Bob Reynolds learns solos by ear to make practice more exciting

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In case you don’t already know about him, Bob Reynolds is a fantastic sax player that also happens to have a great YouTube channel. I was delighted when I watched his new video about transcribing solos.[1]

There’s so much great stuff in this video. More than anything else, I think it’s good for us to see concrete examples of musicians at the top of their game that are still putting in the same kind of work that we are.

Sure, they might be able to identify the notes a little quicker, and maybe they don’t have to slow things down as much, but that comes from years of transcription practice. I thought it was cool to see he’s using the same sort of tricks that I also find helpful: trying to sing what he’s hearing, relating parts of the melody to chords/shapes to help remember them, and so on.

So I’m curious: what is your takeaway from this video? Are there any nuggets of wisdom that made you :exploding_head:?

  1. I would have been more delighted to learn that Capo was his tool of choice, but I won’t let that ruin my enjoyment of the video. :joy: ↩︎

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This resonates with me too. Takeaways are the same as yours, but this other video drives home another point that tools like Capo have helped me realize: Beginner or Advanced? My 60 bpm Practice Strategy for Both - YouTube

There, Bob talks about practicing at a ridiculously slow speed to force yourself to focus on rhythm rather than tonal accuracy. He points out that even a basic scale is easy to mess up at 60 bpm. For some tough pieces on flamenco guitar, I’ll slow down to these kinds of speeds and loop a small section. This way I’m sure I really know what’s going on rhythmically and can take time to make notes sound out.

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Yes! I think the other aspect of this practice is forcing yourself to sub-divide the metronome clicks yourself. I have used a similar trick[1] with scales where I set a click at 50bpm, and divide them up to 8, then back down to 1. So you divide it as whole notes (v. hard!!), half notes, triples, quarters, fifths, sixths, sevenths, and finally 8ths and back up again. (If you’re new to this idea, I suggest trying a higher bpm, and only dividing from 1-3 at first.)

A helpful modification to these ideas is to treat the click as happening on the 2nd & 4th beats (where a snare drum often sits.) This helps you develop a feel for your own internal downbeat, and I think it feels very natural to play along with.

  1. Borrowed from my brief time in drum lessons: it’s SUPER HARD! ↩︎

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