Beginner’s 5-Step Guide To Transcribing Solos

Transcribing the music left for us by the greats is the fastest way to see improvement as a musician. Beyond just learning the “language” of the “jazz” (hereafter referred to as “BAM”, short for “Black American Music”) art form, I’ve seriously stepped up so many other skills in learning to transcribe. It touches almost every facet of musicianship: rhythmic interpretation, harmonic analysis, developing thematic material, standard repertoire. The more you do it, the faster you get at it, and you start to bridge the “mind-body connection” making it easier to ideate and execute fresh ideas on your instrument that honor the tradition of the art form.

The vast library of recorded music from the last century has been preserved for today’s musicians to study, learn from, copy and emulate. Through this process, we create and move the art form forward in contemporary practice. And at no other point in history has vast library of musical material been so accessible.

I’m launching this blog with a short summary of the process I go through in learning a solo. It is by no means exhaustive or the “only, best way to do it”, but rather, a set of strategies that have helped me learn and retain musical ideas for study and analysis.

Step 1: identify a solo to start with and listen to it. A lot.

Working with a teacher is a great way to gain exposure to musicians you may have overlooked or not given serious study to their material. If you don’t have a teacher, pick some music that you enjoy listening to, by a musician who you want to sound more like in your playing. If you do have a teacher and you’re not working on transcribing music right now, try asking your teacher for some appropriate material to focus on.

I would steer away from something that is far too complex or beyond your level, which will lead to frustration when you’re just starting off. Likewise, after you practice this a bunch, it becomes so much easier – it’s nice to stretch outside of your comfort zone, and sticking to easier solos might lead to boredom and not push you towards new and exciting concepts.

In high school, the first solo I “sort of” transcribed was Dexter Gordon’s solo over Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man from his 1962 debut album Takin’ Off. I loved this album and it was on repeat in my car for years. We’ll listen to it here:

When I was a little older, I sought to break through new plateaus in my playing, which had stagnated while I was in college focusing on other things. I sought the help of the professor of Jazz Studies at a local university, who set me up with a talented student of his. I had stopped transcribing because it was “too hard” and overwhelming, but that was because I just wasn’t practicing it! The first solo we started on was, appropriately, another classic Dexter Gordon cut: Second Balcony Jump from his album Go (recorded 3 months later and also released in 1962).

If you’re in a jam with finding a good solo to start with, these are great places to begin your journey. You don’t have to only focus on saxophone players if you’re a saxophonist, and trumpet players if you’re a trumpeter–transcribe what interests you, and dig the musicians whose language you ultimately want to infuse into your playing.

If you’re not ready to take on a full solo quite yet, you can even start by only just transcribing a well-known melody. It’s super important to do this by ear: I found that after years of relying on fake books, I couldn’t even recall a melody by memory. Now I know and have memorized a significant number of tunes that were completely mystifying to me when I was just getting started out, and this was only achieved by using my ears.

I think it’s best to steer towards modern recordings with clear and clean audio and playing that is easier to internalize, and solos that are shorter (1-3 choruses). I wouldn’t jump right into Coltrane’s Giant Steps just yet.

Some other highly recommended solos are:

Step 2: Learning The Tune: “The Head” And Changes

“The Head” of the tune is simply a musician’s way of saying “the melody”. You want to learn the tune, by ear. Learn it how the musician is interpreting the melody, learn the changes, listen to other versions of the tune to hear how other musicians might interpret it.

If you’re just starting off, picking a tune with a “standard” form like blues or rhythm changes will simplify the process of learning the “changes” because they don’t vary a ton (there are always variations on common themes, but many songs in the repertoire stick to similar formulas because they work so well and are widely known. For more about this phenomenon, check out my post on Contrafacts).

Knowing the underlying harmony of the moment will go a long way towards unraveling the small details of the solo, such as the pitches used in different articulations, ghosted notes, smears, or where the recording quality is compromised or you have to otherwise “estimate” what was being played.

If you can’t find the changes by ear quite yet, you can start to look for other resources to investigate, or ask your teacher for clarification. Aside from the Real Book, I also rely on Brent Vaartstra’s amazing work over at learnjazzstandards.com to reference changes. These are occasionally more accurate than what’s in the Real Book, and he posts tons of videos of each standard by different artists, usually in different keys. I’ll be creating a post on my process for learning tunes in a future post on this blog.

Step 3: Learn To Sing The Solo

After you’ve listened to the solo a few dozen times, make mental notes of the material being presented. Learning to sing the solo will help you to further internalize the roadmap of the tune. Sing along with the recording as best as you can. I find that as I get further in the process of actually writing out my transcription, my pitch and rhythm get even more accurate. But, I will say, the more detailed and precise that you can get at this early stage of the process, rest of the process gets easier.

