Levi Clay Interview - The Master of Guitar Transcription

The fastest way to stall on guitar is to confuse memory with musicianship. That is where Levi takes us, starting with the honest origin story of learning guitar for the wrong reasons, then quickly finding the right ones: teaching, curiosity, and the addictive moment when a student’s “light bulb” turns on.

We dig into what actually makes practice work. Levi explains how his Guided Practice Routines grew from years of teaching and from noticing a huge gap in modern guitar education: plenty of people say “practice these scales,” but almost nobody demonstrates how to practice in a way that keeps you engaged, tracks progress, and builds usable skills like fretboard visualization. We talk psychology, structure, and why being “results driven” does not have to mean boring or mechanical.

Then we go deep on ear training and transcription, the craft Levi is best known for. He breaks down transcription as reading in reverse, why rhythmic notation and subdivision are the real bottleneck, and why starting simple beats chasing flashy solos. We also get practical about the tools: how he uses Transcribe for looping, why Guitar Pro is still the most learner-friendly format, and why AI cannot replace the human job of deciding where the beat lives and what a phrase means. If you want a clearer process for learning songs, writing accurate tabs, and hearing music inside a full band mix, you will leave with a plan.

If this conversation helps you, subscribe, share it with a guitarist who feels stuck, and leave a review so more players can find it. What is one song you want to transcribe by ear this month?

https://www.youtube.com/c/LeviClay
https://www.fundamental-changes.com/levi-clay
https://guidedpracticeroutines.com/

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Transcript

Opening And First Guitar Influences

Steve 0:35

So Levi, tell me a little bit about what got you started in guitar playing and you know any bands you played in. Like tell me more of of all of that.

Teaching Guitar At Sixteen

Levi 0:45

Sure. So uh I think like many, many young men, uh I started playing the guitar because there was a girl, you know. Uh she was really into a lot of guitar music, and I thought I like this music too, and she liked the idea of uh guys that play guitar, so I was like, I think I can give that a go. Uh we're not together anymore, shock horror. That's not uh the good basis for a relationship. But back then, uh I was definitely the thing that really pushed me uh to want to play a lot was actually the offspring. Uh for the for the old school among us who remember websites like mxtabs.net. Uh I was a user on there for a long time, and my username on there was Noodles is the King, because I was just such a big fan uh of the offspring. I used to have a Washburn BT9 because I couldn't afford the ibners, and I covered it in duct tape so I could be just like noodles. Uh and yeah, I I remember it was her dad actually. He gave me a Total Guitar magazine, and there was an interview in there between uh Noodles, Mick Thompson of Slipknot, and Joe Satriani, and you know, I wanted to read it because of Noodles, and it introduced me to Mick Thompson's work with Slipknot and of course Joe Satriani. Both of those guys would go on to be massive influencers to me uh and sort of changed my direction a lot. But yeah, in the early days it was it was for all the wrong reasons, but then I very quickly fell in love with you know the the the study, the development, the the knowledge, and because I started teaching from quite a young age as well, the education side of things was just yeah, very, very addictive.

Steve 2:15

Yeah, and let's talk about that. So when it comes to teaching, so how old were you when you started teaching?

Levi 2:20

I started teaching when I was 16. Uh, it sort of fell into my lap. It wasn't something I'd ever really considered. I was a very good student in school, in high school, uh, but I had a troubled upbringing. Uh and I think it was what I was probably what a teacher would describe as a sympathy case, right? Uh they saw so much potential in me, but they knew I had that troubled home life. So they would try and help me where possible. And I had some amazing teachers that were really, really great in my early years. And my personal tutor um specifically, Christine Inchley, she pulled me aside one day and said, Hey Levi, I know that you're playing the guitar and and you appear to be getting really good. How would you feel about teaching my my two sons to play guitar after school? And I just was up for anything that wasn't being at home. So I was like, Yeah, absolutely. And then she said, and of course I'll pay you. And I went, I can get money for that? Yeah, fantastic, let's do it. And you know, because they were a fair bit younger than me and I knew a lot more than them, as is often the case in a uh teacher-student relationship, you get to quickly start seeing those light bulb moments in students, and you know that feeling. You see somebody go, Oh yeah, this makes sense. Seeing that feeling of them realizing their potential, like, oh, I can probably do this. It was really addictive from that age, and uh fortunately word got around in my local community, and yeah, within a year I had a good few students under my belt, and yeah, loved it ever since. It's been a lot of guys, you know, teach because they their band didn't make it, or because they need to make money on the side of doing their main passion project. In my mind, I was always going to be a teacher, and I'd maybe dabble around in in playing uh in a band, and obviously I've done that, but the passion absolutely has always been education. Love it.

