Transcriptions
Jimmy Page - Led Zeppelin - No Quarter (live), guitar solo from The Song Remains the Same CD (not on video) in regular tab.One of Jimmy's best, from the end of the '73 tour. Stuctured yet wild, creative, quirky, at times slow and melodic and at times blisteringly fast and riff-based. Jimmy was arguably near his peak, pre-heroin.
Jerry Garcia - Grateful Dead - Sugaree 5/19/77, 1st guitar solo in powertab.
Jerry Garcia - Grateful Dead - Sugaree 5/19/77, 2nd guitar solo in powertab, incomplete. I got burned out at about 95%.
When people start talking about the "best" Sugaree, this date is generally one of the top picks. If you want to track it down, I originally got it as a bootleg, but it is apparently now an official release as part of Dick's Picks Volume 29.
Miles Davis - So What, Miles Davis solo in powertab (trumpet).
Miles Davis - So What, John Coltrane solo in powertab (tenor sax).
Miles Davis - So What, Adderly solo in powertab (alto sax).
I can personally guarantee that the Coltrane and Adderly transcriptions are more accurate than those published in the Miles Davis "Kind of Blue" transcription book.
Instruction
Shortcut to the Modes, a method for playing the modes based on major and minor pentatonic scales.Software for Transcribing
Slowgold is one of many types of software that allows you to loop segments of music and slow them down while retaining normal pitch. Frankly, I could not do super accurate standard music notation (i.e. for Powertabs) without it. By tapping your foot on the beat and creating loop points with the mouse in time (on the "one"), measures are isolated. Then, in "wave view" you can overlay a grid and relatively easily see and hear the note lengths.Power Tab Editor is a freeware tool for creating, viewing, and printing guitar based transcriptions using musical notation in addition to guitar tablature. It also plays these back through your sound card using MIDI. There is a large archive of powertabbed material (.ptb) at PowerTabs.net.
The Horrors of Transcribing
Clearly, transcribing is a task for people with way too much time on their hands. But it's also pretty frustrating, because even when you're working along with the "official" tab, it may not always be accurate. Here, I had the fairly insane idea of transcribing Frank Zappa's Rat Tomago. First is my version of the first 6 bars:
And here, the "official" version, from "The Frank Zappa Guitar Book:"
Now, there are some minor differences just because of the way I'm tabbing it, with some notes that are slurs not being noted in the official version, and there are some individual differences in the way the timing can be done, but there are some big gaps between the two. Now, I'm not saying I don't make mistakes, but I guess I do have the advantage of modern digital technology and loads of time. I'm imagining the original transcribers were working from reel to reel tapes maybe, and probably didn't have a couple of hours to spend on a few bars of music.
I also wanted to mention Rat Tomago so that I could give a heads up to anyone wanting to fool around with it. It is recorded about a 1/4 step above concert pitch, so be advised. You'll need to slow down the recording or tune up a skosh. Although this isn't a tremendous deal, I suspect it may contribute to the fact that no one has tabbed up this masterpiece.