I have bought into the "always transcribe by ear if there's no rush in learning the song" idea. Previously, I would try to transcribe every song, but I soon realized that there's no way for me to verify whether what I have transcribed is correct or wrong, and it made me feel that I was wasting my time because there's no way to "correct myself".
So later I subscribed to the Bass Player magazine, which I think have trustworthy full transcription of songs, and then I try to learn the songs by ear first, and after comfortably being able to play the song from start to end, and satisfied with my transcription, I would look at the magazine's transcription, to see which part that I have got wrong. Usually it will be anywhere from 0 wrong notes for very easy bass lines up to around 10% of wrong notes for harder jazz tunes which have chromatic notes outside the major/minor scale, I am already using a software to slow things down so I am still not satisfied with a 10% miss!
Lately I realized that for most of the parts that I have gotten the wrong notes, I have difficulty singing the differences, let say there's this note in a riff that's a C and I thought it was C#, I have problems singing the whole 10 notes riff with this C in the middle differentiating it with C#, so now i am practicing singing this riff with both C in it and C# in it, and hope that I could find out my weak points and hope that it will help me in my next song.
Are there any other tips in improving my transcription accuracy?
Thanks in advance.