Practice Plans And Learning Psychology

Steve 4:03

So tell me like philosophically, because I love watching some of your videos uh when you talk about theory and you'll talk about triads, you'll talk about a lot of these things. Um so if you have a student who's really, really interested in in learning how to play and they practice a lot, that sort of thing. So what is kind of your approach in in terms of like setting up a practice plan for them? Like, what do you what do you find most value in when you're setting that sort of thing up, if that makes sense?

Levi 4:34

I think uh my teaching has changed so much because my playing has changed so much. I've learned so much more about uh practice and different people's approach to practice and the philosophy of practice in the last few years since starting my my guide to practice routines website. I think that the main thing is more psychology things that I need to uh establish with the students. I have come to the realization that I think so many people, myself included, when I started playing, uh my entire approach to learning the guitar was completely wrong. It was I thought that I was learning to play the guitar, I thought I was learning to play music, but that wasn't what I was doing at all. I was remembering how to play the guitar. Everything that I did was I was picking up a magazine and I was trying to remember as much tab as I possibly could. And so every time I picked up the instrument to play something, it was a demonstration of memory, it was a demonstration of this solo that I've remembered. And so many people play that way, and it's because they don't consider any other way to play, they just assume, oh, that's how you must learn an instrument. Now I don't think of myself so much as teaching people to play the guitar, I teach people how music works and how to connect your inner self with the music that you love and so you can understand it, and then treating the instrument as the conduit for that, the thing that we use to get the internal into the external. So, yeah, I think having people realize that learning the guitar isn't just about memorising a bunch of shapes, it's about forming connections with things, which is strangely esoteric, and I'm not wild on esoteric approaches to things, but I've become more pragmatic in my teaching as I've become older, much more results driven. Uh, I don't want to make people run scales if it makes them run away from music. I want them to be connected to the things they play.

Steve 6:19

Tell me a little more about your new website.

Levi 6:21

So, guided practiceroutines.com, uh we we launched in August last year, uh, but prior to that I'd been running a Patreon page for almost 10 years now, and that was doing great. Uh I had a podcast as well, and my podcast host, uh Mike McLaughlin, who plays in plays in the uh brutal death metal band Party Cannon, he had to do a US tour. So he was out for three weeks, and while he was gone, I was like, Well, I need something to do while you're gone, so I'm gonna make some new content for my Patreon page. And I launched a project called Weekly Guided Practice Routines. And this was purely taken from the fact that about six years ago I started to learn to play the piano, and I was introduced to the idea of daily practic daily guided practice sessions, and they were great, they supercharged my practice, they kept me motivated, but I felt that the daily aspect of it was uh was just too much for for me. So I wanted to create something that was weekly, um, and essentially, you know, thinking of Frank Gambali's old instructional uh the chop builder video, it was so much fun to present uh education or practice, because of course learning and practice are two slightly different things, uh, to present the practice side of things as something that you can do with your instructor. I think practice is something that a lot of teachers they tell their students what to practice, but very rarely do they show them how to practice it, and almost never do they do the practice with them. And of course, you don't want that in a lesson, you want to learn some stuff, but yeah, I think the the idea of having long structured practice sessions where we sit down and do the practice together. Our tagline, of course, is practice together and progress faster. Uh, that was the idea. Patreon did great, it blew up the uh guided practice routines concept did really, really well. I started to notice other people that had clearly seen it doing well starting to do similar things on YouTube. Some conversations were had with other people or other companies that uh once or twice even started to use the phrase guided practice routines, and I was like, come on, man, like I know you've seen my stuff, like come on. Um yeah, and yeah, it just grew to a point where Patreon was not the best place to deliver content like that because Patreon is so somewhere blog focused. And when I got to 150 weeks on Patreon, every Monday, nine o'clock, the the routine went up. If you wanted to find routine number 76, or you wanted to find a routine on the diminished scale or whatever, so much scrolling was involved. So I got uh involved with some people that could build a really good big website for it. Sat down and filmed a whole bunch more content, and yeah, we launched in August with about 200 hours of content, video content, uh giving you all of the guided practice routine method, because of course there is a learning method there as well. And uh yeah, my sort of teaching philosophy around things like fretboard visualization and the practice of the mental aspect rather than just the physical aspect. It's been a wild ride, and you know, growth has been good, but we could always do with more people knowing about it.

Steve 9:20

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, and I'll certainly talk about it as well. For those of you that that may not know Levi, so uh Levi and I have known each other just around the social media uh realm for a while, but uh Levi has been one of my go-to guys when it comes to social media, going out on YouTube. When I'm looking for new things to learn, I'll I'll go to him. We're gonna get into the the biggest thing for me with with Levi is the transcription ear training stuff. Like he is, if I dare say, uh a master when it comes to it, because I I don't think there's anybody else out there that touches you when it comes to those skills. And I'm not diminishing your other skills because you have a lot of a lot of skills, but but that is that is by far and above the the the most amazing part. So uh we're gonna get to that. I I just want to finish this up though. So you've done work with a bunch of companies. Like you've worked with uh Lick Library, you've done a bunch of stuff with them. I know you've got a bunch of books. I've I've actually bought a few of those. So let's let's talk a little bit about some of that stuff too, that you've done and and how you got involved in that and um some of the things that you've created.

