Module 10: Improvisation II – Bebop LanguageLesson 5advanced⏱ 2 hours + an ongoing weekly routine

Transcription, the method

A complete method for learning lines by ear: choosing material, slowing it down, working out the notes, writing them down, analysing by chord degree, transposing to every key and absorbing the result into your own solos, worked through on an original four-bar phrase.

Why transcribe when the lines are written out

Every line in this module came with notation, analysis and fingering. That is a shortcut, and shortcuts have a cost: a line you read is stored in your eyes and fingers, a line you take off a record is stored in your ears. The players whose vocabulary sounds natural learned it the second way, and the proof is in how they phrase: the articulation, the time feel, the dynamics inside a line and the places it breathes are all things notation cannot carry. Transcription is how you acquire them.

Transcription also trains the skill that matters most on the bandstand, which is hearing harmony in real time. After a few months of taking lines off records you will find that you hear the degree of a note against a chord as you play it, and that the ear-training exercises in this course have stopped being exercises. This lesson gives you a method that works, demonstrated on an original four-bar phrase so that you can follow every step with the notation in front of you. On a record you will not have that luxury, which is the point. The chart-reading habits from reading chord charts and the degree analysis from the ii–V–I vocabulary lesson are the prerequisites.

Step 1: choose the material

Choose by three criteria, in this order:

1. You love the sound. You will listen to the phrase two hundred times. If it does not move you, it will not survive that.
2. It is short and complete. Two to four bars with a clear beginning and end. A whole chorus is a project; a phrase is a lesson. Whole choruses come later, built from phrases.
3. The harmony is clear and standard. A ii–V–I, a turnaround, a blues bar, a bridge dominant. You want vocabulary that applies to a hundred tunes, and you want to be able to identify the chord under every note.

For the bebop language, the horn players are the best source: the lines are single notes with no voicings to untangle, and the phrasing is the model everyone else copied. Guitarists came later and are worth transcribing for fingering, articulation and the use of the instrument; start with horns for the language itself. Any good bebop recording from the late 1940s onward will have a ii–V–I phrase you can use within the first chorus of the first solo.

Step 2: slow it down

Use a tool that changes tempo without changing pitch. Every music player and DAW has one, phone apps exist for it, and the metronome in this course can give you the subdivision to count against. Working guidelines:

• Start at 50–60% of tempo. Slow enough to hear every note, fast enough that the phrase still makes musical sense. Below 50% swing eighths stop sounding like eighths and your ear loses the rhythm.
• Loop one bar at a time, or even two beats. A loop of four to eight notes repeated twenty times is how the ear learns; a loop of four bars is a performance you keep failing.
• Do not slow down to find the pitch of one note. Sing it first (below), then find it on the guitar. Slowing down is for rhythm and for separating notes in fast runs.
• Return to full tempo often. The goal is to hear the phrase at speed, not to hear a slow version of it.

Step 3: work by ear

The sequence is sing, then play, then check, for every fragment:

1. Listen to the fragment three times without the guitar.
2. Sing it. If you cannot sing it, you cannot hear it yet; listen again. Sing it with the recording, then without.
3. Find it on the guitar in a sensible position (the one where the first chord's arpeggio sits under your hand).
4. Play it with the recording at the slow tempo. Fix what does not match.
5. Join it to the previous fragment and play the joined piece with the recording.

The rhythm is usually harder than the pitches. Work out where the first note of the phrase falls (on the beat? on an upbeat? after a rest?), then where each downbeat falls inside the phrase. For bebop lines, assume the player is placing chord tones on the downbeats until the ear tells you otherwise; that assumption will be right more often than not and it narrows the search enormously.

The worked example: what the recording contains

Here is the phrase we are transcribing, a four-bar line over the long ii–V–I in F. Imagine you have been given only the audio. Listen to it several times before reading on.

