by Today, let’s talk about how to transcribe on bass. In case you don’t know, transcribing is just the process of figuring out how to play something by ear.
Pretty frequently, I get emails from people asking me to give them tabs or sheet music to songs that they want to play, but can’t find themselves.
As much as I want to help these people, I just don’t have the time in the day to help everyone, so I gently encourage them to try and figure it out for themselves.
However, many people have either never even considered this to be an option or they immediately give reasons why they can’t do it. They say things like “I’m tone deaf” or “I tried once, but it didn’t work for me”.
Think of the implications of being able to figure things out for yourself though. No more hours of trawling through questionable tab sites. You could even write your own tabs or correct the bad ones you find all over the place. You also wouldn’t have to ask someone to tell you the frets or show you how to play something you didn’t know.
The best part, is that you don’t just have to transcribe bass lines. You can transcribe anything you want. You like the sound of a guitar lick? Transcribe it and play it on your bass! Like a vocal melody from a song? Once you know how to transcribe on bass, you can learn melodies and play them for yourself!
That’s exactly what I want to you be able to do after going through the process in this video. It’s one of the most useful skills any bass player can have, so check this one out:
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By the way, very few people actually suffer from true tone-deafness; a condition called amusia. And to the people who say they’ve tried in the past, but it doesn’t work, I’d be willing to bet that either:
#1 – Your method of transcribing didn’t give you enough of a chance to really figure things out; or
#2 – You just didn’t have the chance to practice it enough to really nail it
The methods that I show you in the video though take things super slowly. Seriously – you don’t need to figure out everything at once. You only need to figure out one note at a time, and I’m sure you can do that.
I use Transcribe! all the time – it’s a great tool and I use it all the time so I’m happy to recommend it using my affiliate link above. Have some fun with it and let me know how you go.
If you have any questions at all, I’m happy to answer them. Just leave a comment below and I’ll do whatever I can to help out.
Good luck with the lesson and happy transcribing!
Cheers,
Thanks so much for all your really helpful videos. Do appreciate it a lot.
Just starting with a double bass and it’s a steep learning curve.
Great video – very helpful and informative. Just wish I could hear what you were playing on the bass. It was essentially silent.
Glad you liked the video friend! What are you watching on? I’d definitely recommend using either headphones or a decent sound system that can reproduce those low frequencies. Computer speakers (or eve worse – phone speakers) aren’t great for listening to bass in general.
I use a Bluetooth link from my laptop to my speaker bar that has a woofer. Works great!
That’s a great way to make sure you can actually hear the bass properly! Thanks for the comment Ronnie.