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[M]

I don't do it near enough ... But here's some Benson riffage I transcribed over the weekend. This is Benson on Take 5 from the previous century.

I was transcribing from this YouTube vid':
george benson - Take Five 1976 Montreux 1986

Here's a PDF:
http://www.miwi-music.com/MusicAndMedia/M/Benson%20-%20Take%205.pdf

I was concentrating on the single-note stuff, so my apologies for the empty bars where he goes into the various double-stop things that he does.

Also, there are no slides or other performance notes annotated in the PDF (unlike my handwritten transcription!), sorry. I'm not that adept with the software, yet.

Just for your reference, bar 1 (in the PDF) is at about 1:35 in the vid, bar 54 is at about 3:11, and bar 77 is at about 3:56.

This is in 5/4, and Benson manages to really stay in the time signature. It's essentially an E dorian jam, but check out the chromaticism, and how he works it in there. My favorite bit is bars 55 through 61.

I noticed watching the vid' that the beginning of bar 54 is inaccurate. He's doing a C# - B - A pull-off, but I wasn't catching the A. Sorry about that ... The rest should be pretty good.

I can only play along with him at 2/3rds of this tempo. I guess that makes his technique at least 50% better than mine! (Not to mention his note selection, etc.) :^p

Enjoy.

[peckerwood]

thanks for this, it slipped under my radar until you linked it in another thread! love his take on this, its mastery...now i have something else to practice this week

[Jens]

Does he play the theme with only (or almost only) downstrokes?
Sorry if it's a bit of topic.

Jens
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