How To Get The Most Out Of Transcribing

[Music] you've probably seen the advice just transcribe some solos being used to solve all musical problems in a comment section or an internet forum or maybe a Facebook group and while I don't think that that's the best advice when you give it without any context it is actually quite amazing how much you can learn if you sit down and figure out a solo by ear and in that way you really get it into your system in this video I'm going to talk about how you can use the solos that you learn and the solos interestin transcribe to improve your vocabulary improve your phrasing and your timing certainly also how to connect phrases better and create a better build up in your solos my name is Jen's lassen if you want to learn Jes and make music then subscribe to my channel and click the little bell notification icon so you don't miss anything the first thing to discuss in this video is probably the word transcribing or transcription because of course literally that does mean to write things down and I've written out a lot of solos but at the same time I think the solos that I actually learned the most from we're not solos that I've written out so I didn't really spend a lot of time trying to write it out I just spent some time learning how to play it of course this depends on what you want to learn but some of the main benefits from learning a solo by ear are really better if you don't try to write it down if you really just stick with learning it by ear and keeping it in your memory that's the way that you can really learn the most problems of course there are other things that you can easily approach if you have it written out on paper and have some sort of all of you you'll see that in the video as well personally I think the solos that I learned the most from were the ones that I didn't write out so when I'm talking about transcriptions I'm transcribing I'm really talking about learning solos by ear and Willy write them down is not that important teach you phrasing I think one of the most difficult things to learn is in fact to have proper GS racing and if you try to learn it just only by analyzing and explaining things then that's gonna be a little bit difficult to get into you're playing you're much more likely to really get into your system and get it into your own solos if you take a solo of somebody else with good phrasing and then learn that by ear and play that along with the recording because in that way you really hear what it sounds like in the context and you can really feel how the melodies are supposed to signal groove where the X ends are and how to play the right type of eight knot phrasing this is my experience both from myself as a student I've really improved my phrasing a lot by learning a lot of solos and it's also what I see with my students if I give them solos to learn and they we learn them by ear and they start laying along with the record then they really improve their phrasing and what they're playing starts to sound a lot more like jazz an important thing that I think I should warn you about with this is also if you learn a solo and actually even if you're learning just like a people theme don't ever practices with a bad meaty backing track with horrible swing feel it's really gonna ruin everything you're probably gonna damage your playing and all then you're gonna help it and you should really just play with people a good feel but just with a metronome that doesn't have any feel at all so that at least the feel that you're playing with is coming from you don't take over some swing feel from your phone in some crazy app that has no swing feel whatsoever these first points I'm talking about in terms of phrasing and timing and eighth note feel is really where I think I learned the most from transcribing that's really where I improved my playing and the most important aspect of this is learning to play the solo with the track if you're learning a solo by ear or transcribing it then you can of course also take some of those phrases that are in the solo and try to add those to your own vocabulary now I've made a few videos from talking about how learning so huge chunks and trying to insert those into your own solos can be kind of a problem and actually can ruin more than that might help you but there are of course also ways that you can do this in a way where you can really get fixable and really useful things into your playing and here's probably where it starts to make sense to transcribe so rewrite out the solo so that you can look at well what is being played against the court what kind of a picture is using on top of this court what kind of inversion is there a certain pattern or other kinds of melodies chromaticism all these things become more clear if you start just analyzing the lines against the chords really go a little further than just looking at or it's this note against the court but also trying to understand it's this triad is this a picture in this inversion and in that way get an idea about how the melody is constructed this kind of information is then something you can start processing by really just trying to make your own lines using the same principles in many ways that's also what I'm doing in the series of videos that I have where I'm analyzing phrases from solos of famous people all the way from Grant Greene to Allan Holdsworth and trying to understand how are those phrases put together and how can we make similar phrases ourselves the key to learning to connect your phrases better from a transcription it's really a matter of swimming out so in the previous segment of the video I was talking about how you need to analyze the phrases and figure out what the building blocks were here I think you need to look at the phrase zoom out a little bit and then see what the phrase is around it sound like how they are constructed and how they might fit with the phrase that you're looking at and if we look at where solo from unit 7 and we take the I think the first bridge then that's reduced to 5 and C major a 7 and another 2 5 and then I turn around and this actually happens really a lot with Wes he will play some really great eighth note lines but he'll also have a lot of phrases that if you just look at one phrase in itself it's not that fantastic the first time this is really just using the 9th on a D minor cost us just the E and he's sliding into it so and then continuing with that on the g7 putting a flat nine in there but again what's important here is the rhythm and not really the note choices you're not going to learn a lot of interesting of haters or some interesting course until record by just checking this out and then the same kind of idea but with a slightly different rhythm is now happening in the next part of the phrase so we get and the next phrase that's using again the nine four now in the C major going down to it to the third of the a seven but still keeping that same idea of having some sustained note with some rhythm and then one know that we're skipping off too so it's really just developing the idea that we just had on the D minor g7 and keeping that going onto the D minor 7 so here we only have sort of one note per chord almost and the melodic idea is as much rhythmic as it is about the no choice evil often play stuff that's extremely simple it may only be the major triad of the key or something like that but he will create a really long phrase and really develop some interesting things and be really creative with that and if you're only looking at course and extensions you're gonna miss what's really there and that's really one of the things that we love about with another thing that's great about wes is that he'll do something like this and then the next part of the solo he will do something else to really change things up and in that way create some nice contrast and make it easier to like the solo and keep us listening because we get something new and that's also what's happening here because he goes into a longer eighth note line [Music] the Regis a dense 8-node line and that's gonna work as a contrast to the rhythmical idea that he started with in the bridge and now he's taking it with the ain't no line back into the last day the final thing that you can learn from transcribing and analyzing solos is of course to zoom out even more so how do you build the phrase what kind of a pictures in version scales all those kind of things then you can look at well how does these different phrases connect is that like motifs that are developed it's the call response what other things are happening and finally with this you can also just zoom out even more and just look at the form of the solo and look at what how is he using space what is the build up where is the climax of the solo and what kind of devices are being used to this if you look at West and I think he has a very sort of steady way of building up his solos where he using first single node lines then going to octaves and then going into pores that's just a very natural way to create some dynamics and also to really develop a solo but there are other ways to do this and it really pays off to look at what kind of different aspects might be used here so that can be especially stuff like what kind of reharmonization czar being used along the way when are they introduced what kind of rhythmical subdivisions are used is it first just really in the groove and then later maybe more dense or maybe more double time or more triplets or other kinds of things there are all these different devices and you can look at the entire solo and think about how this is used and tried to take over some of those ideas and work with them when you're soloing the reason that I can keep on publishing videos every week is that there is a community of people over on patreon that are supporting the channel I'm very grateful for their support and if you want to help me keep making videos then check out my patreon page if you join us over there I can also give you something in return for your support another important part of learning from other people is of course also checking out leaks from people that we admire and there's a good way and a bad way to do this so if you want to check out how you might be wasting your time learning leaks then check out this video on that topic if you want to learn more about jazz guitar and subscribe to my channel if you want to help me keep making videos then check out my patreon page that's right for this time thank you for watching and until next time

Channel: Jens Larsen

Views: 30,027

Keywords: transcribing guitar, transcribing guitar solos, guitar, transcribing, guitar lesson, transcribing exercises, transcribing jazz, transcribing jazz guitar, transcribing jazz solos, transcribing music, how to learn jazz guitar, how to play jazz guitar, how to transcribe guitar solos, how to transcribe jazz guitar, jazz guitar, jazz guitar lesson, jazz lesson guitar, how to transcribe music, jens larsen

Id: lprLYFqmOVM

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2019