Levi 10:27

Yeah, I think everything that you said there about transcription being my thing is totally fair. Um it is. It's I I practiced really, really hard and I wanted to be a great guitar player. Uh, and my early professional work was alongside guys like Andy James and Martin Golding or Guthrie Govan, like the teaching events that these guys were at, and I was getting that work as a shred guitar player, you know. Um and I I felt that I was good and I felt that I had potential to keep doing that, but then I'd sit and watch an Andy James masterclass, and I'm just like, why am I competing with this? Like, I need to play to my strengths, I need to do a thing, I need to focus on the thing that I'm uniquely good at and focus on the skills because if you want to learn to play technique, I can point you in the direction of a hundred teachers that teach technique wonderfully. And I just don't think that even when I was a good player, I don't think I offered anything unique in that area. Whereas the ear training and transcription side of things, I found it very enjoyable to actually do, and uh so I so I did a lot of it. And to to answer your question, the that work with places like Lick Library came from my initial passion for sitting and transcribing alone at home for my own development, uh, primarily because the stuff that I wanted to learn wasn't available in tab books, so I had to work it out. When I had that realization actually, that light bulb moment that wait, you can just try and work songs out, you don't need to find a tab on the internet. That was uh that was a good feeling. And yeah, I reached out to Tom Quayle initially at one point. He launched, when he launched his very first products on his website, they were audio lessons with uh a text write up, and uh that was it. There was no transcriptions of any of the solos that he played. So I reached out to Tom and was like, Hey Tom, love your work. Um I bought all the products, I think they're great, I think they're missing transcriptions, I would be happy to do them for you. And he was kind enough to uh take me up on that and post the transcriptions as a product on his site and mention my name in there, saying these were all done by Levi. So that was really, really helpful. And same with Andy James. I did a lot of work with uh Andy James and both of those guys, I owe them a lot. Uh they were working at Lick Library, of course, and the owner of Lick Library, Kim Waller, was constantly asking, like, oh, we need a guy to do this, or we need somebody who's experienced in this particular area. And both Tom and Andy were like, cool, Levi, Levi's the guy. Um so I went in there and I worked with Lick Library for yeah, five. I was in in I still work with them, but I I was in their office every day for about five years. Uh initially, as product specialist, I was a consultant on the creation of a lot of products. I would work as uh, you know, when guys were in and they had theory questions or I we wanted to tighten up explanations of things, like they would ask me, what do you think the best description of this chord is? Things like that, where it's very much behind the scenes, and then eventually I got the opportunity to sit in front of the camera and film some stuff. And I think I'm at 20 courses for Lick Library now, which is um yeah, yeah, really cool. So uh it was yeah, Andy James, Tom Quail. Uh but like I say, came from transcription. That was that was it. Transcription. Yeah.

How Transcription Became The Superpower

Steve 13:33

So let's go into that then. So how did you start figuring out I mean I I don't even know where to start with this because there's there's so much cool stuff to talk about with this. So what how did you start figuring out that you had uh uh you know, most of us are at an age where when we first started playing, like I'm I'm 55 right now. So when I started playing, there was no other way to play in Fargo, North Dakota other than by ear because the guitar magazines weren't around my area at that point in time. They were just kind of getting going uh when I first started playing guitar. So you took a record and you put it on, you listen to a few seconds and you tried to figure it out and go back and do it over and over and over. I would wreck the grooves in my record from picking it up and putting it down over and over and over. Like, how did you start this whole process of developing the ear that you've had that that or you have that then became this transcription thing that you do?

