??? For Professional Guitarists: How Many Tunes Do You Know?

[Glennwillow]

??? For Professional Guitarists: How Many Tunes Do You Know?

I wouldn't call myself a professional anymore. I haven't played for money in a while, maybe 25 years. But I still remember a lot.

I have no idea how many songs I remember. I could pick out hundreds of songs and play them, but I would have trouble with remembering all the lyrics if I haven't played a song for a while. However, for some reason I never seem to forget the guitar accompaniment.

In performing remembering lyrics was always my problem. I never seemed to have trouble with the guitar part.

- Glenn

[Mandobart]

I sat this one out for a while as I'm not a professional musician - I have done more than a few paid gigs, but music has never been anything close to a main income source for me.

That said, I know (meaning if asked I could perform them right now, complete with leads and lyrics without assistance) several hundred songs.

And at the song circles I attend these days, I do pull some out randomly to demonstrate progressions, patterns, scales to illustrate a technique or concept.

I'm also able to seamlessly lead songs I've never played before but heard enough to know how they go. Likewise I can and have played accompaniment on songs I've never heard before. I chalk it up to the "startling variability" ;-) in most blues, bluegrass, folk, rock and Irish trad music.

[Brent Hutto]

Originally Posted by Mandobart

I sat this one out for a while as I'm not a professional musician - I have done more than a few paid gigs, but music has never been anything close to a main income source for me.

That said, I know (meaning if asked I could perform them right now, complete with leads and lyrics without assistance) several hundred songs.

And at the song circles I attend these days, I do pull some out randomly to demonstrate progressions, patterns, scales to illustrate a technique or concept.

I'm also able to seamlessly lead songs I've never played before but heard enough to know how they go. Likewise I can and have played accompaniment on songs I've never heard before. I chalk it up to the "startling variability" ;-) in most blues, bluegrass, folk, rock and Irish trad music.

My wife has a theory that music in general and specifically music within a "type" (like traditional acoustic or classical or American Songbook standards) allows your memory to pack in a lot of songs because it probably has a way of filing tunes away that takes advantage of the redundancy. Kind of like ZIP or other computer data compression programs that sort of encode just the differences without repeating all the overlapping parts.

When it comes to fiddle tunes, it's the fact they're so similar that makes me unable to remember what name goes to what tune!

My late mother had several favorite tunes she'd ask me to sing and.or play on the piano when she came to visit. Two of them were Danny Boy and Shenandoah and she always said they were the same tune with different words. They're not actually all that similar tune-wise but I could kind of hear what she meant.

I have a bunch of tunes I kind of mix and morph together when I'm just noodling around on my electric guitar. They all kind of share some melodic or harmonic DNA (to my ears at least) and sound much of a muchness when I insert a phrase from one into another or bounce back and forth between several of them. The tunes are:

You Are My Sunshine
Lay Down Your Weary Tune
Tom Dooley
Frere Jacques

and sometimes I even mix in Vincent (Starry, Starry Night) although it's not quite like the others.

I like to start in one key for all of them but gradually introduce a flat 7th or flat 3rd or maybe even a sharp 4th or flat 2nd in a random way I call "Modal Drift". It's fun to take advantage of what my ears perceive as similarities in the feel of different tunes.

Of course that just amuses myself, not sure anyone else would hear it as other than a muddled mess out of some perfectly nice melodies. But my wife says it sound OK from the next room and hey, you stack enough delays and modulation effects on it and anything will sound kind of cool!

[dnf777]

Originally Posted by Brent Hutto

how many tunes would you estimate are kicking around in your memory just waiting for a chance to pop out when you're demonstrating a I-IV-bVII-I progression or need to play a fiddle tune in D-Dorian? Hundreds? Many hundreds? A thousand or more?

Yeah, cateorizing and recalling (and actually playing) songs by elements of musical theory is a whole 'nother level! I have the utmost admiration for those folks.

I can sing along to a million popular tunes, but put a guitar in my hand and let me lead the song, I go into screen saver mode after the opening verse, if I get that far.

[Brent Hutto]

Originally Posted by dnf777

Yeah, cateorizing and recalling (and actually playing) songs by elements of musical theory is a whole 'nother level! I have the utmost admiration for those folks.

I can sing along to a million popular tunes, but put a guitar in my hand and let me lead the song, I go into screen saver mode after the opening verse, if I get that far.

Yeah, that's one of the amazing things about my guitar teacher. Not that I ask any really advanced questions but even random stuff about a certain chord voicing or progression he doesn't even have to scratch his head to come up with an answer or example. I show him a cool Amaj7 voicing I just stumbled on and he'll be like, "Yeah, I love that way of doing maj7 and I use it when I start the chorus of [such-and-such tune] except that's in F" and off he goes playing the tune for me.

It's that free-association memory thing that's really even more impressive than the sheer number of tunes he can remember. I ought to ask him some time if he started teaching because he's good at that kind of thing or is he good at that kind of thing because he's been teaching a long time!