The Art of Transcribing For The Guitar - Part I

by Richard DeVinck

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone asked me what exactly it is that I do when I transcribe music: I could quit my day job and spend more time playing the guitar. The inquirer usually is someone with little or no musical background, yet it never ceases to amaze me at how often the question comes from a musician. Either they are curious as to the actual process of transcribing or they are just confused between transcribing and other musical terminology or processes like "arranging" and "transposing".

Let us first deal with terminology: transcribing is the subjective (i.e. imperfect) process of listening to a musical performance and writing it down in either standard musical notation or tablature. The transcriber thus interprets what he hears and relays that information to other musicians by way of the printed page. It is the goal of the transcriber to educate - that is, to teach other musicians how to perform the transcribed piece of music - by way of a universally accepted and understood notation.

Although arranging is similar to transcribing , it differs in one essential aspect: arranging is the process of setting the music to predominantly different instrumentation, while transcribing deals with notating the music of the actual instruments involved in the performance. Arrangers usually take liberties with harmony, voicings, rhythm and alternative instrumentation. Transcribers tend to be more true to the original performance in terms of rhythm, pitch, fingerings, etc.

Transposing is simply writing down or playing music in another key or register. Hopefully this brief explanation clears up any confusion or misunderstandings about the terms "transcribing", "arranging", and "transposing".

The art of transcribing has been around as long as the written word. Man has written down what others have said for thousands of years. For the most part, musicians have written down their own compositions. On occasion, after hearing a performance of music, a musician with good musical memory might have written down a transcription of that performance (at least as best as he/she could recall). However, it has only been during the latter part of the 20th century that music transcriptions have attained a higher level of accuracy - not to mention popularity.

Publishers have been printing sheet music for hundreds of years. In regards to classical music, the works are usually taken verbatim from the original handwritten manuscripts of the composer. If, let's say, a Bach cello suite differed from edition to edition (publisher to publisher) it was usually because someone added their own preferred fingerings, bowings, phrase markings, voicings, etc. - essentially, arranging the original to fit the musical practices and preferences of the day.

When it came to popular music, publishers usually assumed (rightly or wrongly) that everyone played piano. Until the latter part of the 20th century, most popular songs were printed as piano arrangements. I guess this had more to do with the fact that it was much more economical and profitable for the publishers to print piano scores than to transcribe and print every part of the recorded instrumentation. More often than not, the arrangements were not in the original key of the popular recording, or used inaccurate harmonies, or just didn't capture the true feel of the music at hand. If you were a trumpet player in a band, most of your sheet music (or "charts") was handwritten by the arranger of your band who would often use a published piano score as the foundation on which he would compose his own voicings, harmonies, and instrumentation.

When it came to guitar sheet music, just ask anyone old enough to have lived through the 1960's and 1970's and they will tell you that finding an accurate printed arrangement of your favorite popular song was nearly impossible. If you did find the sheet music to a popular rock song, it was more than likely arranged for piano (an instrument probably not found in the original recording of the song, anyway) with guitar "frames" above the piano score. Again, the chords were usually inaccurate or "simplified" and there was little or no hint as to how to play the harmonies, that is - no riffs, fingerings, solos, or arpegiated patterns.

This all changed in the early 80's with the advent of periodicals like Guitar For The Practicing Musician. Its publishers and one or two other monthly magazines took a gamble: they believed that if they would make available to the public (mostly teenage boys) note-for-note transcriptions of guitar-based rock songs, that the public would want to try and learn to play those songs no matter how complex and detailed the transcription's notation. They also brought back an old form of notation which went out of favor hundreds of years ago: tablature. The gamble paid off and "note-for-note" guitar transcriptions soon became the hottest sensation in the publishing market.

The note-for-note tablature format soon carried over to music songbooks of entire records, as well as anthologies. Bass guitar, piano, and even drums were added to the list of instruments which were assigned note-for-note tablature songbooks. These more accurate transcriptions have proven to be a great educational tool and have resulted in many students teaching themselves how to play their instrument.

One could attribute the success of note-for-note transcriptions to two things: the first being the favored notation of tablature. Tablature is a more "accessible" or easily-read music notation. It is more of a direct representation of the instrument at hand. Guitar tablature has six lines, representing the six strings on the instrument. The numbers on the lines represent the frets to be fingered. (Refer to Fig. A below.) Although rhythm is usually notated above or below the six-line staff, it is usually memorized aurally by the student from the recording. For the most part, those who learn from tablature usually have memorized every nuance of the recording, so rhythm does not pose much of a problem. In contrast, standard music notation relies much more on interpretation and association in order to be understood.