Prolific Transcriber

[dbwhitaker]

The New York Times published an interesting article this week about a kid named George Collier that's been doing a lot of transcriptions and posting them on YouTube. A handful of trombone solos are included. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/arts ... =url-share

Here's one example:

[Finetales]

George Collier is one of many on YouTube, but probably the most popular. The trend started several years ago (possibly with George himself?), and it's a simple formula: take a video, put your transcription of it on the bottom, clickbait title. Bonus points if you put a bunch of editorial comments in the transcription.

Like most YouTube transcribers, George Collier's transcriptions are never entirely accurate, and often not particularly close. But they do a great job of exposing lesser-known musicians and performances to a much wider audience, so I think it's a net positive. Also, good for George for finding a successful niche and maintaining it at that age.

There is a trombone-focused transcription channel of this type, Rob Egerton Jazz Transcriptions. For my money, the highest-quality (still not completely accurate, but closer than most and on much more complicated material than solo lines) clickbaity transcription channel is Timothy Gondola, who transcribes exclusively piano/keyboard content as far as I know.

The only YouTube transcriptions I've seen that are pretty much perfect are June Lee's beautiful transcriptions of Jacob Collier, which are masterfully done. Not to mention that one mistake here and there in dozens of transcriptions of that incredibly dense and complicated material is inevitable!

[mgladdish]

Yeah, June Lee's transcriptions are brilliant.

I was looking for a transcription of Jacob's version of Overjoyed and found George Collier's. It wasn't even close. So now I'm doing it myself. This shit is *hard*!