Just looking for advice on what to add to my practice regimen and how to figure out how to transcribe. Then eventually trying to understand why they do certain things and add it into my playing.

 

I think you have to practice thinking in terms of melodic ideas. It sounds like your mostly thinking in terms of scale patterns like thirds. I have a 3 lesson set on my site on 4 note groupings http://www.neffmusic.com/blog/product/4-note-groupings-14-99-lesson-series-deal/ . This deals with taking 4 notes and coming up with melodic ideas from those 4 notes. You wouldn't think that 4 notes would give you a lot of options but when you take all the possibilities and octave changes you have 96 choices. What I would suggest is working on these as melodic material to pull from. Try playing one through the whole form of a tune. The first step is playing the idea over one chord but where it gets really interesting is when you play an idea through 2 bars of chords. For example if you take the pattern 1235 and play it in half notes through the first two measures of All the Things You Are(in Bb). You would play GA over G-7 and BbD over C-7. In this simple idea you are playing an idea through the changes and not resetting it for every chord. This is just the first step. Then you continue the idea through the rest of the tune. Along the way you add some alterations to the idea but the goal is to keep the original idea there and recognizable to a certain extent.

 

To transcribe, you hear what's being played and you write it down in notation. Knowing your keyboard is very helpful with it, practically a necessity. I just learn it by rote. I'm not a qualified music teacher so I can only comment on what I have done over many years. I like to focus on the building blocks which leads to better ideas. Learning great recorded solos is good too because it opens new doors while it builds technique. Here's a trick that after you understand it, you hear it all the time; when improvising eighths and sixteenths runs, think of the run in groups of two notes. The brain can handle the two notes while planning the next two. You can build up your abilities to handle longer runs. Sometimes its so obvious you have to laugh, but its not a laugh of derision, its just acknowledging something that's always been there but you didn't know to listen for it.
'I would like to be melodic...' Hey, that's great. The problem with tons of players who know a lot of fast licks is that unless you're also a jazz musician, you have no idea what they're trying to get over to you. Listen to Stan Getz; he certainly knew his way around the horn and played plenty of fast stuff, but it was ALWAYS lyrical/melodic and there was not one note of 'hate' in it - all love for cool jazz - no sociological axe to grind.

 

Thanks for the advice.

 

If you want to play more melodically, listen more to melodic players. When someone plays a phrase that really connects with you, learn to sing it, then find it on your horn. If you can find someone else's melodic idea on your horn, you can find your own melodic ideas on your horn.

The more you do this, the better you will learn the horn and the more quickly you'll be able to respond in the moment.