A style of practice that’s somewhat unique to jazz players is transcription. Because jazz involves a lot of improvisation, it’s not as straightforward as classical music when you want to play what someone else played. In some cases, you might transcribe a solo because you want to pull a piece out of what the original player did—or maybe you’re just trying to improve your ears. Either way, transcription is an all-round boot camp that makes a big difference in your playing.
But something Chad gets asked often is how to transcribe effectively. After all, you’re not just figuring out the notes, but you’re also figuring out the rhythm, and digging deeper than the average listener to find out what’s really going on.
By the end, we’re going to get into transposing a piece into other keys. And this is a fairly advanced technique, which Chad has covered with students in his Text Lessons Studio. Our Text Lessons are a great way for you to bring consistent challenges to your playing, with personalized monthly challenges, personalized critiques of your playing, 24/7 access to text Chad, and monthly mentorship sessions. Learn more about our Text Lessons here, and come be a part of the studio!
Let’s jump in—here are seven steps to level up your transcription.
Contents
Memorize the chord changes
Easy enough—our first step is just memorizing the chord changes for the tune you’re working on. So if you’re working on Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite,” you’ll want to make sure you know the changes all the way through. This is something that horn players sometimes forget to do, and it means that they might not be able to solo as intelligently over the changes as they want to.
There are several ways to go about memorizing standards, but one of the best is with Roman numeral analysis. Sure it takes a bit of theory to get the hang of it, but Roman numerals have a great practical application and can help you improve your ears. Plus, Roman numerals can help make tunes easier to remember. Instead of remembering all the individual chords, like C / Am / Dm / G7, you can just remember that the tune is a I / vi / ii / V — which is a very common progression that you come across often. This helps you memorize things as a whole, instead of as separate chords (where you have to remember major, minor, etc.).
Sing along with the solo
The absolute best way to be sure that you have a solo down is to sing along with it. You don’t have to be a good singer, but you just want to have it down so that you internalize the pitches. Once you’re comfortable, try singing without the solo behind you to see if you really got it!
Write it out!
Now we’re going to get into the meat of transcription—actually writing things down. This can also be helpful because then you’ll have sheet music to read off of, too. The important step here is that we’re working toward is total memorization.
That said, the best way for you to memorize the transcription is the the way to go. So if that means reading the transcription, do that. If it means writing it down, do that.
But ultimately, you want to get to the point where you can just hear a transcription and memorize it without having to write it down or having to read it.
If you do want to use written transcriptions, there are tons of resources out there. You can find books of solos from Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Michael Brecker, Dexter Gordon, and even for Chad LB!
Once you have it memorized, that will be helpful for the next step.
Analyzing each phrase
This step will take a bit more time, but it’s a game-changer. Like we mentioned, analyzing is going to be so much easier once you’ve memorized the changes, because you can really understand how each phrase sits in the harmony. We want to analyze how each note lines up with the harmony, so we can understand what the player was doing when they were improvising. So if we look at a Charlie Parker transcription, you’ll see that in the pickup bar to the solo, Bird plays D, E, F, Bb, Ab, Bb, Ab, F. Now you’ll notice that these notes don’t line up with the G7 chord that he’s playing against…like at all. So what’s going on here?
We can come up with a few solutions, like maybe he’s outlining G altered, or he’s playing diatonic in D minor. But from Chad’s point of view, the simplest solution is probably that he’s outlining a backdoor dominant substitution—a Bb7#11 chord, which are all notes in the Bb Lydian Dominant scale.
A backdoor dominant is a cool sound that we’ve talked about before—it’s a dominant chord a whole step below the tonic. You can use it as a sub, or it’s a common device to use in the actual written harmony of a lot of standards.
We see this in “Yardbird Suite” in bar two—in fact, we see a full backdoor ii-V, which is where we use the backdoor dominant and the relevant ii for that backdoor chord. So that’s where we see Fm7 to Bb7 (pulling from the ii-V of Eb).
Now it’s important to remember that while Bird was doing all this cool stuff, he was also improvising. He himself is known for saying that when you’re playing, you want to forget all the stuff you’re thinking about when you’re practicing and just have fun, but you can also think of this as deliberate practicing to give you the freedom to just have fun. And transcription is a great way to be deliberate with your practice routine.
