What I learned from Transcribing, Arranging Schindler’s List theme for Guitar

The Value of learning lines from other instruments

As a guitarist and guitar lover, I always enjoyed all types of guitar solos. From shreddy solos, to the more melodic ones. From David Gilmour, to Jason Becker. Love them all.

As I advanced my studies in music and guitar, I found myself looking and listening more and more for non-guitar musicians, trying to understand their approach to soloing, improvisation and arrangement. I listened to sitar players, wind instrument players, saxophone players, violinist, violists, and many others.

I searched for representative solo of these instruments and what made me enjoy them, what made me get interested and grab strongly my attention and perhaps bringing something or two for the guitar and my own playing. So I listened to a lot of different stuff and have learned a lot during the process.

Most guitar books and methodologies are really geared toward shapes and patterns for notes, chord and scales. My most important confirmation, because I had strong suspicion of this before, is that other musicians are more melody oriented from the first moment they start learning their guitar, much more so than guitarists.

Funny thing is, when my path crossed with the theme of Schindler’s List I thought I was already done with this exercise, but it was a great surprise for me to find this tune. I confess that I listen to the whole soundtrack before watching the famous movie. The whole score, beautifully done by John Williams, has the incredible violin performance from Itzhak Perlman. The theme caught my attention for its incredibly beautiful melodic approach, and the type of improvisational approach that I only found in different styles from the classical universe.

Itzhak Perlman, a true violin master

Before getting into the details of this whole medium post I want to really emphasize the importance of ear training. Transcribe your favorite solos, not only the notes but the expression, the dynamics, articulations, tone choices and many other important nuances that complete a full musical performance.

So if you haven’t seen the video of the performance, here it is.

Part I: About the Transcription Part

So here I’m going to explain my methodology for transcribing anything, from a huge symphony to a crazy Charlie Parker solo. The process goes like this: A) discover the notes that are in the extreme registers (bottom/bass notes and top notes), B) try to infer the harmonic context, locally (the chord of the current bar) and globally (If diatonic, would be the key of the section or song), C) If not possible to complete B after A, transcribe more chord notes to get a good idea of what’s going on and finally, D) transcribe the whole solo with this a priori knowledge. Of course, you could always jump straight to the D) in order to play the solo, but I would advise against this as you will read shortly.

A) Discover the notes that are in the extreme top and bottom

(Important: Is the bass note in root position, or is an inversion? or the case for static bass?)

B) Try to infer the harmonic context, locally and globally

With the bass notes and top notes you can pretty much figure out the rest of the notes played by the band or orchestra. If the Double Bass is playing an A, violin+flute playing an E, and you feel its a minor chord, betting on an Am chord probably wouldn’t be too crazy. So if you have a standard Am chord, you’ll find the notes A, C and E distributed along all instruments. Now, you know that the soloists’ frame work (at least, in that specific bar ) is an Am and the musician will probably playing something from Am or related scale (unless its Allan Holdsworth…)

C) Transcribe more chord tones to get a good idea of what’s going on

To transcribe Jazzy chords with additional chord tones other than the essential ones (tonic, third, fifth and occasional seventh), it requires a little bit more brain power. Sometimes when the middle notes are too fuzzy to pinpoint (especially in Big Bands and huge orchestras), I start to infer the notes via the harmonic context and I sing or play some educated guesses of what additional note the band is playing. For instance, if we are dealing with a minor seventh chord, some more probable chord tones would be 9th, 11th, 13th, or other chord tones in different octaves.