Levi 14:25

Well, I think I'm really like old-fashioned when it comes to the music that I listen to and uh approaches and teaching and the transcription side of things is uh a yearning for what you're talking about there, right? You the an entire generation of players, like all the great jazz musicians that I listened to, none of them used software to transcribe. Uh many of them didn't even have the chance to use records. They would go and see somebody live and they would hear lots of things and they'd sing those things and they'd go home and they'd they'd work them out. And of course, all of that has been lost because of the uh proliferation of tablature in magazines or books or the internet or whatever it happens to be. Now, I should be clear, I'm not against any of that stuff. I think that's all accessibility tools, and accessibility I think is incredibly important. Uh I put up a Bach tab just recently on my YouTube, and a lot of people were criticizing, like, you can't post Bach without notation. And I'm like, but you should, because you shouldn't gatekeep the music. Like, there will be guys in their late 50s, 60s with a wife, two kids, they don't have the time to learn to read and they only get to play the guitar half an hour a week, but they love Bach. Like, it's our duty as people that are passionate about music to give that level of accessibility to people that um that that really want it. But I also think, well, obviously, I know that the value that comes from having the confidence to develop your ear and use it as a tool to work things out is a good thing to do. I obviously, very analytical mind. Uh I always joke with students in new lessons. I'm like, so so what is it you do for a living? Uh are you uh you're an engineer, right? Because I would say a good 40% of my uh of my students are all engineers. They must there's something about the way I I talk and describe things. They're like, oh, this appeals to me, this man appeals to me. Uh so yeah, I had the analytical mind, and the story goes, I mentioned you know, I could only learn things from a tab book or a magazine. And my favourite band at the time was Symphony X, and I still love Symphony X. I think Michael Romeo is just like tip-top prog metal guitar player. Uh, but there were no tab books, there were no tabs in magazines, and back in the early internet days, there were no internet tabs for Symphony X, certainly no good ones. So I went on eBay and I managed to find some Symphony X tab books, and I paid way over the odds to buy these things, like put myself in debt to buy these things. Uh, and they turned up and I was devastated, right? Because they were bootlegs, they were fake. And when I say fake, what I really mean is somebody had made them themselves in PowerTab. Uh, and I was so devastated at feeling like I'd been ripped off. It took me a good six months or so to actually have the light bulb moment where I went, Oh, hang on a minute, somebody just made these. Initially it was, oh no, somebody just made these, but when it occurred to me, wait, I could sit down and actually do this, I thought, let's give it a go. And I just essentially tried to reverse engineer all of the things that I knew about reading. Because transcription I always describe to my students as reading in reverse. If you can see a thing on the page and know how it's going to sound, then you should be able to hear a thing and know what it should look like. Uh, if you work on one, you'll develop the other. Uh so I put a lot of time into it. And it's the thing I really noticed with it in teaching it, it's an addictive thing when students get the bug because they they evidently see it the same way I do. It's like solving puzzles. I I love that feeling of starting with a blank page and then at the end of the session you've completely deciphered a piece of music and and you've tried you know done everything to make it look as visually appealing as like a learning resource. Puzzle solving to me, and I you know, I'm in my past times, my hobbies outside of music are all puzzle-related things. Um board games, video games that are very strategy-based, like I'm I'm super into puzzle solving. Yeah, it's it's that was the reason. It was a necessity wanting to play a lot of music that wasn't available, but also realizing uh the benefits that it was giving me. Because I and you you mentioned doing things from vinyl. For me, it wasn't vinyl. Uh I can imagine how hellish that was. I had a similarly hellish experience because I in my early days I was using Windows Media Player, and so you know, you're playing a track and you're like trying to hear like just one note in a solo, and then you click the bar and scrub it back, and you have to wait, you know, five, ten seconds for that bit to come back again. And you're not gonna wear out the the MP3 doing that, thankfully. But you the uh thinking about the amount of wasted hours that I've had waiting for the notes that I'm coming for, it's like astonishing. But you know, it's it's all been great. It's been good for the year, and yeah.

A Step By Step Transcription Method

Steve 18:55

Yeah. So when you okay, so let's dive into the process a little bit. So you're given a a song that you're gonna do, or you've you've you've chosen a song that you're gonna do. So do and I'm not trying to have you give away anything, but uh even if you did, I don't think there's anybody that could could touch what you do anyway. But so when when you've got a song and you're gonna approach this, how do you start? Like, is there a software that you because in the early days you didn't have software, you just like if you were doing a Momstein lick or or whatever it might be, or a Symphony X lick, how are you how are you figuring out how to do it if it's so fast or there's there's you know, you're you're listening to a wall of sound here and you're trying to pick this thing out. Like, how do you how do you do that?

