I always thought that transcribing would be too difficult., But using Justin’s steps I’ve just tried Molly’s Lips. It took me about 15 minutes to work out the Chords and Rhythm. I even managed to play along. I’ll try something a little more difficult in the near future. Had a blast with this one. Have fun.
I’ve come back to this lesson and would love to say that all is good and I know what I’m doing. Unfortunately I can’t and have to say that I’m not seeing the point. How does this make me a better player? How does it help with chords & chord changes for example?
This still is the case! I had a listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVZtVOrIbF0I and knowing the chords from the JG lesson thought that I would be able to hear the similarity! Doesn’t sound like the same song to me.
I had a look at a video of this on YT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=268C3N2dDYk and couldn’t really hear the guitar (over the drums & vocals) never mind work out the chords being playing. It was just one wall of sound! How are we supposed to work out what is being played from this?
Justin makes a big thing of starting simple! Well if this is simple then I don’t see a way forward. Somebody made a point the other day (can’t remember who. May be one of the clubs) that frustration is good. In this case I’m not sure that it is.
What happened to the extra songs he says in the video that would be added?
The songs suggested in the lesson do not really appeal to me. But entering power chords as a search in Spotify revealed a number of interesting playlists with power chord songs.
This is how I ended up on 10 A.M. by the Black Keys. Not too difficult but challenging enough on finding the correct power chords. Once you have these, the embellishments are not too difficult either. It will have you jamming along with the song in no time. A feeling of success is always a good start!
I totally understand where you are coming from. I’ve been working on transcribing every day for about 6 months now, and it does get easier, but it can be very hard initially - I’ve still got a long way to go and make loads of mistakes.
With the Ramones song, I would start trying to get just the first chord. At the very beginning of the song hopefully you can hear there are three chords being played. One for 4 beats, then another for 2 beats and a third for 2 beats. This overall pattern repeats 3 times identically.
Try and loop the video so it only plays the first chord (the first 4 beats), and try and find a match by playing notes on the bottom string. It might take a while - if you think you have a match, check the whole power chord sounds right.
Once you have the first chord, then try the second chord and so on. Doing this one chord at a time is the way to get started.
It can take a while, but keep at it - your ear will improve with practice - if I can do it, anyone can!
I’ve listened to this over a dozen times today (incl. versions by Green Day & The Offspring, whoever they are) and still don’t get it. Too much going on, too much distortion, to make any sense of the chords. As I said if Justin thinks that this is an easy one then I stand no chance.
May have to give this section as miss as not seeing the benefit at the moment to me for playing songs.
One other suggestion that will work for me sometimes … can you sing the bass note of the chord?For this song, just sing or hum the note you can hear being played. Try and sing the note then turn off the track and find the note you are singing on the guitar. That works for me sometimes if there’s a lot of distractions in the track.
@mathsjunky Thanks for your help and assistance with this and to answer your question no I can’t sing/hum the bass notes as don’t know what they are. If someone said sing a C note I wouldn’t know what that is. Likewise if i hummed a note I wouldn’t know what I have hummed! I have had no formal singing lessons and to be honest I don’t like singing as I think I sound terrible 
Edit as bold!
Hi Stewart - I couldn’t sing you a C without any reference either, but what I could do is sing one if you played it on a piano (well, my singing isn’t great, but good enough to copy the pitch).
So what I’m getting at here is can you sing the notes being played, while they are playing - sing along to the tune? If I can do that, then stop the track I often find it easier to find the note I’m singing on the guitar than finding the note on the record.
That ability is called perfect pitch and only 1 in 10,000 people can do it. So don’t worry about that.
But you do need to be able to do this:
This is a skill that almost everyone can learn with practice.
No. I can’t work out what notes are being played. The problem is that my singing is terrible. I couldn’t hold a tune in a bucket. Even doh ray me sounds pretty much all the same.
You may well be right but how much? I have other things to concentrate on at the moment and, to be honest, I’m not seeing the benefit of transcribing to my playing.
I can understand this - there are big pay-offs, but it does take time. The ultimate goal is for improvising when you can instantly play whatever you hear in your head. Now I’m a million miles from this, but it’s my (very!) long term goal. What I can currently do is hear a lick on a record and think, “Oh I like that”, and work out how to play it - it might take a while, but I can usually get it (or something close. There are other benefits which are more subtle - for example you work out the little things that can make a big difference to how something sounds - a little slide, a little curl etc. You can also find interesting musical ideas you may not have thought of, or other surprises. For example I was transcribing a few bars of a Clapton solo from ‘Cocaine’ earlier today - it sounds complex, but when I broke it down it was just 4 different notes straight out of a minor pentatonic scale.
If you can I would encourage you to keep chipping away at it. I didn’t think I could do it at first, but it really does get easier. For the past 6 months, I have tried to spend just 5 or 10 minutes a day doing some transcribing. Sometimes it’s a complete fail, sometimes I surprise myself.
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Do you want to sing? You said you thought your voice was terrible. I was thinking more in terms of learning to hit a note so you can sing in tune, rather than learning to transcribe licks. If you are not interested in either then maybe this lesson is not relevant for you.
I would love to be able to sing, and belt out a tune any time I wanted to but have to be realistic! I don’t want to annoy the neighbours or the missus for that matter.
It is. Well I think it is and I’m pretty sure that others do to! I tried singing ‘do ray me far’ etc the other day and it just sounded (in my ears) like a low rumble with not much difference in the notes.
