How to Transcribe

Have you ever been in the situation where you’re scouring the Internet for a guitar tab- an accurate guitar tab- of one of your favourite songs only to be unable to find it? It sometimes seems like some of the best songs are either not tabbed out at all, or -maybe even worse- the only transcriptions you can find are totally inaccurate!

Well, wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to rely on somebody else to write out the song before you could play it? I’m sure you’ll agree that such a skill would be very useful, but I also know that one word springs to mind when most people think of figuring out the songs themselves: effort!

Well, hopefully we can change that. I want to show you that being able to transcribe your own songs is something that you can and will be able to do. Not only is it something that you are capable of doing (with practice), training your ears like this will actually help you:

• - play ALL of your favourite songs (or at least know how they should go)!
• - play that melodic solo that seems to be stuck in your head with no way out into the world!
• - compose that awesome song, because you’ll just “know” what note comes next!

How to Tab Stuff out

Through the next few weeks I’ll be taking you through:

• The uses of transcription
• How to find what key you’re in
• writing down the different parts of the song
• picking out the melody
• interval recognition
• knowing all the chords
• getting the groove
• finally, putting it all together into a full song transcription

Hopefully, after all that you’ll be on your way to tabbing out your first song. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comment section below.
Rob.

May 12, 2011 at 6:00 pm | Developing Your Ears | No comments