Choosing Fingerings Through Player Research

Levi 19:38

At its core, the question you've asked there is the same thing that you will see from students who come to you to learn to play the guitar. They say, I want to learn to play this Eddie Van Halen solo, I want to learn to play this mountain solo, and you're like, Okay, cool. Um, can you play the riff in the song? And they're like, No, but I want to learn the solo. And you're like, you're not ready for that. It's too you you need to build up to that. So the the method for the really fast and advanced stuff is the same as the slow stuff, just in more granular detail. Like I said, being able to read, very important, being able to subdivide the beat. That's the people say they transcribe, and often what they really mean is they mean they work things out by ear. The actual transcription aspect is right there in the word. Trans means to change, scribe means to write. You have to take it from its audible form and write it out for it to be a transcription. Not that there's anything wrong with the working things out, that's actually the important skill, but the thing that gets in the way of people's ability to write music down, especially in modern software, is they don't really comprehend rhythmic notation. Uh, so you have to work on that. And when you think of an advanced lick, if you think of uh a Malmsteen solo or whatever it happens to be, so complex tuplets, at its core, you can get really microscopic and zoom in and go, okay, this is the length of the beat, and I can hear that there's seven notes in this beat, and I can either hear that there's seven equally spaced notes or roughly equally spaced notes, or I can hear that it's a group of four in the first half of the bar and a group of three in the second half of the bar. At its core, that's a much more complicated version of reading just basic eighth note, sixteenth note rhythms. That's where you have to put the time. Like, you don't start out with that. What I will say is there is software that can help you, but never let the software do the work for you. So I know there's a lot of people that are convinced I'm going to be put out of a job by AI, and AI cannot transcribe. How how could it? Like, realistically, how could it? I people just don't comprehend the complexity of what music is. It's a uniquely human expression, feeling. My dog can hear sound, but my dog doesn't understand the concept of the beat. The beat isn't a thing, it's not a tangible thing that you can listen to a recording and say, aha, I can see the beat. It's something we perceive sometimes people argue about where the beat is. Sometimes people feel things at half-time tempo when other people don't. Transcription is about it's notating what happened and when it happened. And that concept of being able to conceptualize, hear a phrase, and understand where a thing happened in time. I'm not gonna say that it's uniquely human, even though I did say it's uniquely human. I just don't think the the current AI transcription tools, they you need to tell them what the tempo is. And it's like if you need to tell the thing what the tempo is, why on earth would you trust it to tell you any of the notes in there? Like this is a complicated thing. So using tools, yes, I do use tools. I use a piece of software called transcribe. Uh it doesn't do the work for you. The reason I use it, is it's a substitute for Windows Media Player. You know, it means that I can put the audio in there and I can mark out where all the bars are, which means I can then click and drag sections and loop them very effectively. I do use the slowdown feature in there for really, really fast things, but you realistically want realistically want to use tools like that as little as possible. I again have students they're like, oh, I've been working on this solo. I threw it into this AI thing and got it to isolate just the guitar, so now I can listen to just the guitar. And I'm like, but why? Like I appreciate that you feel that's made it easier, but there comes a point where we have to address the fact that you're unable to listen to a band and focus in on the part that you want. That's part of ear training. It's an important part of ear training. Like when I'm doing ear training with students, the first thing that we look at is bass notes. If you can't listen to a song, like a pop song, and hear what the bass is doing, just hum the bass notes of the chords. Like, why are you worried about what the solo is? You can't hear the movement. And we hear everything in relation to the bottom. And if you can't hear that, like what good is it? And again, you can't just go, okay, well, I'll get some software to just isolate the bass. Well, yeah, of course you're going to be able to hear it if you isolate just that part. No, we have to train ourselves to be able to hear just that thing. To bring it back to what you asked, I think the process and the tips in this area are don't worry about the complicated stuff. The first things I'm always getting people to transcribe are Hank Marvin solos. Like very simple, what I always describe as piano playing on the guitar. That's somebody that just took a simple melody and how would I play that at the piano? You know, no bending, no expression or anything. That's how Hank played. It was very simple. His rhythmic ideas were very simple, but very defined. You can hear the melodies very clearly, rhythms uh easy enough to write out. So, yeah, doing that and just counting and reading, and always asking yourself when you've written it out, can I look at this? And if I had never heard the music, if I played what's on the page, will what comes back to me sound like what I need it to? Not pressing play in the software and having it play your transcription to you, because again, that's you just relying on a tool. So try and use a few less tools because it's the it's the struggle, the adversity that helps improve your ear.

Steve 25:10

That's awesome. So when I was a kid, I I must have been 11th, 11th grade, something like that. I was I was into Vai and Malmsteen and all that stuff because that's that's what I grew up listening to. And I remember buying this Jerry Lane Malmsteen book. And I can't remember the transcriber, but I actually met Wolf Marshall. And so I met I went out for supper with him at some point, and we we had a conversation about this. But I I bought this book and I was trying to learn how to play and it was written in a positional sense, right? And it was sometime later I uh Yngwie came to Fargo with Queensryche and he opened and I was right in the front row, he comes running out and he's playing, and I immediately see him doing more of this. And I was like, like this is like So that's how he does this sort of thing. Not I'm not saying he couldn't do this, but it was it was a a revelation for me to be able to actually see him and see how things were moving across the guitar this way, so you could stay on a single string and do this sort of thing. So when you're transcribing, how do you decide whether or not something that you're figuring out is going to be, you know, positional or it's gonna move like how do you make those kind of choices?

Levi 26:28

Well, I'm glad that we got to mention Wolf Marshall because he's one of the important names in uh in the proliferation of guitar transcriptions. Uh so sh props to Wolf. Uh but yeah, they he did the best with what he the tools that he that he had. Um and you find that with a lot of tab books actually, like Mike from Master the Guitar, he's made a lot of great videos making fun of some of those old tab books, uh poking fun at them rather than you know really insulting people, and ultimately a lot of those things were done by piano players, people that didn't play the guitar with any real expertise.

