An accurate and computationally efficient means of classifying surface myoelectric signal patterns has been the subject of considerable research effort in recent years. Effective feature extraction is crucial to reliable classification and, in the quest to improve the accuracy of transient myoelectric signal pattern classification, an ensemble of time-frequency based representations are proposed. It is shown that feature sets based upon the short-time Fourier transform, the wavelet transform, and the wavelet packet transform provide an effective representation for classification, provided that they are subject to an appropriate form of dimensionality reduction.