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Wednesday, October 26, 2011
A Guitarist's Guide To Transcribing Music
The best way to learn new songs, practice reading and writing music, and master the playing styles of your favorite guitarists is transcription. Transcribing music is a process that any guitarist can do. I found a few articles that should help you start transcribing music on guitar. Transcription is a detail oriented process that takes time and dedication to complete. I suggest starting slow with songs that you enjoy and are simple. If you start with a song that is difficult, you may get frustrated with transcription. If you are familiar with writing music, try and transcribe the whole song including the melody, harmony and solo if there is one. If writing music or tablature is still new to you, then I suggest starting out with chords and maybe the bass line. If you build the foundation of the song in your transcription first, then the rest you fall in to place. These are just a few tips from me, but get a lot more advice on transcription from the articles below.
For this post I thought I would address a topic that has arisen in numerous lessons of late with my own students and something that I feel needs addressing. This topic is the importance of developing a good musical ear through transcribing songs.
I often have students ask me if they can learn to play their favorite song (which is definitely something I strongly encourage) but they often look back at me horrified when I ask if they have tried working it out themselves. It seems this idea had never crossed their minds!
Go back a few years, though, and working out songs by ear was the primary means of learning to play the guitar. This is how most of our guitar heroes and legends taught themselves how to play. You read over and over again in interviews how they would sit with a vinyl record and play it repeatedly in order to learn the guitar parts they admired.
Nowadays Internet tab and artist song books are a student’s first port of call but you can only get so much from a tab. If you want to get the true feel and tone of an artist you have to use your ears. Perhaps even more important is that you will learn to hear parts that aren’t always written out in transcription. There’s nothing stopping you from playing the saxophone part from a song like, for example, “Take Five” except, perhaps, your current lack of confidence in your listening skills.
So what is transcribing?
Transcribing, technically, is writing out a song so that another person (yourself included) can play it from your written notes. But because transcribing is becoming such a rare ability we tend to think of it these days as the art of working out songs through using your ears and also writing it down. But for now we are only looking at working it out at this stage.
It is important to note, though, that there are different levels of transcription. You could be doing something as simple as figuring out the time signature and the chords of a song so that you can strum along to it. Or you could be trying to work out a note-per-note transcription of a single guitar part. Or you could be working all note-per-note transcriptions of all the guitar parts of a single song. Since we’re just getting started, let’s focus on figuring out the chord progressions, okay?
So when do I start trying to transcribe?
As soon as possible, obviously this seems daunting to the beginner guitarist but developing a good musical ear is all about experience, so just give it a try but most importantly keep trying! Start with your favourite song and try to clap along with it, is it 4/4 time? Listen closely to the Bass guitar which often plays the root notes of the guitar chords, try to pick them out along the ‘E’ string and change chords with the guitar.
There are a number of excellent articles here at Guitar Noise that can help you get started. David’s “ear training trilogy” is a good place to begin. The first and, especially, the last lesson of this set are the ones to which you’ll want to direct your attention:
Happy New Ear
Unearthing the Structure
Solving the Puzzle
As mentioned, definitely take your time with the last lesson, which goes through figuring out three song examples step by step. And don’t forget that most people who teach have been working songs out by ear for quite a while so don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t come to you magically in an instance. Like everything about the guitar (and music), transcription takes practice. But at least now you’ve got something to go on in order to start practicing.
The song is too fast, I can’t keep up.
And, unlike your guitar heroes, you’ve also got a lot of help! There are many computer programs available such as Transcribe! and Amazing Slow Downer which allow you to slow down, loop sections and change the pitch of audio tracks. Plus the digital players in some computers also provide such assistance.
Homework assignment
So now you have an idea of where to start it is time to begin. Have a go at transcribing one or more of the four songs below, in this case “transcribing” meaning “work out the chord progressions, just as David did in “Solving the Puzzle.
To give you a hand, all the songs in question use some or all of the chords G, D, A, C, Em, and B7. All you have to do is work out which ones and in what order.
Sweet Home Alabama – Lynyrd Skynyrd
Wonderful Tonight – Eric Clapton
Hot & Cold – Katy Perry
Sweet Child O’Mine – Guns ‘N’ Roses
And don’t be shy about attempting songs not on the list! The more you practice on the better you’ll get at working out songs by ear.
I shall return in a few weeks with the answers but until then good luck and happy listening.
P.S. Extra credit marks for working out the guitar solos!