If the tune is at a faster tempo than you can comfortably execute at this stage in your development, feel free to adjust the playback speed on Youtube, or use another looping/playback app. I love and recommend Transcribe! by Seventh String Software, while it does cost $39, I cannot put a price on the value I’ve gotten out of this software. Youtube Premium also offers more discrete playback speed controls and looping functionality, but standard out-of-the-box Youtube allows you to slow a video to 25%, 50% and 75% playback speeds.

I do recommend trying to learn and sing as much of the material as possible at 100% speed and only slowing down parts to catch specific details, because bringing the material to full speed is a whole other process. When you’re “on the gig”, the band isn’t going to slow down for you! However, this isn’t always going to be possible until your ear has had time to develop (but, once you do this a few dozen times, you probably won’t need to slow down as much – at the end of the day, do what makes sense for you and your journey and at this point of your progression.)

While I’m learning to sing the solo, it’s also a good time to start the process behind writing out the transcription (but don’t rush into actually writing out the solo until you’ve fully learned and internalized the material!). We want to start on analyzing the form of the solo.

Start with identifying the length of the tune (how many bars are in a chorus) and the number of choruses that the soloist takes. Do you know what key the solo is in? Get your staff/manuscript paper out and write out the bars (I like to limit my writing to 4 measure per stave [a stave is the five lines that musical notation is written into]).

I will use this to begin creating my mental map of the solo. A tip I had gotten in my lessons was to identify where each phrase begins, and on which beat, and writing in the rests for each phrase. I might transcribe and write in the first note or group of notes for each phrase after doing this but no more than that at this point – this is meant to help finding the right entrances for each phrase when I’m learning to sing the solo. Maybe I’ll write in sections of the tune, marking where the A and B sections of the form are, top of each chorus. If I know the harmony of the tune, I’ll write in the chord changes as I’m figuring them out.

Once I have my staff paper notated with bars and the form of the tune down, I’ll look at the paper and scan along while I sing the solo, and visualize the notation as best as I can.

Step 4: Learn The Dang Solo

Now that you are prepared (you can accurately sing the solo, maybe you’ve listened to a few other recordings of the same song, you know the changes and melody, etc.) the hard work begins. You now have the responsibility of finding the notes from the recording and putting them on your horn. Taking it as slow as you need to – sometimes this might be one phrase or one bar at a time, or even one note at a time – you want to transcribe the material on the recording and make it come out of your instrument.

We can start: sing the first pitch and then find it on your horn. You might not get it on your first try, but it’s OK to “guess and check”, at least, for now. Now, sing the next pitch in the solo. Think about, what is that interval between pitches? Once you can internalize what you are singing and identify the intervals (an interval is the “distance” between notes) it gets faster and easier. When I was just starting out, I had to go note-by-note and then “find” the pitch on my horn, and then remember them all. It’s like trying to remember The Gettysburg Address letter-by-letter, rather than in sentences and words.

Perhaps there are phrases that “jump out” at you or are easier to recognize. Make a mental map of the solo and where those occur, sometimes these can be easier to “lift” those from the recording and letting those phrases serve as goal posts, and you can fill in the gaps as you move through the solo.

Now, I will loop smaller and smaller sections of a phrase until I can play it on my horn, and then gradually increase the length of the looped sections until I have looped a full phrase along with the recording. Pay attention to time, articulations and inflections the artist is using, as you want to internalize and repeat these as close as humanly possible. The individual identity of one artist or another is truly revealed through their unique approaches to everything else besides the basic pitch and time of the notes!

I find that I might be able to pick out some of the notes in a phrase as “goal posts” and then logically “fill in the gaps” using what I know about the harmony of the moment (i.e. the changes and where the phrase fits in the roadmap of the song).

You will be able to proceed by “chunking” the information on the recording, proceeding phrase-by-phrase, bar-by-bar, and note-by-note depending on your level of comfort with the material and transcription process. Repeat as necessary until you can play the full solo along with the recording. If it helps you to set goals for yourself, breaking it down into more manageable pieces, starting with the first 8 bars (the typical length of an “A section”, in a Rhythm Changes tune), or a full “A section” if your tune is a different length, or a full chorus or even just 4 bars of a 12-bar blues if that’s too much.