\tempo 144
.
\ts 4 4
:8 8.4{ch "Gm7"} 7.3 6.2 5.1 8.2 7.2 6.2 7.3 | 5.2{ch "C7"} 8.2 6.1 9.1 8.1 6.1 8.2 7.2 | 6.2{ch "Fmaj7"} 5.3 8.4 6.4 :4 7.4 :8 5.3 5.2 | 6.2.2{d} r.4 |

Get the skeleton first

The most efficient order is not note by note from the start. First find the skeleton: the notes on beats 1 and 3 of each bar, which in a bebop line are almost always chord tones. Sing each one against the chord and find it. For our phrase the skeleton is:

\tempo 100
.
\ts 4 4
:2 8.4{ch "Gm7"} 8.2 | 9.3{ch "C7"} 8.1 | 6.2{ch "Fmaj7"} 7.4 | 6.2 r |

With the skeleton in place, the rest of the phrase is a matter of filling in two or three notes between each pair of skeleton notes, and the direction of motion is already known. This is also how you will eventually hear lines in real time: the frame first, the decoration second.

Step 4: write it down

Write it down even if you intend to learn it by ear only. Writing forces you to decide every rhythm and every pitch, which exposes the places where you were approximating, and it gives you something to analyse and transpose without the recording. Two options:

• Paper. Staff paper or tab. Quick, and it keeps the ear in charge because you cannot play it back.
• alphaTex, the notation format this course uses. It takes a few minutes longer but it plays back, it can be checked against the chord symbols, and it transposes with a little arithmetic. The how to use page explains the format; an eighth-note line is simply a string of fret.string pairs after :8, with chord symbols attached to the first note of each chord.

Whichever you use, put the chord symbols above the notes. Without them, step 5 is impossible.

Step 5: analyse

Now label every note with its chord degree, exactly as the vocabulary lessons did. This is the step most students skip and the one that turns a phrase into vocabulary: a phrase remembered as "those notes" lives in one key; a phrase remembered as "b3 5 b7 9, root, chromatic, b7, 5 …" lives in all of them.

\tempo 100
.
\ts 4 4
:8 8.4{ch "Gm7" txt "b3"} 7.3{txt "5"} 6.2{txt "b7"} 5.1{txt "9"} 8.2{txt "R"} 7.2{txt "chr"} 6.2{txt "b7"} 7.3{txt "5"} | 5.2{ch "C7" txt "3"} 8.2{txt "5"} 6.1{txt "b7"} 9.1{txt "b9"} 8.1{txt "R"} 6.1{txt "b7"} 8.2{txt "5"} 7.2{txt "chr"} | 6.2{ch "Fmaj7" txt "R"} 5.3{txt "5"} 8.4{txt "11"} 6.4{txt "chr"} :4 7.4{txt "3"} :8 5.3{txt "5"} 5.2{txt "7"} | 6.2.2{d txt "R"} r.4 |

Reading the labels, the phrase decomposes into devices you already own:

• Bar 1 (Gm7): arpeggio from the b3 to the 9th, then a descent from the root through a chromatic passing tone to the b7 and 5th. The chromatic note is the bebop Dorian note of the bebop scales lesson, between root and b7.
• Bar 2 (C7): the 3-to-b9 arpeggio, then back down the chord to the 5th, with a chromatic approach note on the last upbeat leading up into the root of F.
• Bar 3 (Fmaj7): root and 5th, then an enclosure of the 3rd (the 11th above, the chromatic note below, the 3rd on the beat), then 5th and 7th.
• Bar 4: the root, held, and a rest. The phrase is three and a half bars long and breathes at the end.

Write the analysis in words like this under your notation. If any note resists a label, that is the interesting note: either the player is thinking of a substitute chord, or the note is a mistake, or your transcription is wrong. All three happen.