Steve 26:58

Wolf told me.

When Theory Meets Wrong Notes

Levi 26:59

Yes. So they would the notation would often be good, but then when it came to putting the thing in tab, you know, the expertise of how a guitar player would play it wasn't there. So to really get to the the crux of the the Malmstein issue, some people make the assumption that, oh, I guess you must just be able to hear when an E is played on the high E string versus when it's played on the B string. Eh you can when something's like clean guitar in isolation, but it's not reliable with distortion, it's not reliable at speed. It's genuinely quite impressive, actually, when I'm uh transcribing some things and I hear like Jack Gardner, I've just done Jack Gardner's latest record in he the amount of times that boy is soloing on the 20th fret and above on the low three strings on the EA and D strings. I'm like, how does it not sound like mud? Like anytime I play the guitar there, it sounds awful. Surely you're not doing that there. And he's like, Yeah, I I just followed the position down there and it, you know, it works. I I think the answer isn't to try and convince people that you have some sort of magic skill. The usual answer is research, right? I can transcribe all of that Malmstein stuff that you talk about there because I know in depth how Malmstein does things. So if I'm transcribing a Malmstein thing, there's the way I know he plays. And that means that there are certain players that you are much happier to transcribe than others. If it's anything from that Shrapnel school of thought, that's what I grew up on. So like I'm I'm actually in talks at the moment to do um uh Tony McAlpine's Edge of Insanity album for uh the uh anniversary release of that. Like I know most of Tony's playing, so that all makes sense to me. Whereas if somebody came to me and said, uh I'd love you to do this Holdsworth record, I'm gonna pass on that. And not because I don't love it, though to be fair, I don't love it. Uh it's because I approach Alan's fingerings and patterns, they're so alien to me. And the amount of time that would have to go into researching stuff like that, you you don't come to me, you go to someone like Brett Stein. He knows that stuff, like, and I don't, it's just not my area. So, yeah, generally speaking, if I'm doing a transcription and positional stuff feels important, we're so lucky now. I can go on YouTube and I can watch live videos of a player, and I feel that's the way to do things. I've got a video coming out with Troy Grady in uh, well, whenever he gets done editing it, and we're talking about Joe Pass. Uh, Joe's a player that I know he's playing like really, really in-depth. And I did this transcription for Troy that we're doing some analysis on, and there's an area where the camera is behind Joe, so you can see the back of his neck, you can't see how he's fingering things. And I've transcribed this thing, and Troy was like, Can you just check the fingerings on that? Because the way you've written that feels quite awkward, and I don't know why he'd play it that way. And then he sent me a video of how he would play it, and I'm like, the way you're playing it absolutely makes sense, but I'm telling you, Joe didn't play it like that because Joe has these weird idiosyncrasies about the way he plays, and because I've studied so much of his playing, I'm I can be a confident authority in a situation like that. So, yeah, the answer is as with anything, how can you be confident when teaching a student a thing? Experience and authority, and yeah, you put in the research, you learn about a player, and I think that's the great thing about it. Like sometimes you you find a player who has a slightly unorthodox way of doing things. Like a great example from that shrapnel era would be Vinnie Moore. I think he's an underrated gem of the shrapnel scene, um, just an astonishingly good player, and um so articulate in his picking, like just a really monstrous player. But when you look at the way he teaches like three note per string patterns, he doesn't shift up as he does them. So he gets that note doubling on the G string moving over to the B string. And that crops up in his lines. And knowing that, having watched those instructional videos when I'm transcribing Vinnie Moore, and I've done a fair share of Vinny Moore, you have things like that in mind. When you hear things like Eddie Van Halen doing the wide stretch thing, where you're ascending Legato, you're moving up a string, but the note actually goes down, like you have to know the player's way of doing things. And the yeah, the only answer is research. Put in the time.

Steve 31:03

Right. So here's another one for you. Because you have the ear that you have, and you you're very knowledgeable in theory. So when you're figuring out something, do you ever battle with yourself? Like when you're when you're figuring out and you're like, well, that note's not wrong, though. Like he's actually playing something that shouldn't he should have played this instead. Like, does that ever happen for you?

