Transcribing Notes From John Neil (Head Transcriber)
Old Time Rock and Roll – Bob Segar and the Silver Bullet Band
You may recognize these words: now, Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers, and they’ve been known to pick a song or two (yes they do). This is one of those songs, partly recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Alabama with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section. For the transcription, I took some of these parts from stems found on YouTube, which actually play past where the song fades out, so I did the parts true to this. So the ending doesn’t all come at the same place for every instrument … it’s sort of when they stopped playing in the session.
Melody
A high melody for Bob Seger (it was later performed lower as noted below). The range is A#3 to C#5 (with one lower pickup note that goes by so fast, I omitted that in the range checker).
Download the Melody Music Here
Keyboard
A good rock piano part. I was able to find an audio stem that had the piano alone for parts of the song – panned a little right, but for the rest it also had the rhythm guitars panned almost entirely left and right. Transcribing the rest was a 3 part process. I put that through an eq that cut everything on the left and right sides, and left what’s in the center of the stereo field. I transcribed what I heard there, then refined it by listening to the normal stem, then finally, confirmed/corrected it by listening to the actual song. Each way sounded a bit different, and in the end the way it sounds in the song won out of course (but I got more detail from the other 2). The left hand was particularly difficult to pick out, but what I have here should work good.
Download the Keyboard Sheet Music Here
Rhythm Guitar/Lead Guitar
I had the lead guitar do all the fill in licks, as well as the guitar, and sax solo. It’s basically a solo through the entire song :).
Download the Lead Guitar Tab Here
The rhythm guitar is a mixture of 2 rhythm guitar parts – one left and one right. I did the fretting closer down the neck, doing the B and C# chords with roots on the A string, as opposed to going up the fret with roots on the E string. I’ve seen it done both ways, and live, the guitar parts are arranged differently, and they seem to be all over the place. And by 2014 they changed the key from F# down to C# anyway.
Download the Rhythm Guitar Tab Here
Strum/Ukulele
There isn’t a strumming nor ukulele part in this song, so a part was made up that will also work for solo performances.
Download the Strum Tab Here
Download the Ukulele Tab Here
Bass
A moving 8th note part with lots of syncopations.
Download the Bass Tab Here
Drums
A pretty basic drum part with lots of open hi-hats. There was no drum stem that I could find, so I wrote some drums after the fade out that are similar to the rest, and repeated one of the fills at the very end.
Download the Drum Music Here
Download the Lead Sheet Here
