Transcribing

The journey to learning authentic boogie-woogie piano inevitably includes studying your favourite songs, artists and their signature licks. There’s some great technology around to help you with slowing down, repeating and transcribing if you can’t quite fathom by ear what is being played – or if like me you have a terrible memory and need to write things down before you forget them!

Dr Ian Pallister has written a great article about how to transcribe using the Transcribe! software which, as he says, “enables mere mortals to access music that jazz pianists take ages to pick up”.

Notation packages

There’s pen and paper or there’s notation software. I don’t recommend or endorse any products but below are links to the ones I most often hear fellow musicians using and there is a comprehensive list of notation software available on Wikipedia.