About the Course
Are you passionate about guitar tabs and looking to learn how to transcribe music well?
Whether you want to learn to transcribe to improve your ear, you're arranging and writing your own music and want to communicate your ideas to the world, want to be able to add value with your lesson plans as a guitar teacher, improve your ability to draft charts as a session player or a band member, or want to create a side income by selling sheet music or providing transcription services for bigger artists at a higher level, my guitar transcription course is designed to help you with all of that. It’s my hope that this course, Transcribing with Guitar Pro, will help you save time and money in communicating your ideas, give you the tools to level up your own playing, and give you the power to build another income stream for yourself with little to no up-front cost to get started. All you need to start is a computer and a copy of Guitar Pro software (they even have a trial option, fyi).
This course will cover my step-by-step transcribing process that I’ve used to tackle my own arrangements, and projects for higher profile artists as well. This format is the same that I’ve used to handle large transcription projects for artists like Tommy Emmanuel, Andy McKee, Richard Smith, John Knowles, Gareth Pearson, Matthew Lee, myself, and other artists, while keeping the process manageable and low-stress, and teaching music theory overview to make sheet music less intimidating. My goal for this is to dispel any intimidation you might have around reading and writing sheet music, and to help you see it as an understandable, accessible tool for your personal and professional benefit.
Why transcribe for yourself?
Helps you to learn for yourself at a faster pace:
Transcribing music, like reading and writing, is one of those skills that helps you communicate your ideas with larger groups of people, as well as to organize your own thoughts and become more intentional and polished as a musician. I’ve been transcribing now for over a decade, and professionally for about half of that. In my experience it’s made my ear so much better, and it has helped me understand song form more clearly. As a guitarist, I don’t feel like my hands are in charge when I sit down to play anymore - my brain and my heart are. I can hear and understand what’s happening in a piece, which saves me hours of mistakes and helps me get to the best solution sooner in my own arrangements, and helps me understand, in so much more detail, what my guitar heroes are doing. Just like how reading and writing helped me improve my speaking and organize my thoughts, transcribing has improved my playing and arranging, and helped me organize my creative projects.
Extra source of income / reduce operating costs for professional musicians:
If you have a portfolio of songs that you’d like to sell as sheet music, it can be expensive to hire someone to write your tabs for you - especially if you’re an emerging artist, and especially if you are writing intricate music that requires a lot of attention to transcribe well. It can take having a large fanbase before it pays off to hire a transcriber, but it’s a catch-22 because it helps to have high quality products for fans to purchase before you have those seemingly-overnight successes. It’s nice to have the rain buckets out before the rain comes, if that makes sense. If you're an artist with a tight budget or someone who wants to maintain full creative control, by learning to transcribe for yourself you can capture your great ideas in detail - exactly how you want them represented, and at a professional level - without the trouble of hiring a third party who maybe isn’t as invested in your songs as you are. And even if you still hired a transcriber, you’d be able to expedite the process and reduce costs if you can collaborate with them on your tabs at a high level (I know they’d appreciate your help, as well!). Ultimately as a musician, you’re also taking back a lot of the power over your own career with learning this skill, saving yourself time and money, and you’re giving yourself so much more agency in the music world, and in your ability to generate revenue as an artist.
Digital products, like tabs, can provide scaleable value and income:
I love the idea that providing transcription products is completely scaleable. Once you publish a tab and list it for sale, you don’t have to continue investing time in it, and standing over it to ensure it makes money. You list it on your website or in a sheet music marketplace, and as people find it, they will purchase it and the money will end up in your account. No inventory required, no shipping and handling fees. It’s really that simple. Over time, you can divorce your income from your hours by selling passive products like tabs, and if they solve a problem for someone at a fair price, eventually you’ll get compensated. But simply as an educator, I love having the realization that I can figure out a song for an artist, I can learn it once and communicate it once, and their fans can learn it countless times from there. It’s such a thrill to see people get excited to learn something new, and to know that I had a hand in facilitating that because I took the time to learn something and communicate it well on that artist’s behalf. It’s truly humbling to know that some of my favorite artists are trusting me to represent their work well in the marketplace, after years of studying their life’s work in my free time. It’s also deeply satisfying to help their fans connect with their life’s work.
Improve hireability as a band member, session player, or a teacher:
It’s also the case that in a studio environment, being “chart-man” and knowing how to draft charts and tabs on-the-go can improve your hireability as a session player or a band-mate. Being able to provide transcriptions, if you’re teaching guitar lessons or conducting masterclasses, will also help you connect with your students more comprehensively. Some of us are more kinesthetic learners, some of us are more visual, and many of us rely on a combination of resources to understand concepts, and this will help bridge the gap between you and your bandmates, or you and your students, to better serve them.