Step 6: transpose to twelve keys

Transpose from the degrees, not from the frets. Take the chord progression into the new key, then rebuild the phrase degree by degree on the new chords in a position where the first chord's arpeggio is under the hand. Here is the phrase in Bb, in 3rd position:

\tempo 144
.
\ts 4 4
:8 6.5{ch "Cm7"} 5.4 3.3 3.2 5.3 4.3 3.3 5.4 | 7.4{ch "F7"} 5.3 4.2 7.2 6.2 4.2 5.3 4.3 | 3.3{ch "Bbmaj7"} 3.4 6.5 4.5 :4 5.5 :8 3.4 7.4 | 3.3.2{d} r.4 |

And in Eb, also in 3rd position, where the b9 of Bb7 is spelled B in the tab (strictly Cb):

\tempo 144
.
\ts 4 4
:8 6.4{ch "Fm7"} 5.3 4.2 3.1 6.2 5.2 4.2 5.3 | 3.2{ch "Bb7"} 6.2 4.1 7.1 6.1 4.1 6.2 5.2 | 4.2{ch "Ebmaj7"} 3.3 6.4 4.4 :4 5.4 :8 3.3 3.2 | 4.2.2{d} r.4 |

Notice that the Bb version sits a 5th below the original and the Eb version a whole step below, and that both stay in one position. Choosing the register and the position is part of transposing on the guitar; a phrase that only works in one position is not yet learned. Do the remaining nine keys yourself over the next two weeks, in the order of the cycle of 4ths from F: Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, Gb, B, E, A, D, G, C. Write the degrees once at the top of the page and rebuild from them each time.

Step 7: assimilate

A transcribed phrase becomes part of your playing in three stages:

1. Quote it in the original context: the same chords, the same tune, at tempo, with the recording and then with a backing track.
2. Move it into other tunes with the same progression. The ii–V–I is everywhere; so are the turnaround and the bridge dominant.
3. Break it up. Use one bar of it, one device from it, its rhythm with different notes, its notes with a different rhythm. The next lesson is about this stage.

Here is stage 3 in action: the C7 bar of the phrase (the 3-to-b9 arpeggio and descent) transposed to G7 and dropped into a ii–V–I in C, with a new Dm7 bar in front of it and a simple resolution after it.

\tempo 144
.
\ts 4 4
:8 5.3{ch "Dm7"} 3.2 6.2 5.1 8.1 5.1 6.2 7.3 | 4.3{ch "G7"} 3.2 6.2 4.1 3.1 6.2 7.3 6.3 | :2 5.3{ch "Cmaj7"} r |

The Dm7 bar is nothing but chord tones (b7, root, b3, 5, b7, 5, b3, root); the borrowed bar supplies the colour. That is a typical proportion in good bebop playing: plain outlining most of the time, one strong device per phrase.

A weekly transcription routine

Transcription is a habit, not a project. A workable routine for a serious student:

• One phrase per week, two to four bars, chosen on Monday.
• Monday–Tuesday: steps 2 and 3, fifteen minutes a day. Skeleton first.
• Wednesday: steps 4 and 5, written and labelled.
• Thursday–Friday: step 6, three keys a day, in position.
• Weekend: step 7, with a backing track, in two tunes.
• Keep a book. Every phrase, with its analysis and the recording it came from, in one notebook or one folder of alphaTex files. In a year you will have fifty phrases and a vocabulary that is genuinely yours.

Every few weeks, go back to an old phrase and play it in a key you have not used. If it is gone, it was never learned; put it back in the rotation.

Exercises

1. Skeleton drill. Play the four-bar phrase above and then play only its skeleton (beats 1 and 3) over the chords. Then invent new fill-ins between the skeleton notes, keeping the skeleton fixed.
2. Ear only. Have someone play one of the vocabulary lessons' lines to you (or play it back from the notation without looking) and transcribe it by ear, then compare with the notation.
3. Nine keys. The phrase in the nine remaining keys, written as degrees first, three keys a day, in one position each.
4. Real material. Choose a two-bar ii–V–I phrase from a recorded solo, apply the seven steps over a week, and bring it into your playing over a standard you know. Record yourself quoting it at tempo.
5. Rhythm transcription. Take any four bars of a recorded solo and transcribe only the rhythm on one note. The phrase lengths, rests and anticipations you find are as much the language as the pitches.

Quiz