Guitar Pro And Essential Tools

Levi 31:23

All the time. Uh and that that doesn't upset me when that happens, because uh I know people make mistakes in their playing. Uh there are some players I work with who aren't theory guys, like Andy James, he'll be the first to tell you he's not a theory guy. Andy is a very pattern-based guy. He knows a little bit of theory, he knows enough to get by, but it's not like deep understanding of jazz harmony or anything like that. So from time to time, when Andy's putting a harmony line in for one of his lines, he'll just play, you know, patterns higher, but actually he's playing the wrong pattern, he's thinking from the wrong key center. So there'll be one of the harmony units will be wrong. And it's yeah, it's not about correcting, it's just about writing it the way it was. Um, and he's he's fine with it, so that's no issue. The icky one is when you have to tell a player, this is what you played, and they say, Yeah, no, I didn't, and then you're like, No, but you did. Listen, we can isolate it and and hear that's what you played. So we just need to make the decision as to whether or not we want to write it the way you played it, or we want to the wrong what we want to write it the way you intended to play it. Um I don't I never mind whichever way it is. Like, if you want to present the intention, that kind of makes sense. Sometimes I'll do that when I'm transcribing because I do think like a great example of it is quantizing. Players' rhythmic time feel is not always perfectly evenly spaced. Like we rush phrases, and I'm a big jazz guy now. Uh Pat Martino is my guy, and I think he's just got the greatest swing feel, and it's the greatest swing feel because he can push and pull so effortlessly between super straight and then gradually swinging it. I think it's a I I love that, and it it doesn't lend itself well to notation. There has to be a degree of interpretation in uh in a transcription, and we're trying to make things look good on the page. So it's that, it's like you you have to understand when you're making a transcription for somebody, what is what is it I'm doing for them? Do they want a a detailed record of what happened? Do they want to be able to press play and have the MIDI sound exactly like the record of every little timing nuance? Or am I creating a learning resource for somebody? Something that they can study, something that they can sit down with a metronome or however their approach to learning is and give them something that's a useful practice tool. Because the amount of people that come to me and they're like, oh, I saw that Malmstein transcription you did. How do I practice playing 11 notes in a beat? Like, how do you count that to a metronome? And you're like, do you think Malmstein counted 11 there while he was playing? Like that yeah, just it's a learning tool. I'm showing you like the pattern that he's playing. Because if you wrote really what somebody plays, like the all manner of like nested tuplets happen and like stuff that I couldn't begin to count to a metronome to to practice. So um yeah, it it ha it does happen when you find things that are like wrong notes or uh but yeah, you're trying to by and large, you know, I'm an educator, so I'm trying to make educational resources for people.

Steve 34:14

Right. So doing what you do then, obviously something like Guitar Pro has got to become essential for you. You've got to learn the ins and outs of that to be able to then write down or or notate what it is that's that's coming out of your coming out of your brain. So when it comes to stuff like that, is there anything else? Like is Guitar Pro what you use mostly?

What He Listens To Now

Levi 34:39

Yeah, I I mean I'm looking at my computer now and I also have Dorico loaded up as which is more traditional like score writing software. Um what what you I guess you would call engraving software. Uh Guitar Pro is I joke about it. Like I know the guys at Guitar Pro and I work with them um on on stuff. So uh there's no there's no hatred or anything. But I the joke is always that Guitar Pro is made by musically illiterate people for musically illiterate people. It's not it it bugs me because it is the software I use. It's definitely the piece of software that I choose to use because of the again, the end user accessibility. It's so good for users. Uh, but for anybody that takes notation incredibly seriously, Guitar Pro isn't as flexible as it should, not even close to as flexible as it should be, and they kind of laugh at you for it, but I'm not willing to make that compromise of doing everything in something like Dorico or Sibelius, where the the process of writing a thing out is slower, and also the end product that you deliver to somebody is a PDF file that they can't press play on or set loops up in and use as an actual practice tool. So yeah, uh Guitar Pro I use extensively and I have a love-hate relationship with it, but I've been using it every day for like 20 years. So it I can't hate it that much. It is it is an essential piece of kit. It's only two things I recommend people have guitar pro and transcribe. Uh people think they can now not get transcribe because you can import audio files into Guitar Pro. Again, sorry Guitar Pro, that feature is a great idea, but the way people think you should use it, it doesn't, it's not a substitute for being able to set up loops and hear audio in your in your other software. I put my audio and guitar pro at the end and then sort of sync the file. Yeah, so guitar pro, ooh, love it, but sorry for throwing shade at you guys.

Steve 36:28

Makes sense though. So tell me, what are some of your current favorite guitar players, bands? Like what are you what are you listening to these days?

