, if you feel like you have something

that it's not coming through, is to break it down a little bit and see what are the moves of this solo? What are the moves of maybe this lick that I like here or this voicing that I like here? Why did this player play this? And how can I use this not only in the context of this tune or this chord,

but in other ways. Like, is it the shape? that I like? Is it because it has this motion to the line, this shape to the line that I enjoy? Or is it, does it play off of expectations from what happened before it? Like, doing a little

analyzation, you know, and this is after you know the solo, you can play with the record, you don't need the music. But I've done this before, and it's been very helpful, it's just helping me see sort of perhaps what the player is thinking, or even just getting, like, a sense of, oh, this

player, like, you know, plays this scale over this chord, but this other player plays this scale over this chord. That's interesting that they do these two different things, and these are my options. You know what I mean? All of those kinds of things can be really helpful as far as just ingraining it eventually.

So if you're having trouble, if you're getting a little stuck with it not coming out, maybe just take a step back and ask yourself, okay, why do I like this? What is it about this solo? And then get surgical with it. What is it about this bar or this lick or this phrase that I really love?

And why does this work against the chord? you know it's a combination of arpeggios and enclosures and a scale or it's a you know a penitonic run that starts and stops and you know then leaps or whatever you know those kinds of things just like looking at phrases phrase by phrase looking at voicing's phrase by phrase can really help you decipher maybe some of the intent behind it and hopefully lock it in even more oh absolute more frere he switched to french he switched to french oh was that french i don't even know i'm speaking so many languages now. I just, I speak a general European language that blends as a blend, you know. Das is magnificent. He's still going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's good. That's good. I'll just add one more last little tip on this that just came to mind. And that is, and I think this can be combined with these other kind of ideas and strategies we talked about. But that would be to come back and revisit a solo that you've learned a while later, maybe a couple of months later, and, like, play along with it. You don't necessarily have to

go back into a deep analysis of it, but kind of get it back into your fingers. I think you'll find, if you really learned it well the first time, it'll, you'll be able to play it quicker than you think, especially if you're playing along with the recording. For sure. But come back to it and just play it, you know, five, ten times in a row with the recording if you've got the time. And then just sort of let it settle. I think that that will see back into it. your language and into your ears in a way that can be pretty profound. Sometimes when we're in the analysis and the nitty gritty of figuring out all the notes and stuff, we want to get all that information and language and apply right away. But it takes time for it to seep into our

consciousness. But sometimes it seeps in, but we feel like, oh, did I ever get that in from that knowledge that I got from that? So you got to give yourself to a chance to expose yourself to it again, let it kind of creep back in. And then you might see some nice language benefits from it at that time. That's awesome. Cool. Well, in the meantime, go to you'll hear it.com for more episodes on transcribing. Yes. You have a ton of stuff on that. Check out the rest of the podcast. Check out the blog. There's some stuff on transcribing on the blog. I think we even have a best of about transcribing. I don't have to check with Ryan on that, but I think we have one. Yeah, but because you didn't listen and you need to go back and listen. We get dogmatic on you, Mr. Manus. The other day,

I did seven solos you need to learn. Are you like directed at me? Like seven solos, Adam needs to learn? No, it wasn't Adam. It's whoever's listening. But once you learn it, it's going to be directed. You might know, though. Yeah, I just kind of wanted to highlight some lesser known ones because people are always

asking about that. We did some big ones. But yeah, we actually played. And you know what I did was they're all, none of them are piano solos. They're all horn players. So obviously it's for anybody to do, but we're always a little bit, you know, we know we have a lot of piano listeners. And not only that, I really went against the grain of what we normally believe and went out on a limb going solo, you'll hear his style.

And they're all one chorus only. Not that you can't learn more, but I highlighted specific single choruses of these seven great solo. I mean, it's got like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald. It's like a, it's very conservative in a good way, I think, very foundational. There's no like Brad Meldow solo or Kamasi Washington or anything. I mean, this is like the roots of jazz. But these are all, like, it's the seven solos you can learn just one course, and I think you can get a lot out of it.

Because I know not everybody has time to sit and listen to them, you know, learn a whole solo. Yeah, that's a great, great tip. Go transcribe those seven solos tomorrow, everybody. Just take all day, do all seven. Quit your job. Don't feed your kids. Start texting and driving and learn those. Oh, I'm just kidding.

Good. All right, man. We'll see you back here. America. That sounds good, ma'am. Good stuff. Until tomorrow. You'll hear it.