Are you writing down a solo to steal a line?.What do you want to achieve by transcribing?īefore you decide to transcribe, ask yourself why you are learning a particular solo and what you expect to get out of it: Not too far fetched, in that to transcribe, as shown by the above definition, directly implies something that involves writing.Īs I matured and began to seriously immerse myself into the music and study how the masters learned the music, I began to see that “transcribing” meant something much more extensive than the actual or implied definition of the word. I had repeatedly heard the word transcribe from numerous sources and immediately thought of a process that culminated with a written product. So who is right and why are there so many discrepancies if everyone is “transcribing”?Įven though we may not always believe it, the words and language that we use, have a direct connection to the way we think and the actions that we carry out.įor me, transcribing initially meant turning on a record, figuring out a solo note by note, writing down each note, and finishing satisfied with a solo notated on a piece of paper. On the other hand, I’ve encountered players that had dozens of solos written down, but didn’t seem to retain any of it or improve by doing so. I’ve had teachers that didn’t write solos down, but had numerous solos memorized to the point where they could sing them without their instruments. Throughout the years I’ve met amazing improvisers that claimed they’ve never transcribed a solo and have come across others that say they’ve transcribed hundreds of solos. Jazz musicians and educators constantly talked about transcribing, but it seemed that there was a conflict in what was actually meant by the word transcribe, as well as the reason behind doing it. I was curious to get to the bottom of what transcribing actually meant, a word that I had heard for years as I was learning to improvise.Įver since I became interested in jazz, transcribing solos was continuously touted as the “secret” to learning improvisation. This is the definition I found for the word transcribe when I looked it up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary recently. A: to make a written copy of, B: to make a copy of (dictated or recorded matter) in longhand or on a machine, C: to paraphrase or summarize in writing, D: to represent (sound) by means of phonetic symbols
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