Hello, and welcome to a CPDmusic lesson on transcribing by ear. I had a request to do this lesson, and I will try to the best that I can. I say that because there isn’t a “golden rule to transcription” or something like those advertisements say. But, unlike popular belief, you don’t need perfect pitch to transpose by ear either. Sure, you need a half decent ear, but that is easily developed through listening to and playing music. You will also need lots of patients, because when you first start transcribing, you will probably be playing the first ten seconds of the song over and over and over again. But, as I said, there is no one way to transcribe by ear, so the best I can give you is tips, like the lesson title says. So, here we go.
What You Will Need:
First of all, you will obviously need a pen or pencil, and some music staff paper or tablature paper, to right down the music you transcribe. Also, you should have a guitar or some other musical instrument (your voice will work if you’re a good enough singer), to compare the notes you play, which you can identify, to the mystery notes in the song. It is also a good idea to have a metronome, especially if you are transcribing in actual musical notation in comparison to tabs, because you will actually need to know which notes are quarter notes, which are eighths, etc. It is also good to make sure you have a half decent recording of the song, not a live video you capture with your cell phone or something. Also, when your starting, you may want an audio editing program from some sort that will lets you manipulate the recording.
Finding The Tempo:
To find the tempo (the speed of the music), you will have to find the BPM, or beats per minutes. It’s the easiest part of transcription, and is quite simple. You know when you listen to a song, and you tap your toe to the pulse. Well, all you have to do is find out how many toe-taps you do in a minute to find the BPM. Just get a stop watch and get your toe tapping, and just time how many toe taps you complete in ten seconds for example. Than just multiply it by 6, because there is 60 seconds in a minute, and there’s your BPM. This is the number you will set your metronome to, and it should then match the pulse of the song. An alternate method is if you’re lucky enough to have a metronome with a “tap tempo” function. This means you just tap the tap tempo button to the pulse of the music, and it will automatically find the BPM for you.
The First Note:
The first note is also fairly easy. But, unless you have a good enough ear to simply identify what note it is, finding the first note is pretty much guess work. Just play the note over and over again, and play a note on your instrument that you think might be close to that note. Now, there are three outcomes: you got lucky and got it right on the first tray, the note you played is higher than the recording, or the note you played is lower than the recording. If you got the right note, than you’re obviously done this step. If your note is higher than the recording, play a lower note and compare, and if your note is lower than the recording, play a higher note and compare. Repeat this process until you have arrived at the correct note.
A Tip For The Rest Of The Notes:
When you’re first starting, the easiest way is to identify musical intervals. If you don’t know how to identify musical intervals, you will want to read this. This process will involve you taking the first note, which you have already identified, and comparing it to the next. If you can identify that interval, you can identify the second note! For example, if the first note is a D, and the second note is minor third lower than that D, then the second note is a B! This may seem long and strenuous, but until you get the hang of ear transcription, it’s your only hope.
A Tip On Identifying Chords:
You will most likely run into chords in your transcribing days, so you will probably have to have some idea on how to identify them. Now, you don’t have to play the chord, but rather the root note. For example, if the chord is a G chord, the low G should sound in unison with it, although it is not as textured. From there, to determine whether it is major, minor, etc is up to your ear. Until your ear gets to the stage where you can actually separate the individual notes in a chord, you will have to rely on the feel of the chord (major chords sound happy, minor chords sound sad, etc.).
Some More Tips:
Now, I mentioned that it was a good idea to have an audio editing program before, which is where this comes in. Having a program like this can help you immensely. First of all, most audio editors enable looping features, which can come in handy. You will probably also be able to crop certain parts of the song out, which is good if you want to focus on just that part. Also, a lot of audio editors have the option to slow down the audio file. This is great if the song is to fast for you to catch all the notes. Now, if you don’t have an audio editing program, you can get one for free here. It’s pretty basic compared to some of the retail, pro-grade audio editors you can get, but it has the ability to loop, crop, and slow down the audio file (plus much more), which is all you will really need in transcription.
One final thing is that you shouldn’t pick the craziest, fastest, face-melting song you know to start with. Don’t try to make your transcription debut with Through the Fire and the Flames, because you will soon realize it’s above your skill level. Use the KISS principal; Keep It Simple, Stupid! Start with a simple melody you know very well, like your countries national anthem, or the theme from that movie you watched ten-thousand times. The first song I ever transcribed was the theme from Indiana Jones.
Closing:
Well, that’s pretty much all the advice I can give you. All you can do now is practice.
Guitarist listening and transcribing
music.
Steve Vai is a guitarist that has built a music career on methodical approaches and exercises to playing guitar. He has some great advice for guitarists that are developing transcription and ear training skills. Find one of his interviews here at http://www.steviesnacks.com/blog/2010/12/20/you-never-can-tell.html.
