Jazz Saxophone Transcription

Jazz Saxophone Transcription

Most jazz saxophone players will agree that it’s difficult enough to learn how to sing properly while reading it out from a musical sheet, not to mention trying to play a song “by ear”. And since sheet music is almost always strangely missing for a specific song you’re looking for you will need to work your way backwards from the actual song, down to the piece of paper. The result is called a jazz saxophone transcription.

Such transcriptions require an awful amount of skill and ear practice. That’s why people who do this as a job are oftentimes swamped in requests. Most of them are retired jazz players or teachers that have specialized in jazz saxophone transcriptions. If you want to get the transcription for a particular song, note that the price, time and quality of the work depends on several factors. Let’s take a closer look at what these factors are.

The price of a jazz saxophone transcription is most of the times, influenced by the length and difficulty of the song. Ballads are considered especially difficult and rhythms are close behind. It’s quite obvious why length of tune affects the price, since you can’t have a song that will end up in 10 pages be priced equally to one that will be transcribed on 40. This is also an important factor that affects the time in which your jazz saxophone transcription will be finished.

Last but not least, the quality of the jazz transcription you get will depend heavily on 2 things: the skill of the person who does the transcription and the sound quality of the source song that you want transcribed. If you don’t offer the transcriber a good quality song to work on, the results will often lack consistence, no matter how skilled he would be. Most of them will required you to send him the song on a CD or in mp3 format, not accepting tapes, which can severely influence the tonality of the song. Even if the transcriber will accept your song on a tape, they will probably ask to know what key it is in and what the first note is, so that they have something to build upon when writing your transcription.

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