“For me, the loss that we see pouring out of Twitter right now and everywhere you look as people write about their memories of Sondheim is for that person who says yes, devoting yourself to writing or to dancing or to singing or to composing - or whatever it is - is a worthwhile life,” Jesse Green, The Times’s chief theater critic, said in today’s episode. Sondheim, a composer-lyricist whose works include “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods,” transformed musical theater into an art form as rich, complex and contradictory as life itself. It’s good to be aware of a variety of approaches to transcription, try out a few of them, and use whatever method works for you.Stephen Sondheim died last week at his home in Roxbury, Conn. I’m a piano player, so I’ll add in my own comp over the changes. I prefer to learn a solo by ear without writing it down because I think it helps you internalize the solo better. Transcribing adds ideas into your playing, improves your ear, and increases your technique. I think a balanced approach is good: transcribing with a purpose in mind. Still, transcribing by notation is great for analyzing a solo and learning cognitively.įor this reason, I think the maximum benefit you can get out of a solo would be to use the 80-80-80 method (as described above), and after you’ve THOROUGHLY learned the transcription and internalized it, then you can write it down and save it for posterity (for your teaching studio, for your own benefit if you want to relearn it again at another time, etc.) It becomes a part of you as you learn to play it. Let me stress that an intangible thing happens when you learn a solo without writing it down. In this case, writing it down is the way to go. Perhaps your goal is to transcribe a solo for other people to learn, such as in a teaching situation. Maybe writing them down might help you in that process, but you may not have to. If your goal is to learn some new licks, you can learn small parts of the solos of other people and transpose them into all 12 keys.
If that is your goal, then option #2 will suffice. For instance, if you are transcribing a particular tune, you might be transcribing in order to put the melody and chord changes in front of a band for a gig situation. Use the 80-80-80 Method: Listen 80 times, Sing 80 Times, Play 80 Times(perhaps this would be the 800-800-800 Method…whatever you need to do!)The approach you use should depend on your goals.
Learn the solo first, then write it down 5. Write down the solo, and then learn to play it 4. Write down the solo (for analysis), and don’t learn to play it 3. Learn the solo on your instrument completely by ear 2.
Using transcription you teach yourself how to improvise better by learning from the masters.
Transcribing helps you analyze how others approach the changes to a tune.Transcribing helps your technique-especially if you learn to play along with the recording!.Transcribing helps build your vocabulary of jazz licks.Here are some of the benefits of transcribing in general: There are benefits to both approaches, and combining them will reinforce your learning. You can also combine these two basic approaches, and hit multiple levels of learning by both learning to play the solo first AND THEN writing it down. Some considerations about transcribing Jazz:Ī) Learning to play a jazz solo (or lick, or tune) by earī) Writing down a jazz solo (or lick, or tune) that you learn by ear from a recording.