| LearnJazzPiano.com archives: Transcriptions-To Buy or Transcribe myself? | |
| king cat -- 08/04/2005, 01:12:14 -- #17255 | |
| Hi everyone- I'm a classical pianst, 14 years old, been playing piano for about 6 years, and I just started jazz a few months ago. I'm really getting into it, and for a couple of weeks, my jazz teacher has had me transcribe myself red garland's solo on C jam blues, on his cd, "Groovy." I was just wondering- are there benefits to transcribing a solo yourself, and writing it down, analyzing it and stuff, over just buying the transcription, and analyzing it from there. Do I really still "gain" the musical concepts? I asked my teacher, and he said it was better to transcribe it myself. This, of course, is more time consuming than just looking at a transcription. Any insights are greatly appreciated. | |
| jaledin -- 08/04/2005, 09:25:47 -- #17267 | |
| What musicial concepts do you think you'd like to gain? It's possible that the musical concepts are part and parcel of the process of transcribing -- listening carefully to a short piece of music, learning to associate phrases with their pitches. If you ever want to understand somebody who isn't included in the books, you'll need to know how to transcribe, so you might as well start learning now. After my first three dozen or so solos, it only takes me about twenty minutes or so to write out one chorus (32 bars) of stuff without much rhythmic complexity (i.e., most bop pianists, many other straight-ahead musicians). If you set unreasonable goals, like transcribing the LH on every solo and not using speed control, you might get bogged down and only do a few transcriptions before burning out, I'll grant you. It boggles my mind that people are willing to trust some antique blob of transcriptions made using primitive equipment rather than their own ears -- what if the printed text is wrong (as it often is)? But there's no need to be pedantic about it -- why not just say to yourself, "OK, I accept that listening to a lot of jazz is a necessary part of my jazz education; whenever I hear a really cool solo which is only a few choruses long, I'm going to write the title down so I don't forget and see if I can puzzle it out in the near future." Then, if you amass a list of a dozen or so solos, you can see which ones have already been transcribed, and acquire the transcriptions, and the ones that *haven't* been done before, assuming you really like them, you'll take care of yourself. The ears are coming first, and you're learning the solos *you* want to study without being concerned by which tune is in the Omnibook or the Bill Evans Collection or whatever. With this small adjustment, you won't even have time to worry about which method is better -- you'll be figuring out the best way to understand the solos you need to decipher. If they're all published solos, so be it, but if none of them are, it's not a big deal to transcribe them. So which solos do you want to transcribe, anyway? | |
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