You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 4 Memory Hacks To Learn Standards

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

Before you get on the bandstand, it's important to have a few jazz standards under your belt. Today, Peter and Adam give you some hacks to help you memorize oft-called tunes.Have you checked out the latest course from Open Studio - Bebop Enclosures for Beginners? Learn how to create swinging bebop lines as Adam Maness walks you through how to practice bebop standards. For more information, just follow this link. Interested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Wednesday's Open Studio Live Events:1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)3:00 PM - Edu Ribeiro Drum Conversations + Q&A on YouTubeFor the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Peter. Yeah. Do you remember the order of the states of the United States of America alphabetically? No, but I do, I am able to recite them by admittance to the Union. What? Oh, yeah. Backwards. Alaska, Hawaii.

I don't know if that's correct. Oh, man. I'm Adamannis. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hearer podcast. Music advice and inspiration coming at you. Coming at you today. We were sponsored by Open Studio.

Go to Open StudioJadioJazz.com And check out our new course, Bebop Inclosures for Beginners. Have you heard about this course, Peter? I have, and I just had the pleasure of watching the first few minutes, but a minute ago. Cinematic, is it not?

It is cinematic. 24 frames per second. For any of you video geeks out there, this is our first 24 p... 24 frames per second situation. So it's like Stephen Spielberg combined with Stephen Scylberg. combined with Stephen Segal.

I don't know. I don't know what I'm talking. Steve Wilson. Now we're talking. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, no, it's another great offering from the arsenal of yours, not truly, Mr. Adam Maness. Yeah, we're excited about it. Go to open studio jazz.com slash bebop enclosures for beginners to check that out.

It's going to be right there too right at the top of the page. So go check that out. Yeah. Today, we are talking about four memory hacks to learn standards. So we're back on the hacks. Because remember we said we're not doing hacks anymore. Buddy, we've always been a couple of hacks. But we have to differentiate between a couple of jazz hacks and some real useful hacks, the way to hack your way to improvement quicker.

I mean, I feel like at a certain point, everything we say is somewhat useful, right? Hackworthy? Like, we're, yeah. Yeah, we're hackworthy. Yeah, I'll definitely say that. No, you know what? We've been focusing hard on during this pandemic. with practicing and how to get better and how to make the most of our practice.

And I feel like we do have some good insights here into how to use the best of our memory to learn things like standards. And you can do more than just standards. You know, I've actually taken the time during this lockdown to learn a lot about McCoy Tyner's, the start of his solo career. And I know actually a good amount of the personnel on his albums, the first 10 albums that he made by using some of these same memory hacks. Yeah, yeah. And I think, too, it's...

Bob Northern played French horn. I don't know if you knew that or not. Of course. Robert, as his mother named him, actually, technically. You know, memory is an area that I think we... It's very easy to fall down that slippery slope where it's like, oh, I don't have good memory, or I'm losing my memory, or I can't remember things, or I can. This is definitely a skill that's super useful in, you know, really any kind of musical endeavor.

because, you know, there's the obvious of like, the more you can play something memorized, you can really concentrate on the artistic value and the delivery of it. But then you've got the more practical, like, for instance, this, for memory hacks to learn standards, like you can accumulate a repertoire.

I mean, knowing a bunch of tunes, if you don't really know them and have them memorized, and, you know, we'll talk a little bit about really knowing them as opposed to just memorizing what you've seen on the page. You want to learn them deeply. for sure. But I mean, the more you do that, the more you accumulate your repertoire, you're not going to have time to review them all every day or every week or even every month. So you've got to really

know them. So any kind of little help that we can do to give you some new entry points to doing that will really be rewarded. And also, I mean, a lot of this will apply to not just learning standards, learning tunes in general, learning solos. And, you know, pattern recognition. We can never, that's not really one of the hacks, but I think it's what you're going to see as a recurring theme. and memorizing things. Because to memorize, it's just like if you think about memorizing poetry or memorizing a speech

or memorizing directions to get somewhere, if you can assign and understand a pattern that's, usually various patterns that are laying within that work that you're memorizing, it's going to be so much easier than just memorizing, you know, note by note. That would be the equivalent of just learning letter by letter as opposed to words and sentences and paragraphs

and more importantly, concepts that exist there. That's right. Yeah, I think we're going to do this a little out of order from we have written here, Peter, for our list because I think that you just changed my mind with what is most important. That's my mind control. That's my first hack. Take mind control of your co-host.

