Practicing Tunes for Memorization

[mattbn73]

Kind of started this in another thread, but didn't want to derail so much.

Okay. I'll say some things which may be very obvious, but these are the things I've found to be most helpful for myself and for students. So, they're at least worth getting out of the way.

On memorization and learning tunes more quickly/efficiently: Work on things in SECTIONS as opposed to just playing through WHOLE tune so much. Anything is easier in smaller bits, and like many things, tunes are really just the sum of their component parts.

If you play through a whole song form every time you practice, the math says you're going to be EXPONENTIALLY better at sections which repeat the most often or are otherwise the simplest and easiest to remember. You can't really quantify such things, but if a tune has three verses, five choruses, and a single bridge - you're going to be about five times better at the chorus (vs. The bridge) for each time you "practice" the song in its entirety. Verses are somewhat in between, simply because there's usually some variation with each one, especially if you're singing etc.

Whether it's a choir rehearsal or a guitar lesson, my priorities are basically to learn the sections one-at-a-time in something like this order:

Chorus, vs1, vs2, vs3, etc., bridge, endings/intros etc, and if needed - transitions.

CHORUSES: choruses are mostly obvious. They're the easiest usually. They're the most repetitive and have strongest hook etc. Know when it's time to move on to other sections' practice.

VERSES: Work on each verse, one-at-a-time - but in succession. This is super simple but profound, if you've never tried it. I picked it up from a composer of children's musicals, and it changed the way I look at practice. By doing them in succession, you learn the very subtle musical variations found within each verse, while simultaneously getting a MUCH stronger sense of their unifying "sameness". Again, profoundly effective.

If verses have a TON of differences between and within them, it's usually helpful to underline accented syllables, "down beat syllables", or syllables on which important chord changes occur. Very often, if you get the rhythm right, you get the melody "for free" (in terms of memorization/internalization). Anyway, that's primarily for singers I guess.

BRIDGES are about contrast and very often require the greatest amount of focused practice. Otherwise the things which are designed to subconsciously "surprise" the listener surprise us as we screw it up. This is compounded by the fact that they usually occur only once in the form and contain fewer similarities to other sections. Again, that's a problem ONLY if your playing the whole tune all the way through all the time.

ENDINGS, intros, and instrumental breaks are usually variations of other sections. Analyze the entire form and make note of what theme/progression they reference, and you'll learn them much more quickly.

Lastly, TRANSITIONS are hugely important. For self-taught guitarists, without experience in school band programs or structured music lessons, it's easy to miss. If you are comfortable with individual sections but always seem to mess up when you do the whole tune, you're probably missing the transition between sections. In the beginning, treat them as a separate element to practice. Practice the last measure of the verse, stopping on (and holding) the note or chord on beat 1 of the chorus. Don't continue onto the rest of the chorus. You already know it.

Anyway, sorry to be so long. These are simply some form-related considerations. There are others as well. Learn to see larger patterns, practice in sections, and practice the hard posts more. Music is largely about simple repetition, but you miss it if you don't see the patterns.

[SunnyDee]

Good so far!

You moving the other stuff over to this thread, too?

[tonyo]

Great topic. Some years ago another member of our music club commented to me that I should memorize the songs I typically play at a jam as they were the same half dozen or so. This was after watching me chase the pages as a breeze swept them away.

What amazed me about the process was how easy it ended up being memorizing songs once I tried. The mindset of 'memorizing is too hard' becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

I always thought it was too hard.

Now I'm the opposite. And lets face it, mental exercises, such as memorizing a song, is very good exercise for the grey matter.

[jaymarsch]

Thanks for this, Matt. I performed last month with my songwriting group and decided to perform one of my most recently written songs. It is also a song of mine that is the most complicated in terms of chord changes. I have places where I do different things with the melody at the end of each verse. I really had to break it down differently in order to remember the chord changes.

I am going to copy down your advice and refer to it when I next need it.

Best,
Jayne

[mattbn73]

Sorry I dumped this off and then checked out for a while. I've been crazy busy with seeing to my dad after his stroke.

Anyway, probably a bad title for the thread on my part . In the other thread we were originally talking more about how you make a chart, how you organize things visually to facilitate memorizing something faster or even just having a greater overall understanding of what the whole tune does. Rereading it, the OP comes off almost as more of an article or something . Sorry. Not my inattention. Those are just some of my personal thoughts on the process. So let me start over:

How do you make a chart? How do you decide what information put in front of you on a sheet of paper (or whatever) in the early stages when you're organizing things? Does the way you do THAT affect how easily you understand and learn tunes? SunnyDee and I were talking about this: http://www.acousticguitarforum.com/f....php?p=5402564 ....and then we looked at a specific tune and a chart available for it online.

https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/d/d..._touch_crd.htm

Anyway, that chart is a good example of what I've tried to get away from the last 15 years or so, especially in teaching. This is all just my personal opinion: but I just find that it's too much information. It's a huge blob of text and chords, and you're mostly chained to the words, one syllable at a time. Also, because of THAT fact, it's very dependent upon your knowing the rhythm of the lyrics cold, BEFORE you can really have any idea of the rhythm guitar part. This is backwards if you think about it, because the harmonic rhythm is usually much simpler than a highly varied melody which you might sing over simple tunes. It might be helpful at times to use the simpler, slower HARMONIC rhythm as a tool to learn the MELODY.

For absolute beginners, I always did a kind of a compromise with the "chords over words chart". I simply fit the lyrics underneath the rhythmically charted chords, instead of fitting the chords arbitrarily over the lyrics. This is actually pretty time-consuming, and I don't do it for myself, when making a chart.

If it's for me, to play and/or sing, I simply print a lyric sheet, and write out the rhythmic/chord structure on the side. This way, I can make a chart in about five minutes, if it's really basic. If it's a more difficult tune structure - with more sections etc. or more changes - it takes a little longer, but the process of MAKING the chart in a visually dynamic way - to illustrate rhythm and form - basically ensures that the tune is almost MEMORIZED by the time I'm through making it.

So for the other thread I scrawled the following chart in our hospital room:
It's pretty ugly, even under those circumstances , but I was extremely limited. Anyway, you can see more of a rhythmic structure. Since I didn't really re-write all of the repeated parts in the chord structure each time, it's visually simpler and shows you that that tune isn't as complex as you might otherwise think. Actually the OP to this thread is more like part 2 of this discussion.

Like I said earlier, making a chart is a very personal thing. Not really a right or wrong way, but I would be very interested in others thoughts.

So: how do you make a chart ? Especially if it is different from traditional "chords over lyrics". Do you have some short hands for reflecting rhythmic structure beyond just lyrics etc.? I'd be really interested in other's thoughts on this. I've seen people do interesting things with grid-like structures for rhythm parts etc. Thanks.