The Long Game And Legacy

Levi 36:36

That is such a cool question. I used to, when I interviewed her, I interview people a lot. I'd or I would always ask that question in my early interviewing career, and then I stopped asking it because I hated the answers I was getting. Not because not for any reason other than it became very apparent to me that all of these famous people I interviewed didn't listen to any guitar players anymore. You know, they're like, I've not heard a new record in 25 years, I'm too busy making them. And you're like, okay. Uh and so I stopped asking because I felt that it was it reflected badly on them. And now I'm going to give you an answer that reflects really badly on me. Uh, but hopefully in a positive way. So I did mention six years ago I started playing the piano. That is now my main passion. Like harmony is expressed much more easily on the piano, so I tend to listen to a lot more piano players than I do guitar players. What I've also really learned again, well, learned is the wrong way of putting it. I mentioned offspring at the start of this interview, and I started playing music for songs. I started playing for songs. I got distracted by technique, as we all do, uh, and technique is a great thing to practice because you can measure your progress, but you you can't really measure your progress and your ability to uh learn songs or write songs unless you're sitting with a stopwatch to time how long did it take me to work that song out. But at its core, the thing that really speaks to me in music is not a guitar solo, it's a great song, it's a great lyric. I could sit and point out songs that I listen to where there's a lyric in there where I'm like, that's a that's a beautiful lyric. Like uh I I'm listening to a band called Lake Street Dive a lot at the moment, and they have a song, uh Is it being a woman? It's in one of their songs from the from uh again, I forget the name of the album, and we'll come to this. Uh but the lyric is uh uh e even the weatherman gets caught in the rain sometimes as a way of expressing the idea of people who are confident can still be wrong about things, and I thought it was a really poetic lyric. I like I get caught up in lyrics more so than guitar playing uh now and all the bands that I am listening to, modern bands that aren't piano focused, uh bands like Lawrence, um Lake Street Dive, I mentioned, uh Sammy Ray and the Friends, and another band that I listened to. If you pulled a gun out right now and put it to my head and said, Levi, who is the guitar player in any of those bands? I cannot tell you because I don't care. And I don't mean that as a mark of disrespect on the people that play in those bands. I hope that they take it as a mark of respect. I'm not focusing on your playing, I'm focusing on your music. So it's the it's the song side of things. Uh but from a piano perspective, it's always gonna be Randy Newman. Randy Newman is is my guy, like initially because of all the you know Pixar music and film music, but I love Randy's like dark satirical take on a very uh twisted view on on society uh and some really yeah questionable lyrics at times, and and I like that. So uh I'm listening to great piano playing and and very dark satirical political commentary.

Steve 39:36

It's funny, I spent my whole childhood being a metalhead and listening to Maiden and everything else. Now I go back and spend most of my time listening to Devo and you know whatever it might be, the Suicide Boys or whatever it might be, but um But yeah, it's kind of fun. So tell me what's what's what's the future for you? What do you what do we see Levi doing in five years?

Levi 39:59

Oh I'm gonna say the same thing that I have realized that I've done for the last 10, 15, 15 years now. Um I don't know, I'm gonna adapt. I think that's the always the key thing, right? It's looking at the market you're in, not complaining about how it used to be and why it isn't that way anymore. I remember when I put out uh a crowdfunding campaign for my album that I put out like 10 or so years ago, I got some shady comments from guys that worked at Lick Library where they were essentially saying, like, well, back in my day, you know, we didn't go cap in hand asking people for money to make an album as a way of like looking down on the way the industry was at the time. But that's how the music industry was uh when I put that album out. And I would also like to point out, sir, you in fact did go cap in hand asking people for money, you just called them record labels, and you had to pay back all of the money that you took from them. So who's the real mug, you know? I think it's always about adapting to the way the industry is. And you I mentioned AI, like I'm monitoring it, I'm keeping an eye on what that means for business. I realistically, if I'm completely honest, and reveal my my grand plans to people, I want to keep growing guided practice routines. I am working in conjunction with some great players about bringing them in to film some great content, uh, content that I wouldn't consider myself an authority teaching. You know, if who do you go to for to learn Legato technique? Do you go to me or do you go to Tom Quayle? Like, don't listen to me when it comes to Legatos, not I'm not the master there. Uh so I want to be able to bring more guys in and work with more guys. And uh if that means traveling to people, you know, uh there's so many great players all over the world, it would be great to just be able to pick up my camera rig and because I do consider myself uh you know an expert in the education space. And the thing that I never really get to talk about is yes, I've released 21 books for fundamental changes and I've done the 20 courses for Lick Library. But I did mention that you know I was instrumental in helping some of those courses happen at Lick Library. Fundamental Changes, I have played a part in probably 75 to 100 other book projects. I have helped several like companies create product. I have worked as ghostwriter, a ghostwriter in magazines for artists. I have worked as a ghostwriter on books, like taking material that people make that they can't turn into educational material and me go, okay, let me piece this all together. I would happily do a lot more of that and keep working with you know the greatest names in the industry because long gone are my dreams of people thinking of me as isn't he one of the greatest guitar players of all time? I don't want to be remembered as being one of the greatest guitar players of all time. I want to be remembered as the guy that helped as many people as I could. There you go. That's right. Learn to play, you know, uh learn to or helping people to make money. Like if I can do that, then that's that's a good feeling. And if some of it trickles my way, then great.

Steve 43:01

But Well, Levi, thanks. Thanks so much for your time today. It's been really nice talking to you.

Levi 43:07

No, I really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on.