As an undergraduate, I took a course titled "The Logic of Chess." I was a relative newcomer to the game; I knew how to play, but wasn't any good. One of my classmates, a USCF-rated player, was clearly taking the course for the pure love of the game, and perhaps for an easy math credit. He once asked me, "Do you want to improve your rating significantly in just a week?"

"Of course," I answered.

"Then take a copy of Chess Life, find a transcription of a game between two Grandmasters, and memorize every move."

That evening, I began applying his advice. Sure enough, my game improved within days. I might not have understood every move to its fullest, but by studying an annotated transcript of a game I felt one step closer to thinking like a grandmaster. If you've ever taken a foreign language, say French, you might have learned that it doesn't just pay to know French, you've got to think in French. When you bypass the translation routine in your head, your fluency improves dramatically. In Music, as in Chess and Language, to express yourself as a master you must learn to think like one. This is why we transcribe.

Transcription is the act of deciphering, note-for-note, what occurs in a piece of music. Most of the great musicians we admire transcribed music played by the greats before them. Sonny Rollins studied Coleman Hawkins, Eddie Van Halen studied Eric Clapton, Pat Metheny studied Wes Montgomery. For every great musician, there are a number of others that inspired him. Do not confuse inspiration with mere impression. If you admire an artist because he impresses you, that may be enough to motivate you to pick up the instrument and play in the first place, and that's important; but your path to mastery is paved by periods of inspiration, during which you are actually inspired to study an artist's work very closely. Many guitarists mistakenly cite artists that impress them as influences, when the list of artists that have actually inspired them is much shorter. When an artist inspires you, a fitting response is to transcribe some of his work.

Some guitarists will claim that learning other people's solos will only make you sound like other people, and hinder you from developing your own unique style. If you believe that, you doom yourself to mediocrity. No one ever developed a unique style without first being familiar with other styles. The process of learning to be a musician involves first building a foundation of basic proficiency, then basing any personal innovation on that foundation.

The ability to listen to music and either transcribe it on paper or perform it enhances all other creative musical skills. If you can hear a phrase and play it back, you are better equipped to write or improvise original music. You possess an internal ear that ought to know how something sounds before it's played. Whereas listeners first hear, then process, musicians process, then play. In other words, just as subtraction is merely addition with one sign reversed, transcription is performance reversed in time. It is an act of reverse engineering; in transcribing, you place yourself in the head of the original performer. You learn how a master thinks.

In my next post, I will describe the three methods for learning solos, and their inherent pros and cons.