Fundamentals of Transcription by Ivor Holloway, SJW Staff
Ivor Holloway is a familiar face to many at the Workshop, where he first participated as a young saxophone player at the age of 12. Ivor studied music and psychology at Princeton, and recently graduated from Mills College with a Master's degree in Music Composition. He's currently on staff at SJW. (Photo: Ivor at the Stanford CoHo)

How did people learn to play jazz before there was a Stanford Jazz Workshop?  Louis Armstrong never had the benefit of an Advanced Jazz Theory class.  Charles Mingus didn’t go to Jazz Traditions lectures to learn about the various jazz styles and movements.  For most of the history of jazz, people studied it without the educational institutions and modern teaching methods we take for granted today.  So, how did they do it? 
           
One way they learned was by listening to recordings of other musicians carefully and playing along with them on their own instruments, memorizing or writing down their favorite parts.  This is called transcription, and it’s a technique that most great players have used to hone their skills and to build on what came before them.  Even with all the educational options for jazz students today, there’s no substitute for the experience of really studying your favorite songs, solos, or melodic phrases from your record, CD, or MP3 collection, and learning to play them yourself.

You can buy books of transcribed solos in music stores, but learning a solo or a tune directly from the record yields benefits you won’t get any other way.  For one thing, it’s a great workout for your ears, and will improve your ability to recognize and comprehend anything you hear in the future, whether you’re listening to recordings or playing with a group.  Also, you’ll pick up on the nuances and subtle expressions that can’t be accurately written down, but which are an important part of a jazz artist’s style.  Transcribing jazz can be a painstaking process, but don’t let this deter you.  A few simple tips will help you get started and make sure you get the best results from the experience.

The most important thing to remember if you’re new to transcription is to start with something simple.  Choose a medium-tempo tune whose chord changes you already know and understand—perhaps a standard, or even a blues.  Find a solo you like by an improviser who uses lyrical phrasing, doesn’t play a lot of fast or complicated rhythms, and stays mostly inside the tune’s harmony.  Even if your true passion is for blazing-fast bebop or avant-garde jazz, it’s a good idea to start with something strongly melodic to build up your transcription skills.

The first step in transcribing your chosen solo is to listen to it several times, paying attention to things you might not notice as a casual listener.  How many choruses does the soloist play?  How does his or her phrasing compare to the tune’s melody?  Are there repeated elements or themes that recur or develop throughout?  Try to get familiar enough with the solo that you can sing along with parts of it.

Next, go back to the first phrase.  Listen to it, rewind, and listen again until you’re able to sing it.  Even if you’re not a singer, it’s important to learn to sing it first before you try to play it on your instrument.  Singing will help you remember the phrase and allow you to figure it out by ear rather than by trial-and-error when you try to play it yourself.

Once you can sing it, try to figure the phrase out on your own instrument.  Sing it first, and then try to play what you sang.  Keep doing this until you think you’ve got it right, and then check it against the recording.  This process draws on many of your skills as a musician.  Understanding the chord changes will let you listen for and identify chord tones in the solo.  Your knowledge of musical intervals will help you find the next note in a phrase by ear.  It can be tough going at first, but you’ll find that as you do it more and more, all skills will grow stronger and become more automatic.  The result is faster, more intuitive communication between your ears and your instrument.  Go through the rest of the solo (or as much of it as you want to learn) in this fashion: one phrase at a time, singing each one first, and then learning it on your instrument. 

You can write down each phrase as you go along, but you’ll probably find that the intensive listening and repetition make it easy to remember what you’ve learned, even if you spread out the task of transcribing over multiple days or weeks.  Although writing out the solo and figuring out how to notate all the rhythms is also a great learning experience, your main goal should be to memorize the solo and learn to play it, emulating the artist’s time feel and articulation. 

No matter how simple a solo you choose, you’ll likely run into a few notes or phrases that stump you at first.  Don’t get discouraged; just skip over the section that’s giving you trouble and return to it later.  Try coming back to the challenging phrase once you’ve learned the phrase that comes after it.  Sometimes it’s easier to work backwards, piecing the notes together in reverse order. 

Other times, you’ll encounter a phrase that’s too fast for you to hear it accurately.  If you’re learning the solo from a vinyl record, try playing it at a slower speed so you can hear the notes more clearly.  Bear in mind, though, that this will change the pitch of the notes, so you’ll have to transpose them back to the right key.  Many CD players and computer music players have a function that can change the speed of the recording without altering the pitch.

Another common problem is unclear recording.  Sections of a solo can be hard to hear if, for example, the soloist moves his or her instrument away from the microphone, or the drummer plays a loud cymbal crash.  If you find a point where you know the soloist is playing something but you simply can’t make out exactly what it is from the recording, try to make an educated guess based on the rest of the solo.  Look at what the soloist plays over the same chord changes in other choruses to try to figure out the missing notes, or even just make up something that sounds appropriate to fill in the gap, based on what you’ve learned about the soloist’s style.

Get into the habit of transcribing music as part of your regular practice.  You’ll be amazed how quickly many of your fundamental skills will improve.  You’ll learn tunes faster, be more aware of what’s going on when you play with a group, and achieve a better and quicker understanding of all the music you hear.