Bob Reynolds has a great post on his vlog detailing his process for transcribing where he goes into great detail as a highly advanced, masterful musician. I’ll post this video here:

Some Tips For Step 4

Before we finish the process, I’ll detail a few pitfalls I’ve encountered with these methods and some advice for you:

Not singing the solo accurately: helps to zoom out and really take your time when internalizing the material in Step 3, aiming to sing with much accuracy and detail as you possibly can. This allows you to better internalize the intervals between notes and will make the process move along smoother later on.
Guess and check: The least effective way to transcribe is going to be “guess and check”. Sometimes we have to do this, or make educated guesses based on our knowledge of the harmony, and that is good for short-term progress, but now we have to break out of patterns and phrases that were learned incorrectly. When I’m just learning to play a phrase, I might “guess and check” and play it wrong 50 times before I get it right just once. Now, my brain has practiced the phrase wrong 50 times, and correctly 1 time. Your goal should be “perfect practice”, or repetition of the right phrase, getting it right before repeating it. With a good, accurate interpretation of the solo while I’m singing it, I can be more precise in translating it to the horn.
Writing out the solo too soon: commonly, I encountered road blocks whenever I would start to write the phrases out while I was proceeding with the solo, so I could remember them when I came back to the project between sessions. This was hindering my progress, as I relied more on what I “wrote out” rather than how it sounded on the horn. I found it was faster for me to get from A-to-B in terms of getting a solo written out on a blank sheet of paper, but I didn’t retain the information as well 2 or 3 months down the road.

Now, let’s move onto the final steps of learning a solo!

Step 5: Record Yourself, Edit Your Transcription

When I get to the point where I can comfortably play the solo along with the original recording, in its entirety, I like to make a few video recordings. This allows me to hear my progression towards the goal of recreating the solo as accurately as possible. I’m looking at a few things:

How is my pitch? Am I playing in tune with the recording?
Did I get all the notes and rhythms accurately? Listen for wrong notes, early or late entrances, comfort with the material.
Stylistically, am I using appropriate articulations and inflections as the artist did?

Recording lets you isolate your performance after the matter. We can miss so much while we’re focused on the process of making music and it really helps to get an outsider’s perspective on what we’re performing so we can be better musicians.

If you’re looking at your sheets of blank staff paper, make a note of where the mistakes occur and go back to those points in the source material and iron out the details.

I hate recording myself and hearing my playing – it’s like hearing a recording of your own voice. But, it’s necessary to hear your progression as a musician, and every once in a while you might even surprise yourself. There’s no hiding your mistakes and it makes you super vulnerable to self-criticism, but I also believe that the process of self-critique and being honest with yourself is what separates creatives and artists from the rest of society.

That said, it’s important to be gentle with yourself and constructive. You’re putting in the effort to improve and be a better musician than you were yesterday, and as long as you have your goals in sight and put in the work, you will get closer to where you want to be.

Step 6: Write It All Down

To a beginner, this is the hardest, scariest part of the process. I have also seen the most improvement in my sight-reading and notation skills from writing out the solo once I’ve learned it. This is an oft-avoided part of the process, but I feel that at least 80% of my growth as a musician is attributable to the detailed writing out of transcribed music. I have really started to enjoy this part of the process recently, as it can almost be like a crossword puzzle (and it’s something you can work on while you’re away from the horn, i.e. late night when practicing would disturb others in your domicile).

The first step of this process is to write the solo down without your horn or a piano. Internalize what you are doing on the horn and then place the notes in roughly the appropriate measures. I might start with stemless notation and then transcribe the rhythms, but lately I have found it more rewarding to transcribe a rhythm first and then assign the notes.

The goal isn’t 100% accuracy, yet, and that’s OK – we’re ultimately creating a symbolic representation of the abstract ideas presented by the soloist, and sometimes this system falls short of conveying the true character of a solo.

If we’ve done the work with our mental model, we should have a good feeling about where the phrases start and end (our “goal posts”) which we can then fill in the missing information.

Once we’ve gotten to the end of the solo, it’s time to edit what we’ve written out. Sit down and play it back on the horn, maybe with a metronome first, making sure all your bars have the appropriate number of beats, and the duration of notes and rests fit into the measure. Check the accuracy of your work to the solo as you have memorized it, noting any inaccurate notes and rhythms.

If you want to, throw it all out and start again from memory!

You can also try your hand at digital engraving. I’m learning and will be publishing my transcriptions that I’ve created in MuseScore4, which is a fantastic, open source desktop software program for engraving. You can also explore Sibelius or Finale if those options are appealing to you.

Since I’m in the process of learning and improving my music engraving skills, I’m revisiting and working on digitizing my collection of transcriptions I’ve worked on in the past few years.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve completed your first solo transcription, pick a new solo and start back at Step 1. I promise you, if you keep doing this, and stick with it, it gets easier and faster every time. Don’t be tempted by shortcuts.

While I’m making my transcriptions available on this site, it’s meant as a reference and will not replace the process of getting in there and learning them. With music, there’s no shortcuts, nobody can learn this for you, and that’s the beauty of the process and why it is such an important tool for the developing musician.

For my next installment of this blog, I’ll explore the question, “What should I do with my transcription?”. Now that we’ve completed our first, or maybe we have a handful of solos we’ve transcribed, I’ll share some of the methods I’ve been taught for internalizing the language of these solos, and some techniques for assimilating this language with my playing when I go to take a solo myself.

Stay tuned for more!