Jazz Transcribing Tip, Slowing Down The Playback

 Note: There is a Follow Up Article to this. Be sure to read both!

Well, I am now done with Gary Burton's Jazz improvisational class and I will be moving on to studying Piano with a prominent Jazz recording artist in LA.

One of the first assignments I have gotten is to transcribe (to mean duplicate, not necessarily write out) solos.

If you are skilled at this, you can hear the quality of voicings and you'd be able to tell what the voicing are.  Occasionally you also run into people with perfect pitch and they can do it while in sleep.

While I got a hang on Jazz harmonies, it will not be an instant recall at this time, so it will be a bit of uphill battle for a while as I get up to speed with it.

As a musician in the digital age, I always try to use tools to make my jobs easier. That's tools are for!

So to transcribe a song, it is better for me to slow down the song. In the older time with tape only this would not have been possible, since if you slow down the tape, then it will also alter the pitch. But today, you can do the digital re-sampling and be able to play the songs slowly and at the same time with the original pitch.

If you have a digital audio workstation (DAW) this is a familiar territory. But for the purpose of just playing something slow, a dedicated tool is a much faster option. Also for many soloists, they do not have a full DAW setup.

So I did some search and I just came across the tool called Amazing Slow Downer, which sells for about $60.00 online. With it I can slow down songs as much as 20% of the original.

While you are processing the signal heavily it is not exactly like the effect of slowing down a MIDI track, but the processing quality is surprisingly and you can change speeds interactively, real-time, with just a slider; much more musician friendly!

On this tool, you just open an CD track or audio file and play with the slider. You are in business in a matter of a few minutes.

With looping presets, so you can  recall in-out points and loop around the parts that you want to practice or analyze. You can set up 10 or so pre-set in-out points.

Another nice touch is a MIDI event control. It learns your MIDI control signal, and you can program it to start to play or play a loop. That's quite nice since you can focus on your work from your keyboard. I mapped start and stop on the joystick so I do not have to reach the computer keyboard to start and stop it.

It's available on Mac and Windows and it can play CDs as well as common music file format like MP3 and AIFF.