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Sorry if this has been already discussed before, but I'm new here and just getting into jazz seriously.
I've transcribed several solos from my favorite players in the past but I'm finding that this process rarely has a positive effect on my playing. In other words, transcribing solos and lines from solos has so far only had a minimal effect on increasing my vocabulary and on incorporating new concepts into my playing.
How do you use transcription effectively so that the lines you learned and concepts that you've gleaned from them actually show up in your playing?
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06-10-2024 11:14 AM
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Analyzing and lifting from tunes is discussed in the Donna Lee thread by some great forum members and teachers. I remember Pamosmusic and Christian Miller did videos specifically on pulling vocabulary from the head.
Bebop heads: Donna Lee
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Don't wait for the material to passively work its way into your soloing, actively work it in. Take one lick/idea/passage and practice it in isolation. Then practice working it into soloing until you can execute it while playing for real. Repeat. You should also do analysis on it to see in what different circumstances or chords you can play it over.
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I think starting to collect deliberately is a good idea. I have students literally keep vocab journals.
Sorting them by major, minor, and dominant is a good idea too.
Along with what Bobby Timmons over there says, it helps to be very deliberate. Take one of them and find three or four ways to play it. Sit with a one chord vamp and try to play it over the vamp, try altering the rhythm, try playing fragments of it, try repeating notes, basically anything you can do such that you can still say you’re working on the lick. Anything that makes it interesting.
After that it can help to have some ideas about how to apply that same lick to other chord types. And there are some very simple formulaic things to get you going with that.
But with that said, I almost always feel like this stuff is more osmosis than anything else. I feel disappointed after two weeks when I don’t hear the vocabulary coming out in my playing, but after a month I just start to notice I sound vaguely more “Grant Green” (or whatever I’m working on) in some way or another. And it helps to just accept that too. Transcribing might not make you better by the end of the month. But it will absolutely make you better by next year.
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Learn to sing the solos you like by ear (if that is not what you are doing anyway). That's what they did in the old days. The "scribe" part is that the vocabulary and a intuitive feeling for the construction of a good solo gets "written" into your neurons instead on paper.
Originally Posted by todonne3
If learning a new language would you rather do dictations all day or listen to native speakers? Some masters say listening should be 50 percent of your practice.
EDIT: The singing does not have to be great. In this video @ 7:00 you can hear Lee Konitz sing a solo while sitting in with the Barry Harris trio. TBH I am not sure if he is improvising or quoting a solo he learned while studying with Lennie Tristano. Anyway that is the way Tristano wanted his students to sing master solos. He would not even let them improvise before they could sing some solos. He let them study the solos with half tape speed to capture all the details. These days there is a lot of software that can timestretch audio digitally (even YouTube can change the playback speed) so the pitch does not go an octave down as with tape if you half the playback speed.
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Sing short lines you like. Then keep repeatedly singing them. Then play them. Then sing them over tunes. Then play them in tunes.
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