I’ve been transcribing professionally for 15 years, but it hasn’t always been that way.
 
When I started playing guitar, I learned from magazines. If it wasn’t in a magazine or a tab book, you just couldn’t learn a song right? Well a few years went by and I really wanted to learn some Symphony X, but there were no tab books! Then I found some on eBay! I was very excited and bid far too much money for a 16 year old and when they turned up, I was devastated. They were bootlegs. Some guy had just made them in powertab and bound them like books. I’d been ripped off!
 
Then it dawned on me… some guy just MADE these? Hey… why can’t I do that?
 
So I sat down and learned to transcribe. And it was addictive. Before I knew it, transcription was as much a part of my music life as playing the guitar was.
 
Transcribing was awesome because it allowed me to learn fusion, a style of music that there were no good lessons on at the time. A real game changer for me was transcribing Guthire Govan’s Erotic Cakes shortly after it came out. I spent weeks on this project and word got around that I’d done it. I found people talking about me on forums, and it wasn’t long before people started emailing me and asked me to transcribe solos and songs for them. Before long I was paying my rent doing it.