Every one of us has biases and preconceptions about people we see in guitar magazines. Sometimes those biases are based on facts, sometimes they are but a reflection of how we've been treated.
I'm no different.
A while back, I watched an interview with Steve Vai, where he talked about his early days as a guitar player. In this interview he talked about how hard on himself he was as he was learning to play.
Unsurprisingly (to me), Steve was his own taskmaster. "If you even think you're going to get up before you play this right"..... That was the kind of thing he'd say to himself when he felt like putting down the guitar.
That interview (in my mind) confirmed everything I'd suspected about what kind of person he was. If you had asked me then, I'd have told you that he's a picky, snobby music theory genius, who looks down on anyone who doesn't study music the "right" way.
Boy, was I wrong.
Some of you know of Justin Sandercoe, the wonderful UK based online guitar teacher from JustinGuitar.com. Justin's interviewed Steve Vai earlier this year. The video from that interview is posted at the end of this article, but I want to focus on something Steve said at 6:00 into the interview:
"But, having said that, that was my way, you know? And I enjoyed being very methodical, and breaking things down. That's not necessarily the way for everybody, the way for you is what you feel. The reason I did 10 hour workouts, is because that's what excited me.
If you're going to take any advice from me, I would tell you to find the thing that excites you the most, and go after that. Whether it's just playing, you know, a Led Zeppelin song, not practicing scales.... you don't have to know music. Just tell Jeff Beck to play an F# on the G String, he might not know where it is."
What else is there to say? Just goes to show you, you can't judge a book by it's cover. By all visible metrics, Steve Vai looks like he'd be you're typical music theory snob. But in reality, he knows what he loves is not what everyone loves.
"The important thing is to find what excites you"
What excites you? Writing original music? Memorizing scales? Transcribing solos? Maybe it's dressing up in a hat, and trying to look and play like Jimi Hendrix. Or sitting on stage with Albert King trying to imitate his licks.
There are "right" ways to accomplish specific guitar skills/styles. But there is no universal "right" way to approach the art of guitar playing. Anyone who tells you otherwise is confusing what they love for universal truth. And they are probably miserable. You'll be happier if you listen to Steve Vai's advice.
GuitarWorld.com is revisiting Steve Vai's classic mag column, "The Ultra Zone," for this crash course in ear training.
I could never overstate the importance of a musician’s need to develop his or her ear. Actually, I believe that developing a good “inner ear” — the art of being able to decipher musical components solely through listening — is the most important element in becoming a good musician. Possessing a healthy imagination is a necessary ingredient for creativity.
But without the ability to bring those imagined sounds into the real world, one’s creative aspirations will remain crippled. Training one’s ears to understand and recognize musical sounds and concepts is one of the most vital ways to fortify the connection between the musical ideas in one’s mind and the musical sounds created on one’s instrument.
All musicians practice ear training constantly, whether or not they are cognizant of it. If, when listening to a piece of music, a musician is envisioning how to play it or is trying to play along, that musician is using his or her “ear” — the understanding and recognition of musical elements — for guidance.
This is also true when trying to emulate a piece of music, or transcribe it, or even just finding inspiration in it. No matter what one is playing, one’s ear is the navigational device that steers the musical ship where it will go. Without a good ear at the helm, you could find yourself musically adrift at sea.
I have always been fascinated with looking at music written on paper. When I was in college, I took a class called solfege, which entailed learning how to sight-sing. Sight-singing is the art of looking at a piece of written music and singing it. First, you identify the key center, and then you sing the written pitches, using the “doe-ray-me” phonetic structure, just like that song in the movie The Sound of Music. “Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti-Do” (pronounced “Doe-ray-me-fa-so-la-tee-doe”) represents a major scale; there are other monosyllabic sounds that represent the other pitches that reside within a 12-tone octave. These solfege classes in college were difficult courses, but they were well worth the time invested. A thorough study and analysis of solfege within the confines of this column would be impractical, so I can only encourage you to investigate it on your own.
I’ve always considered transcribing to be an invaluable tool in the development of one’s musical ear and, over the years, I have spent countless glorious hours transcribing different kinds of music, either guitar-oriented or not. The most well-known example of my guitar-based transcribing labors is The Frank Zappa Guitar Book (Hal Leonard), for which I transcribed, among other things, the entire Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar series of recordings. Many musicians, however, do not have the ability to pull the sounds — guitar solos, rhythm parts, melody lines, etc.—off the records that they love. Transcribing is an art that takes a lot of practice and a study that I encourage everyone to experiment with.
