What I’ve learned from transcribing over 200 solos.

My name is Jorre Reynders. I’m a professional saxophonist and half the part behind all the transcriptions on the Youtube Channel “Sharp Eleven Music” which I co-host with transcriber-in-crime Timothy Pedone. Lots of people seem to miss the plethora of advantages that transcribing on a regular basis can bring you besides the conventional ones that everybody knows: gaining vocabulary and improving your phrasing and understanding of the jazz language. 

After doing 200 solo transcriptions in 6 years, I’ll guide you through a rough guestimate of which other benefits started to show and where that was in the process with this little diary. 

Transcriptions 1-10: Transcribing is a slow and painful process, but gaining a few licks here and there is totally worth it. “Look mom, I can play an actual Brecker outside line and tap dance at the same time.”

Realizing this simple yet effective adaptation improves the quality and speed tremendously: play the music you want to transcribe without guessing the notes and playing over the audio you’re trying to uncover. Simply play the fragment, pause, then take your instrument and start trying to locate the first note of the line. Patience pays off double in the long run. 

Transcriptions 10-30: I’m getting into a flow, especially because it’s timebound. I have arbitrary deadlines, which is the only thing keeping me from getting addicted to drugs. Or salted peanuts. 

Anyhow, the process starts to get more liberating and less painful and a kind of workflow is starting to take place. I feel my ears relax. Just getting comfortable with picking out notes and sometimes struggling. Like going to the gym, you start to expect some pain before gains occur. Struggling is a sign of progress.

Transcriptions 30-60: Starting to take on the larger and sometimes daunting solos. Michael Brecker, 4 minutes of shredding? No problem. 

Because I’m deconstructing the music and notating it, I feel the benefits going the opposite way. Sightreading has improved a lot. So has musical memory and imagination, also called audiation. Instead of being able to hold one measure at the time in a medium tempo solo, I start to be able to comfortably hold double that amount in my memory to transcribe at once.

Transcriptions 60-100: I’m peaking in challenging myself with the complexity of the transcriptions. James Carter’s solo on “Pick Up the Pieces” uses all the tricks from the book and some that have never been found in any libraries. I need to become creative to work my way through what, in the past, I would’ve considered a point of giving up. But the point of transcription is to learn the concepts. If the concept is “make overtone noises and screech through the range of the instrument”, there is no point in trying to notate pitches and rhythms. It’s an effect, so notate how you do the effect.

At this point, I feel like a solo transcription is a mini thesis. It’s your personal dive into the mind of an artist you admire. 

Transcriptions 100-120: Starting to look at other instrument solos than saxophone solos. And also taking up the challenge to try a guitar solo of an unusual guitarist, Allan Holdsworth. Although I intellectually knew this, it makes me realize that every instrument has a very specific culture of coming to lines and licks, the things that come natural of course. But a new world of lines and ideas opened up. The saxophone is such a chromatic instrument!

Mental note: transcribing trumpet solos is kinda sadomasochistic. Half of their notes seem to be either ghosted, out of tune or just ambiguous unintended cracks. Sorry trumpet players, I love listening to it, but I don’t love transcribing it.

Transcriptions 120-130: Transcribing piano solos is interesting. Always loved Chick Corea. 

Transcriptions 130-150: Because I’m background checking the players I’ve transcribed, I start to see recurring names as the influences of the jazz greats. It’s always rather easy to backtrack the most influential players from the 50s and later, the usual suspects like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, etc… But going one generation further back brings you to the names of Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins (yes, these names ring a bell for most of us as well) but a generation even before brings us to the more obscure names of Earl Bostic, Buster Smith and Frankie Trumbauer for example.

I'm slowly starting to transcribe my way back into history and wow, that doesn’t disappoint! These are pioneers and some of the most early inventive players of their instruments. The only major difference is that their lines seem composed or very prepared improvisations compared to today’s standards. 

This helps me see the bigger picture of where improvisation, jazz and saxophone come from. It’s almost like a “survival of the fittest ideas” and watching how it developed through the decades.

Transcriptions 150 – 170: I realize that - after the covid pause of gigging - I can memorize tunes way faster. Chord progressions, rhythmic kicks, melodies, … you name it. But especially retaining melodies starts to happen way beyond what it was. What’s that about suddenly? Did the government secretly plant a chip with melodies in me? Or extra ram memory?

I’m afraid the answer is less Hollywood inspired. Because of transcribing and mainly mentally absorbing the ideas, I’m just better at conceptualizing melodies now. It’s much like what we can do with usual chord progressions. For example, you can recognize a “IIIm7 VI7 IIm7 V7 Imaj7” in the blink of an eye and a bunch of other common chord combinations, if you’ve studied a few years of improvisation. But somehow recognizing the patterns in melodies always seemed harder, which is a bit odd given that it concerns way less notes in a total sum.

 I guess that’s the case because the main focus of jazz impro methodology is around harmony. 

Transcriptions 170- 199: After transcribing around 70 different artists I start to get especially drawn more and more to Paul Desmond’s improvisations of whom I’ve been an avid fan for many years now. I intuitively marveled for many years at his insane taste for melody. But now, transcribing in bulk is helping me to see how his improvisational concepts are structurally different to others.

Before, I assumed one of his major powers was that he can continue a sequence through the hardest changes in the most beautiful way. While that is true, there is this other aspect that starts to show when I look at a bunch of transcriptions: he is rhythmically incredible! Not only that, he uses a lot of rhythmic motifs, laying the ground for what they call in jargon antecedent consequential phrases, or in easier words, “Question and Answer”. That can be in a 2/2 measure structure, or 4/4 or 8/8, and sometimes even over full choruses.

I’m starting to love the broader structures of good solos more and more. Very much like movies can have thematically different storylines (the romantic comedy, thriller, the whodunit, …) with specific structures of development in tension and release structures, solos have that as well. Paul Desmond improvises a lot like classical composers develop their melodies intertwined with classic jazz language. Dope. 

2024

I never had the best ears to start with, nor the worst. Just slightly above average. I started a journey of curiosity that I could never have had the slightest idea of where it might lead to. 

What has transcribing 200 solos brought me? Yes, vocabulary and a better ear, for sure. And all the specifics laid out in my “Transcriber’s Diary”. But as a saxophonist seeking for my own voice on the instrument:

Confidence, imagination, awareness and direction for my own creative output.