Transcribe a Song in 20 Minutes?

My process for fast-learning

If you’ve seen my last few posts on the main YouTube channel this past week, you’ll see I’ve started a new series called “Could I Play Bass With….?”.

They’re not cover songs, nor are they exact transcriptions of the original bass parts. They’re simply what I might have done had I been the bass player on the track in the first place. And really they’re a chance to do two things:

1. Play with a band or artist that I never have before

2. Push my technique and musical range way further than only doing what used to doing in my practice routine already.

So where does the 20 minute thing come in? Well so far, that’s all I’ve had to spend learning each of the two songs I’ve posted in the series, and the two I have in the pipeline ready to launch soon actually took me a even less time.

Let’s learn:

I kind of load the deck in my favor when it comes to something like this. Like a card cheat who knows exactly where the favorable cards are at all times. To do that with music, I listen to the song for a considerable amount of time and as far in advance as possible before I start to put pen to paper or fingers to strings to learn it.

In the case of the Dirty Loops “Circus” arrangement, I’d been listening to that for over a decade, and the AAL “The Woven Web” for as long as it’s been out. This gives me a massive advantage when it comes to the efficiency of learning a song.

This method won’t help so much when you find yourself in a studio situation or a last-minute gig call where you have to learn music on the spot that you’ve never heard before, but no matter how long you have to learn material, this ALL helps at the end of the day.

Knowing I was going to learn the song, do at most three takes for YouTube, and then move on to probably never play it again, also played a large roll in the process. I didn’t have to make a meticulous chart that would make total sense if I looked at it 5 years from now. I needed the basic info, in the shortest chicken scratch possible.

This is all I notated for “The Woven Web”

Because so much of the AAL material is quite riff-based, the form is not something I found very difficult to learn and didn’t need to write it down. I highly recommend listening to the bigger picture of the song before starting to drill into the specifics of riffs. Once you know that a song could be Riff 1 | Riff 2 | Riff 1 | Riff 2 | Bridge | Breakdown | Riff 1… the learning process for each of the components becomes way less stressful.

For “The Woven Web” I literally wrote down 3/4 of the thump section’s rhythm with the notes I wanted to add for my contribution to the arrangement, and that was it. No form, no riffs, no chart really. That bigger picture was already in my head from repeated listening, and then I filled in the blanks over the course of about 20 mins as I only really had 3 riffs to learn.

The Dirty Loops “Circus” track was slightly more complex harmonically, but the fact I’d heard it so many times over the course of a decade or more made it arrive under my fingers very quickly. I didn’t have to notate any of it, and the biggest challenge was actually figuring out what to do in the sections where Henrik solo’d on the original, because I couldn’t remove 100% of the bass in the higher register.

Again, when you concentrate first on the bigger picture of the form, you start to notice all the bits that repeat rather than being overwhelmed by the fact that the band is playing their asses off and it sounds like it’s going to be difficult to play.

F#min7 | Cdim | Bmin7 is hardly Olivier Messiaen, so make sure you really zoom out before you zoom in.

I’m going to make an in-depth video about this for the main channel, but I wanted to throw this out there to the mailing list first as I’ve been getting a ton of questions about how long it takes to put a video like that together.

The final, and probably most important element of the success and efficiency of the process, is the actual practice.

Although it took less than 20 minutes to learn the information on the recording, I played each song at least 60 or 70 times before cutting the video and audio. The Dirty Loops video is take 2 of 2 and the AAL is take 3 of 3. The only reason the AAL song didn’t go down in two takes was because I fucked up switching pedals.

That repetition element of the practice routine, whether you’re doing it to film a video for youtube, or whether it’s simply a private element of your practice routine, is something that often gets overlooked.

I was doing this for both of those things of course, but the work was always the primary reason. I’ve always played music from far outside my own artist style, and have spent weeks and months playing one song over and over until I could only hear one bass.

Don’t forget, that’s why we do this. YouTube shouldn’t be the primary reason to learn and work on something. I think it should be the love of the music, and a hunger for pushing yourself to be better.

More soon,

Janek

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