But fear not: you do not need to have the ability to sight-read or transcribe in order to practice ear training exercises. If you are just sitting there with a guitar, there are still a great many ways to develop your ears, in the quest to strengthen the connection between your head and your fingers. Below, I have outlined some of the ways a guitarist can work on ear training exercises using just the guitar.
As guitarists, there are certain things that most of us do that are simply part of the program: we learn some scales, develop some exercises intended to improve our physical abilities, work on chord forms on different parts of the neck, etc. I believe it is extremely important to put aside some time dedicated solely to focusing on ear training.
One of the easiest ways to begin working on ear training is to sing what you play. For example, you can play a C major scale (C D E F G A B) in any position — preferably one that is physically comfortable for you—and sing each note of the scale as you play it, being very careful to sing on pitch as accurately as possible. Start with one note: play the note, sing it, and then play and sing the note simultaneously. Then go to two notes. Once you feel comfortable, take a little piece of that scale, say, the notes C, D, E and F, and create a very simple melody with these notes for you to sing simultaneously, à la jazz guitarist George Benson.
This is an easy way to get your ear in sync with the sounds your fingers are creating. Whether you’re soloing over a rhythmic vamp or are playing alone in free time, you have to really stick with it, and don’t allow yourself to slip up or drift into something else. The idea is to endlessly improvise and sing what you are playing, using any key.
Another good thing to do is to record a simple one-chord vamp to play over. First, only play/sing notes that fall within the key, staying within a basic note structure of a five-, six- or seven-tone scale. Don’t start wandering off into your favorite guitar licks to play; save that for another time, when you’ve developed your ear to the point where you can sing just about anything you can play. This is an exercise in discipline: do not play anything that you cannot follow perfectly with your voice. Whether you stay within one octave of the guitar, or you sing the notes an octave lower than the sounding pitches, or you use falsetto to hit the high notes, you must be able to recreate all of the notes played on the guitar with your voice.
If you work on this every day, you’ll find yourself getting better and better at it, and it will become easier to do. The cool thing that happens is that you’ll begin to hear music more clearly in your head, allowing you to formulate musical ideas—write music—within your head, without the aid of a guitar. When you finally do pick up the instrument, you will discover that you will instinctively be able to play these ideas that have taken form in your mind.
To take this a step further, try this exercise: without a guitar at your disposal, picture the guitar’s fretboard in your mind, and then envision playing something so that you will “hear” and “see” the notes as they are played. It may be helpful to sing the notes as you imagine them being played. This is an excellent exercise that will fortify your mind-fretboard relationship and actually improve your ear by strengthening the acknowledgment of “pitch relativity” (how one pitch relates to another, in terms of sound and placement) on the guitar’s fretboard. You may discover some cloudy areas in your mind’s eye/ear, but if you work through it, the picture will soon become clearer and clearer.
These techniques do not address the act of playing one thing on the guitar and singing something completely different. Someone like Jimi Hendrix had the uncanny ability to play very complex rhythm parts and single-note riffs while singing complementary parts.
This technique requires a whole different set of brain muscles and is very difficult for many players. Playing one thing while singing another must be worked on as an independent field of study. If I could play the guitar and sing at the same time, hey, I might have a career! I’ll be back next time with some more effective ways to help you to develop your ear.
The in mathematics, the definition of "Vector" is "representation of a quantity having both magnitude and direction". In lead playing, a certain quantity and variety of notes are selected and intersect with rhythmic patterns to create the illusion of both magnitude and direction.
How to Listen for the Vector Points
As you study your favorite lead guitarists, learn to listen critically to the passage in the following manner:
Listen to the first and last notes of the lead first. These are the starting and ending points where you will need to also be.
Next, listen for the vector, or pivot notes that indicate accents or changes in direction at various times between the starting and ending points on the lead (vector notes very often occur on the strong beat of each measure). Play only the vector notes several times through as you listen to the original artist. This will get you playing the important notes with the important accents in time with the original artist, in much less time than if you just start at the beginning of the lead and plow through to the end.
Finally, listen for all the connecting notes between the pivot notes, and play along from pivot to pivot note repeatedly until you are quite comfortable before moving on. If you miss one or two of the in-between notes, it still sounds good as long as you keep the time and play cleanly.
We call this approach the "Vector Technique", because it keeps you focused on the important notes and pivotal notes at the end of musical phrases. Kinda like the Karate Kin on Plum Poles, you see here to remind that it's more important to hit the right notes in time to get back home, than to hit every note.
These articles should serve well as a start for you. Transcribing music is a wonderful skill to develop that will have a big pay off in your guitar playing. Subscribe now to Mike's Guitar Talk for direct access to your first source of guitar information on the web.
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