Hey Stuart, I have (had) the same problem. I realized in junior high choir that I couldn’t sing, and just mouthed the words all year. 
I’ve always wanted to be able to carry a tune though. I don’t know if this has already been recommended…I’ve been working through Justin’s Ear Training course. Just 10 minutes a day (I’ve added it to my practice routine) and I can actually sing about an octave now! The best part - I’m learning a song on guitar and singing while I play! (Not ready to go out in public…baby steps.) I’m only mid-way through Grade 2, but I couldn’t be happier!
There is also in this course a “play what you hear” exercise, which I do regularly as well. I think your original question is about transcribing, and I think this would be a great help with that as well.
Singing is all about ear training as @judi says. Learning to transcribe is ear training. I’m sure Justin’s ear training course is also excellent. You can almost certainly learn to sing in tune, but you have to train your ears to hear that you are getting to the correct pitch.
Transcribing practice may not seem directly relevant to your guitar playing, but it will be good to improve your pitch recognition skills.
I started this over a year ago and so far I’ve got to the second video of the Introduction. I left it very quickly as just didn’t get it!! I came back to it about 3-4 weeks ago and managed Happy Birthday, just! See Play What You Hear Exercise
I’ve read through the Learn More section for the 3rd video of the Introduction and Justin sums this up perfectly. https://www.justinguitar.com/guitar-lessons/learning-to-sing-for-ear-training-et-003
*1. Find Somewhere Private To Explore your Voice
A lot of singing is confidence, so start somewhere where you can explore singing without your partner or kids sniggering at your attempts. I still have ‘wounds’ from people criticising my singing (and playing for that matter!) that undermine my confidence about doing certain things so I know first hand how hurtful people can be - even if they mean well."
Finding somewhere to do this without interruption is the problem.
Ah, I feel your pain! I’ve been at the Play What You Hear exercise for about 2 months now, and it’s still a struggle for me. But I’m getting better.
Back to singing (and ear training): I see you’re in the Introduction section of the Ear Training course. I think I skipped through that stuff pretty quickly (it’s an intro, after all!). I’d encourage you to move on to Grade 1. Beginning with the first lesson in Grade 1 (The Perfect 5th Interval) Justin introduces a great practice technique: “2. Play and sing a root note, then stop playing and sing the interval jump and then check it on the guitar so you’re sure you are getting it right and in tune.” I’ve been doing this for a couple months now, and it’s been amazing how helpful it’s been both with singing and identifying the intervals. Even if progress is slow, it’s recognizable!
Hang in there…we’ll get this…
I didn’t progress to the first lesson as I had only competed the 2 of the 3 parts of the Introduction and that took over a year as I couldn’t work out Happy Birthday. The 3rd part was about singing which for the reasons above put me off. I’ll give lesson 1 a go and see what happens, although " Find Somewhere Private To Explore your Voice" may be a problem in my house!
Wow this lesson was rather fun! I was quite intimidated to start, but I ended up not having much trouble at all with Molly’s Lips, Blitzkrieg Bop, and All The Small Things. I did have a bit of a slow down with Fly Away and I haven’t started Polly or the Queens of the Stone Age song (this one I have never heard before, I don’t think).
I think the biggest issue is when the guitar part is drowned out by vocals or other instruments. In those sections, I just cannot hear any notes. All the songs so far have had this issue in some small or big way, so I feel a little stressed about not being able to transcribe them from start to finish. I’m also not completely comfortable not documenting rhythm and timing information. I realize that is not the goal of this lesson at all, so I’m trying to not worry about it, but it is certainly going against my instinct of needing to do a transcription ‘correctly’. I realize I don’t have the skill to do it ‘correctly’, and this I do not like.
One thing I found myself doing- though I was aware in my head that this was an exercise using power chords, I completely forgot as soon as I started Molly’s Lips, and in my mind I wasn’t thinking ‘power chords’, I was thinking ‘find the note’. So I didn’t use power chord base notes when trying to find what I was hearing. I found the first place on the fretboard I could that sounded right and I wrote that fret number down on blank tab. Then I went back and wrote the note names under the fret numbers. After I picked out all the notes of the progression for as much of the song as I could, I moved to the next song. It was Fly Away (4th song) before I realized, oh crap, I’m picking out notes, but they aren’t 5th or 6th string power chord root notes. That wasn’t too bad of a mistake because, since I’d jotted down the note names, it was easy to just change my fingering to be the power chords for those notes. In the last two songs (Polly and Queens of the Stone Age song) I’m going to try specifically for 5th and 6th string base notes. I think that will be a better method anyway because I’m expecting them to be the two hardest ones. As I said earlier I don’t think I’ve ever even heard the QooSA song.
Anyway, really fun so far. I haven’t checked the tips or answers to see if I’m correct with my choices yet.
I think the songs I like the best so far (since Justin asked) is Blitzkrieg Bop and All The Small Things.
What do we do about the parts we just cannot hear over the other song parts? Should we skip over that and only focus on what we can hear? Or put the song in Moises and turn off the vocals (even if that’s cheating a little bit)?
I do this all the time when I’m transcribing…makes life a lot easier when you are starting out. I can’t prove it, but I think this is actually helping me train my ear to pick out individual instruments in a mix.
Also, if you want to jump ahead to transcribing rhythm…I find slowing down the tempo and turning on the Moises Smart Metronome feature to be super helpful.
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