Now, we already have a good idea of what most instruments are doing and where we are harmonically speaking, we can quickly transcribe the solo

D) Transcribe the whole solo with this a priori knowledge

I like to do this process because while I’m transcribing the solo, I can already gather important information such as what are the notes the musician likes to rest on, what are the scales or arpeggios he is using over the the chords (Is it a normal arpeggio or is there something different going on?). Also, For extremely quick passages and runs, I can probably figure out what the soloist is doing without transcribing individual notes through this process. (If the music is in Gm, and you listen to a flute run blasting thought and the last note sound stable, you can probably guess its a Gm scale, a Gm arpeggio, a chromatic scale or something related, resolving in a high G)

(the alternative would be transcribe note for note, maybe using a slow down software, and with complex and fast passages it gets tiring, old and in my opinion, not the best way to go about it)

Questions I ask myself when I’m transcribing solos (from obvious ones to subjective ones listed below):

• What notes are the musician playing?
• What scale choice is he using?
• Regarding arpeggios, is the musician using only major and minor ones or is it an extended arpeggio, e.g. major arpeggio with a 9th throwed in there, for instance?
• What are the notes the musician likes to rest on? what are the notes intervallic relationship with the harmonic context? Does it sound stable or full of tension?
• Can you recognize a motif or pattern (via usage of note, rhythm, interval, articulation, almost anything really), or overall idea thought the performance?
• Does the musician prefer a specific interval leap ?
• Does the solo start slow or already start quick? Does the playing speed change as the solo goes on?
• Regarding vibrato, does the musician use this technique? If so, how much is it? Is it at a constant rate or does it change during the solo?
• What are the main articulations the musician is using?
• How does the musician choose the dynamics of the chosen instrument as the solo goes on?
• Does the musician use notes or technique to surprise and engage the listener?
• What makes this particular solo so memorable for you? Even if you don’t know how to explain it in practical and objective terms (or even musical term), try to at least point out some of those qualities.
• Is there climax for the solo? How is it?
• Can you describe how the solo makes you feel from beginning to end, bar to bar?

This is a general approach that I have in mind when really digging deep in a well crafted solo. To close part I, I will go over some of my conclusions using this process with regards to Mr. Perlman’s wonderful solo . Important: I have many more conclusions but I won’t get into a lot of detail because I don’t want to make this complete dissection but I’ll get to the main points and I think musician’s should do their own listening and research for what makes them tick and want to absorb. In music, most of the times our hands and our brain needs to make their own path. Your brain has to make its own connections and rewire to the type of playing you desire, and that only comes with a lot of study, practice and ear training.

My main findings on the violin solo:

• Constant use of quick slides (Portamento, for the non guitarists) to arrive at notes. This slide is very quick and very much different then the slide technique most of us guitarists use and are used to. It sounds more like a very quick bending then a slide, due to fretless nature of the violin. When we use the slide technique from one notes to another we really make that articulation stand out. In this case, it’s almost like a ghost note. Very discreet, but it’s there. It comes from an undefined note and it’s so quick that you’ll never hear a slide out of tune
• Mr. Perlman uses many variable rates of vibrato. He doesn’t just stick to a fixed quick vibrato in a Largo tempo. In the majority of this solo, his vibrato is very quick and pitch wise, not excessive. Other instances, he uses
• Due to the nature of the violin (little neck!), he uses some big intervals that are not common at all on guitar solos, but are very pretty and important intervals used many times throughout the solo
• Regarding Tempo and performance, you can see that Mr. Perlman sometimes is ahead of the beat and sometimes a little late but obviously this is a performance decision of the soloist. You can feel that his own playing is very tight and that he controls his pace and soloing and not the music controls his playing. Most contemporary music, especially in Rock and Metal, the guitarist is confined to what the band is doing. I don’t know the details of the recording session back in the day, but I imagine it was done with John Williams conducting the orchestra and Perlman leading the way (I could be wrong, don’t quote me on this)
• Lots of masterful usage of the bow, impressive performance using dynamics, crescendo, decrescendo, accents in the best way possible

If I had to point out the largest challenge to arranging this song for the electric guitar, I’d say that the last point (bow dynamics) was the most challenging aspect. The second most challenging aspect would be the notes out of the playable range of the guitar. The third one would be building a decent distorted guitar tone, one that blends nicely with the backing track I made through virtual orchestration and had the expressiveness, sustain and soaring melodic feel of the original solo.

