I’m a bass player who plays other instruments for fun and occasional profit.
I switched from electric to upright in 2012, which started my move away from playing things that you plug into the wall. My main musical use of electricity is to either record or arrange/transcribe music using Logic Pro and Musescore, respectively.
I started studying Guitar Craft, Guitar Circle, and New Standard Tuning (NST) in 2020 and it’s my current focus.
I transcribe music for two reasons. Transcribing helps me understand a piece of music in ways I can’t get from simply listening. Transcribing also leaves an artifact that other people (including future me) can read to be able to perform or understand a piece.
Robert Fripp’s first solo album, Exposure, is my favorite album of all time. I can’t explain why, it just speaks to me.
When I started playing NST Guitar, I decided to start transcribing and arranging pieces from that album both to better understand the music that I’ve loved for so long, but also to better understand how to play an instrument that still feels foreign to me.
New Standard Tuning presents a number of challenges that I am still working on overcoming.
The following are my attempts at finding reasonable paths through the instrument for both concepts and pieces.
I’m a huge Jon Brion fan and regret the number of Largo shows I’ve missed almost as much as I value the shows I was able to attend.
Sadly, the most common source of “transcriptions” of popular music is Ultimate Guitar, which is a real morass. I hate the text-based format, but in order to put my transcriptions in a place where people can find it (and other JB tunes I don’t need to transcribe), I held my nose and dealt with it.
Most of these transcriptions were either of obscure tunes or songs no one got around to. The one that’s really worth looking at is Little Person, which was the most harmonically complex and beautiful (and lacked anything remotely accurate on the web).