Why I love Guitar Pro
Over the years, I’ve learned the ins and outs of transcribing with Guitar Pro, I’ve worked with them as a beta tester and an alpha tester to figure out the ins and outs of the program (and I’m so grateful that where I’ve even requested certain features, I’ve seen them show up in later versions!). Of all the transcribing softwares out there, and there are so many good ones, I’ve found Guitar Pro’s team to be incredibly friendly and helpful, and I’ve found the software to be SO practical for my needs, and it’s so popular among the guitar community these days that you can share the interactive files with friends easily, because the barrier to entry to get the software is so low (That also means you have a larger audience to sell interactive files to). Some transcription softwares cost hundreds and will shut down multiple times before the program even opens, but guitar pro is so fairly priced and easy to work with. It is developed enough of a program to notate really complex musical ideas, but it’s specialized enough that notating for guitar is disproportionately easier to do with them over other softwares, and yet it is still flexible enough that I can pivot and include other instrumentation easily - like piano, drum tracks, dobro, etc. I love that the software is affordable (less than $100 to download, with a free trial, and discounted upgrades, and one license works across FIVE DEVICES.) It’s also super interactive, it’s designed to be a practice tool as much as a transcribing tool, and it’s not so heavy of a program that it bogs down my computer. I’ve done tens of thousands of dollars worth of transcriptions on my stock macbook airs (one from 2014, and now one from 2018 - still going strong), and I have virtually no issues running the program. No fancy equipment necessary!
I first downloaded Guitar Pro 7 back in 2014, and within the first year of owning the software I sat down one weekend and read through the entire manual over the course of three days. While the program is fairly straightforward, over the years I discovered so many intricacies about how the program works that are not Googlable, but were so critical in helping me get professional level results with the program. I’d love to share those with you, and a lot of what I cover in this course are hacks that I’ve figured out, the occasional workaround if you have something really difficult to notate and need to make it easier to read, and also tips and tricks that can benefit you if you decide to publish your work at any point and want it to look more polished than the typical bootleg tab. ;)
When I started taking on high-level transcription processes, I developed a style for transcription that goes more in-depth than most of the big-box sheet music outlets, with the end goal in mind that ‘if a student cannot figure out how to get from point a to point b on the fretboard without a video reference, I’ve not included enough information.’ This means I’m more clear about notating new fingerings as they come up, and being more clear with what is happening in complex movements - explaining step by step what happens with each note, and even notating when the notes STOP - not just when they start. But I also make it a point to not include irrelevant information that crowds the page.
After years of deliberating over many different types of tabs and working with thousands of pages of tabs, and hundreds of songs, across multiple different formats, I feel confident to communicate my system of transcribing in a way that teaches what you’d need to know at every level, while also providing insight from my specialties as a transcriber and player.
While it is definitely possible for there to be mistakes in transcription work, it’s also the case that transcribing is not a 100% right or wrong, binary model. Transcribing feels to me like a trifecta of algebra I, essay writing, and graphic design, and so in the course we address the basic technical aspects of reading and writing sheet music through basic music theory foundations, and then more editorial aspects of the transcribing process such as page formatting and typography, consistency in notation, legibility, and how to accommodate for various unconventional techniques, etc.
While my background as a player and a transcriber is mostly fingerstyle, in the vein of artists like Tommy Emmanuel and Andy McKee, this course will also contain what I’ve learned in side projects for blues and jazz guitar styles, as well as a few other types of instrumentation.
The only prerequisite that I would suggest for this class is that you have a basic foundation of how to play the guitar. You don’t need a working music theory background in order to start the class, although it would help. I will address relevant music theory concepts as they pop up in the course material, just as a refresher. Nobody has a full deck of cards as an artist, and so it’s totally okay if you feel like you have some blind spots in your learning path because it was incomplete or non-traditional. I promise you, we all have insecurites and blind spots in our skill sets! It’s totally fine.
While this course does go really in-depth with the transcription process, I also believe in helping you execute things quickly and giving you the practical ways to do things. I use Guitar Pro above other softwares because it is extremely fast to use and to learn, and it has such a competitive edge over other transcription softwares with how easy and quick it is to use. It saves me SO much time and money as a transcriber myself, so I trust that it would do the same for you.
Again, when I started transcribing at a professional level for work I very quickly got outside of Googlable territory and had to figure out a transcribing system for myself. If I would have had this course as a beginner transcriber I would have saved myself LITERAL YEARS of work. This is the course I wish I would have had a few years ago, and I’m so excited to be able to share it with you, and to be able to do so affordably in this day and age. I’m also so excited with how incredible the most recent versions of Guitar Pro are, and I can’t wait for you to fall in love with them like I have.
Whether you're an aspiring for-hire transcriber or a guitar player who simply wants to level up and preserve the integrity of your music, it’s my hope that this course, “Transcribing with Guitar Pro,” will help you learn a high-return skill to deliver consistent results and unlock a world of opportunities in your career and in your own creative expression.
-Kirbs