Part II: Arranging this masterpiece for Electric guitar

Oh boy, this was challenging. I could have simply transferred the notes of the solo to the guitar and call it a day. But I refused to do so. I really paid attention to the expressiveness of the the original solo, the articulations, little details of the playing, to be able to put a “guitaristic” spin to it.

So gathering all my conclusions regarding the points above, I started writing out, rehearsing the solo and adapting what I think would translate best to the guitar. I started to test different fretting of the same notes and what worked best due to the tessitura of each strings of the guitar (with distortion, timbre changed considerably from the same note in different strings). Some legato proved to be quite challenging to transfer to the guitar as well, especially larger leaps. So I had to work around some of those choices of what to use and what to change or exclude. I left the slide in because it was so beautiful and characteristic of this type of playing that it would be certainly missed. Most of the time I used ascending or descending slides from unspecified pitches. In some specific parts, instead of the slides, used string bending to try to emulate the violin’s portamento.

In this tune there are 4 notes out of range (high F,G,G# and A) for a 24 fret electric guitar. To Overcome this, I had three options:

1. Natural harmonics
2. Pitch bender, the whammy bar or a whammy pedal
3. Bottleneck slide

I ended up using the bottle slide for this. It’s what most sounds like the violinist fingering and the one with more expression. It also allowed me to use vibrato the way I wanted to. As most of the notes that required additional solution was part of the climax and ending of the tune, It became clear to me that I had to use an elegant solution.

Natural harmonic would be possible, but it would be impossible to do a legato or something expressive through this option.

Natural Harmonic: Here is a reminder for guitar harmonics (or any stringed instrument harmonic, as this is an acoustic property of a strings)

Basically if you divide the string in specific subdivisions by fretting lightly on the string, you will get one of the following notes: octave, major 3rd, perfect fifth, minor 7th one octave (or two) above the note that would sound if normally pressed. For instance, if you play a natural harmonic on the 12th fret of an E string, you’ll get the note E one octave above the string so in essence you play the same note of the 12 fret in a different way. If you play a natural harmonic between the 3rd and 4th fret, you’ll get a major third 2 octaves above the string.

Soure: Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_harmonic

In the graph below you can see where each note of the harmonics are in relation to the fret.

Soure: Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_harmonic

Although doable through natural harmonics, going by this method proved to be quite challenging and not worth the hassle due to the lack of expressiveness, so I eventually decided to went with the bottle slide solution and I’m glad I did.

Part III: What I learned on the performance side

Now we’re getting closer to the fun part of actually playing this wonderful solo and recording, being comfortable with its execution!

Before getting to the actual playing, I had to get a new guitar tone to make this thing happen. A standard distorted guitar solo would not make the cut. It would be too harsh, too screamy and would not play nicely with the orchestral backing track.

Guitarist imitating violin is nothing new: you can listen to Van Halen, Yngwie Malmsteen and Guthrie Govan doing very cool stuff in this direction. The problem is that this solo has a lot of sustained notes and simply using the volume pedal or the volume knob on the guitar on all notes would not make the cut also (although I do use this technique in some parts to emulate the attack and dynamics of the violin bow). Something I forgot to mention before: the ADSR envelope of a picked electric guitar is very different from the bow and violin. All the troubles with arranging and performing this solo, are my attempt to bridge this gap.

Speaking of sustain, the guitar is not the best instrument for sustain (especially if you’re playing in a clean jazz semi acoustic guitar) but in live situations with deafening volume and feedback from the amplifier this should not be a problem (if you can tame the feedback harmonics, of course). As I was planning to record this in my home studio, I could achieve some high volume to give a nice tone and amp feedback for the sustain. In practical terms, the achieved sustain was not that impressive so I had to pick some long notes anyways.

To shape the tone I used an AxeFX III (outboard guitar simulation) unit and I must have spent a lot of time shaping the a amp configuration, the gain EQ and effects such as reverb and delay (more on that later). I kind of given up on the perfect tone as my desire to put this out to the world got bigger and bigger. I am quite satisfied with the end result of the tone but I could probably achieve something better if I had more time and patience.

