How to Transcribe Rhythm

I had to wait a while to release this post because if you want to transcribe the rhythm of a piece, you first have to understand how time signatures work, and also have a good grasp of the different note durations.

If you understand all of the above, then it’s time to read on…

Counting the Beats

When you start to transcribe a rhythm, a good starting point would be to count the beats to work out the time signature. A good rule of thumb is that the “1″ (first beat of the bar) is always stressed. So to work out the time signature you just need to count the beats in between the most stressed beats…

Let me explain with an example…or rather, you’re going to provide the example. I want you to play a CD, MP3, YouTube (whatever, just so that you’re listening to a song- any song). Start by trying to tap along to the beat- this will give you your basic beat.

Next, you have to try and figure out how the beats are grouped. Is it going “1 _{2 3 4} 1 _{2 3 4}” (remember, the “1″ is stressed/accented/louder), or is it “1 _{2 3} 1 _{2 3}“? Another good indicator is to listen to when the chords change. Usually (but not always) the chords will change on the first beat of the bar (the “1″).

So if you hear the chords change on every fourth beat, you can have a pretty good guess at it being 4 beats to each bar (counting the beats as “1 _{2 3 4}“).

The Metronome

Once you’ve worked out where the beats are (finding the time signature isn’t always important it just helps a lot), listen to how they are divided. Of course, this is much more difficult than it sounds, so to help us, we’ll use a metronome.

With the music still on, try and tap the rhythm of the melody (or chords, depending on what part you’re transcribing). If you can’t do it right away, then try using the metronome. You don’t always need fancy programs to slow stuff down, if you have an imagination…

Turn the song off, and try and tap the rhythm back that you heard (yes, this will take practise!). Next, set the metronome going at a fairly slow speed and try to tap out the rhythm to that speed.

WARNING: if you go too slow, it actually becomes harder, so it might be a good idea to start with a similar speed to the original and work down from there.

Why work downwards? Because you want to slow the whole thing down so that you can analyse every beat.

Once it’s slow enough, you’ll be able to hear better how each beat is divided. You can then work from there using the right note durations for each beat.

Helpful Tools

This skill, as with most of transcribing, requires practise- but at least this way you’ll have an idea where to start. There are also a few programs tools that you might find useful (apart from the metronome) such as Guitar Pro. Guitar Pro allows you to write out the song and play it back (which can catch any mistakes from transcribing). This has been something that I’ve found very useful myself in the past as you can listen to how accurate your tab of the song is and correct it as need be.

I hope this is useful, and if you have any questions please comment below.
Rob.

June 30, 2011 at 2:00 pm | Developing Your Ears | 2 comments

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