The Art of Transcription (Part 1)
Transcribing is basically just the art of playing back and/or writing down something you’ve heard. Learning songs, licks, phrases and solos by listening to recordings is a time-honored tradition among jazz musicians.
Many people believe that they can’t transcribe. They think that you need to be born with great ears or some special ability. But the reality is that transcribing is a simple learned skill like any other, and involves a great deal of work.
The big payoff is that transcribing regularly is one of the best ways to improve your ears and your playing.
In earlier times musicians learned from records, carefully dropping the needle in the groove to listen to a lick or phrase over again (and before that, it came from imitating other musicians playing live in real time). Then came cassette recorders with cue and review functions which made finding those notes so much easier (not to mention saving countless vinyl records from ticks, pops and skips). Now we have looping devices and computer software that help make these tasks so much easier.
The tools of the trade:
Transcibe! is a wonderful program available from www.seventhstring.com. After trying Amazing Slow-Downer, and several others, I found this one and have been using it regularly for about the last six years.
Manuscript Paper: available at any music store or print your own at http://www.blanksheetmusic.net.
Notation Software:
There are several good programs out there and which one you choose depends somewhat on factors like your budget, you expectations, ease of use, the quality of the finished product. Let’s first look at the two key players for “publisher” quality music engraving.
Finale http://www.finalemusic.com/ has for many years been the industry leader. It’s extremely powerful and customizable, and will allow you to produce just about any notation style you can think of. But all this power comes at a price and it does have a pretty steep learning curve in the beginning. It’s also expensive (about $500 retail, $250 with an educators discount). They do however offer several scaled down versions which may suit your needs.
Sibelius http://www.sibelius.com is a younger program, and is Finale’s main competition for those requiring a serious notation package. Although Sibelius taughts their more intuitive interface, having been a Finale user for about 15 years, I actually found Sibelius to be somewhat confusing. However, I know many musicians who would disagree with me and the charts that they turn out with Sibelius certainly look fine. It is priced similarly to Finale and offer several entry level options as well.
Rather than take anybody’s word for it, I think you should download the demos for these programs and try them both out. See which one fits your style of working.
Tablature Based Programs:
I’ve never been a great fan of Tab http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablature and a few years ago, would never have believed that I’d be saying this, but for transcribing work, I’m actually finding that a Tab program is fitting quite nicely into my work-flow. The reason is this: If you transcribe something and get all the notes down in Standard Notation, you still need another step to add the string and fingering indications, and since there are many possible ways to play the same note on guitar, no computer program can do this automatically. All the notation programs force you to use a different tool to enter finger and string information than the one you’re using for entering notation, so you’re forced to make two passes. However, once you’ve entered a particular finger on a string at a certain fret as in Tab, it always produces the same note! Hence, it’s much easier to generate good Standard Notation from TAB than it is to generate good TAB from good Standard Notation. There are several of these programs out there:
Guitar Pro http://www.guitar-pro.com is the one I’ve been using lately. I really enjoy the ease with which I can quickly enter guitar music in the Tab mode, while simultaneously generating standard notation. The notes appear on the upper staff the instant you enter the fret number on a string (as opposed to Finale, which makes you cut-and-paste the Tab staff into the standard notation staff. Guitar Pro is also by far the easiest when it comes to entering chords and chord diagrams. Really a snap (although I wish they would allow you to extend the chord box beyond 5 frets). But the program does have some short-comings in the standard notation department. I’ve noticed that in certain situations C flats and F flats will mysteriously turn into C sharps and F sharps (they assure me this is fixed in the next update). Also sharps and flats often collide with each other (and sometimes with note-heads) when used together in chords. There are also some non-traditional uses of common fingering, string and picking indications that I’d like to see fixed. But all-in-all, a pretty good program, and you can’t beat the price (just $59). It allows me to bang out a lot of decent quality work very quickly, and while it’s not too flexibile, if I really need something to be publisher ready, I can always export to MusicXML format and import into Finale where it can be tweaked.
Some other popular Tab programs are http://www.power-tab.net and http://www.tabledit.com. I haven’t worked extensively with either of these, so I won’t try to review them here. As always, it’s a good idea to download and try the demos first.
So that concludes our brief tour of some of the modern tools available to use. Next time, we’ll talk a bit about the actual process of transcribing.
