I’m dipping my toe in again . I barely have any experience ,except for one relatively easy solo that I seemed to luck out on and following a few vocal melodies (I really enjoy doing that actually,should do it more).
anyway Im a big Slash fan and some guy on YouTube did a great improvisation piece that I liked so this afternoon I spent 30 minutes installing transcribe , downloading the video off YouTube and actually transcribing the beginning few notes .
im quite buoyed by my initial success ,although to be fair it’s a few slow expressive bits at the beginning. The challenge will come when it gets into those endless Fast cascading picked/legato type runs . I’m working on some similar type stuff in paradise city / November rain outro solo’s so hopefully
the experience of working on these and the transcribing will consolidate eventually into some sort of proficiency .
I figure if I do a bit each day as an extra to my regular practice I might be able to improve my ear , My ability to construct my own solos, to improvise and to transcribe more stuff in that style Also I’m thinking when I do use tab books for learning specific stuff it should improve that too.
tell me your stories and experiences Hints , Tips Or especially. How it improved your playing and ability as a musician
thanks
Comments
One of the things you learn from transcribing is how other guitarists move their fingers. It’s tempting to think of experienced recording artists as using all four fingers, and having wide stretches. In practice a lot of their playing can be done with just two fingers.
The third thing I’ve learned is how often TABs on the internet are wrong. Either writer hasn’t worked out what was being played, or has just applied their own finger patterns
if you are going to transcribe dots as well as tab, then it will give you a much greater appreciation of rhythm, both written and heard. So much rock and pop is very rhythmic, guitar solos are often very interesting rhythmically. If you don’t transcribe them, then you just end up ‘feeling’ the rhythm as you play. If you transcribe, it can be challenging but it really sharpens up your knowledge of the piece and of music generally.
Once upon a time we had no choice - you either knew someone who knew the chords/notes or you worked it out for yourself. Then guitar magazines started tabbing popular songs, then we got CD's with the magazines, then Youtube came along and now pretty much any tune you can think of there will be a vid on YT teaching you how to play it.
If you go down that route though you will never develop a musical ear, and, you will never know when the so called experts have got it wrong...
I'd say most of the tab you find on the internet is inaccurate, some of it is laughable. When you get to Youtube it's better, but I'm often surprised how many can't tell the difference between a slide and a bend.
An interesting effect for me is that, with solos, I find that if I can hear something, I can play it. If I can't make out the notes at normal speed, I can't play it. That really fast run in the Sweet Child o Mine solo for example, I simply can't make out what notes he's playing how ever hard I try, so just out of curiosity I went to Justin's tutorial where he plays it through really slow - and I still can't nail it, at normal speed.
Most tab sites only give you the number of the fret on the string and not how you play it, i.e how long for and what the rhythm is. Learning to count the bars by ear and hear how long the measure is helps you learn the length of the phrase if its a solo or the chord if its a progression.
Rhythm is harder to transcribe which is probably why you rarely see the rhythm stems above the guitar tab scores on YT and Ultimate Guitar. But it accounts for 90-95% of guitar playing and without it riffs don't sound right. Solos are harder to learn as you won't know how long the phrase is in the bar or what beat of the bar it falls on, many solos start before the first chord i.e the + of the last beat or even before.
https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.html
I totally agree with previous comments regarding variable internet tab accuracy, including tabs that are in the wrong key.
Sadly I've found as I've got old(er) that you lose your timing a bit and it's very frustrating. there's stuff I used to play 30 years ago that I can't reproduce now and it's not because of lack of dexterity it's because I'm just not 100% on the rhythm.
Whenever I learn a riff or a phrase the first thing I always do is sing back the rhythm before I add any notes. This enables my picking/strumming hand to get the timing right so its got a context of applying it to a measure.