If this is something you would like me to get into or share it online please let me know because honestly I don’t think this would be interesting for anybody but hey maybe somebody wants to know more about the patch.

With the transcription and arrangements in place and in the way I wanted, the performance was only a matter of getting the best take, as I left little to wander on the recording process. I did, however, leave dynamics, vibrato, picking and some legato parts open to improvisation and change to the live performance.

I did not write out tabs or musical sheet, but I really explored in the arrangement phase the most appropriate fingering and string for the best tone in that particular moment. I did end up changing some things like a more emotional string bends here or there, but not that much. I just like to leave some improvisation to the recording process.

Other difficult aspect of the performance was the tempo fluctuation. I started out matching the backing track with the official music sheet (after I transcribed the whole solo, so I did not cheat ok?) and surprise, surprise! A straight click in the DAW made for a horrible backing track with little to no expression and no sense of movement. I have no maestro in this situation and obviously I could not guide the string section like the real world.

To counter this, I tried some things. First, I tried a very straightforward Tempo programming, like a constant slope in the tempo track to emulate ritardando, and stuff like that. That still made the backing track very mechanic and I was not satisfied so I tried a more radical approach.

I put the original recording on a separate track in Cubase, and started configuring the tempo track to match the original recording as close as possible, and I am quite satisfied with the my fake orchestral mock-up. Now that the backing track problem was solved it was a matter of recording the performance

I have a strong (and weird) performance anxiety. Not the type that makes me puke before playing or makes me a lot of mistakes but it comes to me as a very stealthy anxiety. It makes me lose track of my tempo playing and makes me hyperaware of everything I do. Made me feel that I’m in control of my timing but when listening to the recording, I’m obviously not.

I won’t go into this topic here because this post is already huge . I’ve written an extensive article here at medium to discuss performance anxiety and its roots and how I came to tame it. Just be aware that the performance of a complicated solo like this, with a lot of expressiveness and tempo, is not possible without a firm control of your playing and you’re internal metronome.

As mentioned before, I had to use the bottle slide to achieve notes above the 24th fret guitar region of the guitar. Now we enter in fretless instrument instrument territory. Now I know how much cellist, violist and violinist players suffer with intonation and other issues because of the lack of frets. We guitarist have it easy now. We just have to press the right fret and we’re good to go.

With ear training through transcription (and singing lessons in the past, those definitely help!), hitting the notes above the 24th fret with a bottleneck slide was not that hard but I really had to use my ear to guide me because there is little to no external reference. I could use an approximate location on the fret on the string as the picture below indicates but due to the size of my fingers and the bottle it will never be feasible to use this visual guide to get the notes right.

You could always ballpark the location, but I wouldn’t count on the visual reference to get the notes right. Little dislocation of my finger, will ruin the intonation! So I used my ear and best judgment with regards of my fingers to achieve the right information for the extended range notes. I didn’t have years of experience and honestly I’ve used the bottle slide very little but I enjoyed using this clever solution to getting to those high notes and I’ll probably implement this on my playing for future stuff.

These are the most important aspects of what I tackled and what I learned from Perlman’s solo on Schindler’s List. If talking about the virtual orchestration process (track mock-up) for creating the backing track is of any use for any one, please let me know and I could perhaps expand on the process and maybe this could be useful for other composers and virtual orchestrators.

I’ve learned a lot lifting this solo from Master Itzhak Perlman and there’s little more I can say about John Williams beautiful score, and not to mention the powerful and wonderfully movie. Being a Spielberg fan, I don’t know why or how I slept on this movie for so long!

In conclusion, I really recommend spending time listening and looking for solos that captivates you and that are not in your original instrument, it’s a pretty profound study and the benefits are really amazing. I was well advance in my process of destroying the “box-and-shape” oriented view that we guitarists tend to have(studying improvisation and singing helps too) and lifting the solo from a fretless instrument shattered this prison once and for all. Let the melodic idea guide your soloing, not the shapes we are always so used to.