But Charlie Parker was genius in his approach to all elements of his improv. He had his methods for rhythmic approach, rhythmic embellishment, voice leading, approach notes, and you can see all of that in the first few bars of the solo.
But even though he had a lot he could say, part of his genius is that he kept it short. He used brief phrases, like this one from the second phrase of the solo in bar 42. The second riff is just a totally diatonic riff in C that he was really known for playing.
Some other things to consider: what other concepts are they using? Are they using approach notes and enclosures? What about rhythmic embellishment? Are they playing diatonically? Are they using substitutions? And for more modern players: are they using pentatonics, melodic cells, or all those extended techniques we’ve covered before?
Beyond that, it’s really helpful to see how they’re articulating phrases. Often, Chad has talked about the dooden-doo articulation, which is a widely known articulation for jazz horn players. If you want to hear how Chad articulates this phrase, be sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video for How to Transcribe in 7 Steps.
Memorize a whole chorus
Chad gets asked all the time if it’s ok to just memorize a phrase from a solo. A phrase is better than nothing, but ultimately you want to get to memorizing a full chorus, because you can see how the player passes through the whole song form. But why stop at just a chorus? If you can memorize the whole solo, you’ll get the biggest benefit from your transcription.
Application
Here’s where it gets real fun. Now that we’ve learned the solo of one of the greats, we’re going to try to solo in the style of what we’ve just learned. This is going to be difficult when you’re talking about the masters, but one thing you can try to do is imitate a few different ideas they’re using in the solo—like imitating the length of each phrase, imitating the melodic shape, or the melodic and rhythmic concept.
Let’s say you’re going to imitate a five-bar phrase—so try to play for five bars! If you’re trying to imitate the melodic shape, see if you can generally move up where they do, and down where they do, too. If you want to imitate their rhythmic content, try to note some of the rhythmic embellishment they do—is it sixteenth notes? Triplets?
Finally, we’ll look at the melodic concept. Are they using a bunch of enclosures in the phrase? Are they playing mostly diatonically? Are they doing hip substitutions? You can even borrow a few notes here and there and then see if you can go in your own direction.
Chad even did his own response to the phrase Bird played in bar 45 in our YouTube video.
This is easier said than done at first, but the more language you learn and the more skills you develop, the better you’ll be able to imitate the solos you learn.
Transposition
This last one is the hardest—and one that Chad’s been tackling with advanced Text Lessons members.
This is an overwhelming task at first, but it has a magical effect on your playing and overall musicianship if you can really push yourself and have the discipline to do it a bit day by day.
The “Yardbird Suite” solo is one that Chad likes to work with, and he actually memorized it in all 12 keys, which he says really boosted his playing.
When you’re transposing, you’ll want to think about how each phrase lines up with the harmony, and then even give some scale degrees to each note. you can write down each scale degree if you need to. This way when you’re transposing, you’re not going to need to think about moving notes up or down by the interval of transposition, you can just think of the scale degrees, which can be translated into any key.
So if we look at the phrase in bar 45, we have essentially one chromatic approach note going into the 4 of the Fm7, then we do that same chromatic approach down into the 3, then we’re just playing diatonically all the way through—we’ve got the root, then we switch chord changes to the Bb7. So we do that for the 2, the 13 (or the 6, depending on how we think about it), and then the 5. So then if we transpose up a half step, instead of thinking about the individual note names, just think about moving the chords up. So moving up a half step, we’ll be at F#m7 and B7 (or Gbm7 and Cb7 if you want to think of it like that). This way, the scale degrees aren’t changing, it’s all the same material, and you’re just calculating what the scale degrees are in the new key.
This might sound difficult at first, but in the long run, it’s going to be a much more effective way of learning each phrase in all 12 keys. And then it’s going to do a lot more for your ear in the long run, because you’re developing these number associations that really apply to every single key.
That’s all for today, we could definitely go a lot deeper into this stuff, but if you want to work with Chad individually on this, be sure to check out the Text Lessons Studio! It’s a great way to stay challenged at your own pace. Make sure to also check out our YouTube video for more detail and examples of Chad playing.
Happy shedding, and until next time!