Paul Maine

An important part of learning the jazz language is transcribing the music of those that have gone before us as well as those that are still with us. It is important to not only figure out the notes and rhythms but to also to figure out the articulations, pitch bends and other nuances.

We happen to be fortunate to live in an age of technology that provides us with wonderful tools to simplify the transcription process. In the past, transcribers would slow down the speed of phonographs in order to determine the notes. Although this would slow down the music – the pitch would also be lowered and in many cases the music would be “muddy” and difficult to “play along with”.

I have evaluated several different transcription software packages and prefer Transcribe!

Transcribe is available from the following URL:

http://www.seventhstring.com/

The software runs on mac, PC and Linux.

Do you use any transcribing software? If yes, what are you using?

Wikopedia defines a contrafact as follows:

“A contrafact is a new musical composition built out of an already existing one, most of a new melody overlaid on a familiar harmonic structure. As a compositional device, it was of particular importance in the 1930s/1940s development of bop, since it allowed jazz musicians to create new pieces for performance and recording on which they could immediately improvise, without having to seek permission or pay publisher fees for copyrighted materials (while melodies can be copyrighted, the underlying harmonic structure cannot be).”

The song “Donna Lee”  is a contrafact of  “Back Home in Indiana”.

We will be using contrafacts to communicate and illustrate various jazz aids.