You're definitely an influencer in that regard. But I think we should start with this one, which is somewhat similar to what we would normally start anything with, which would be listen. But I think the first hack to learning anything musically is to realize that we are here to make sounds and that we need to listen and understand how it sounds first.

So if you want to learn a standard, learn to sing it first. Learn how it sounds, be able to sing it, at least in your mind's ear, right? Know the words, all of our,

I mean, if it's a jazz standard without words, okay, learn the melody, but go back to the original recording, see if you can learn the song. As a song you know, you know, a lot of these songs, Great American Songbook standards

and jazz standards. They're not songs that any of us grew up with, right? They're not part of our popular music lexicon at this time, unfortunately. But you have to learn it. You have to be just have it ingrained. So number one is to listen and learn to sing it first. That's right, right, right. That's great.

And I always think back to, I had a wonderful French teacher in, was it middle school or high school? But she said, echoed a repetet, listen and repeat. So you listen and then you repeat. It's not echoet a libretche. Ribe. Right. Ricochet. Ricochet.

Ricochet. So yeah, we're listening and then we're singing. We're listening and we're saying whatever it is that we're doing. That's really the key. Awesome. Number two is to perform it. It's to add it to your rep from the start. Hard to do here in the middle of a lockdown pandemic.

But this is a trick that I always used to use and I have no shame and looking like a fool sometimes. So I would just be like, no, let's just play it tonight on the gig. That's right. I'm going to call it. I might not know it all the way. I bet you'll know it afterwards. You definitely are going to know it. I mean, it's a little humbling, but you will know it having performed it.

And it just forces you actually, if I know that I'm going to put it on the set, it makes me know it before I leave the house. That's right. Or at the very least, I'm listening to it also on the way to the gig and I'm thinking about it. It becomes an exercise of, I have a deadline. Deadlines are important. Deadlines are important. That makes the world go around. It does make the world go around.

Everything important happens on a deadline. So give yourself a deadline to it. Say, I'm going to perform it this weekend or I'm going to record a video of it and put it on Instagram this weekend. Right. It's going to make me actually have to get my stuff together on it. So perform it. And the thing about it is, too, like you want to the advance. level of this hack is really to work this into your practice routine. Yeah, if you have a gig,

that's, I mean, that's the perfect pressure because we actually memorize things and, like, memorization a lot of times is sort of the finishing product of really learning something. So a lot of times when we're under the pressure of public scrutiny, which is kind of what a gig is, a performance, that pushes us over the edge. So we have to kind of go out on a limb a little bit to do that. But you can also kind of, the hack on this is to put yourself in that position at home. This is harder because you have to, you know what, it's like the difference between doing a marathon and a virtual marathon. You know, everyone's like, there's no races going on. And so I can't run my marathon.

No, you can do a virtual one. But it's harder because you don't have the pressure of like you paid the money and you show up at that time, which is like the gig. But you can still go out there to the same course on a date that you prescribe in advance and in advance and then do that. So you can put this pressure on yourself and say like, you know what, I'm going to play my own little private gig and pretend like there's an audience and learn this sucker tonight. Okay, so the first two, the learned to sing it and the perform it and really kind of put a deadline on it. That's some wisdom right there.

And put a ring on it too like Beyonce said. Let's be honest. Isn't that one of the, I thought it's something. Oh, yeah, yeah. Put a ring on it. But this next one, this is actually a hack. This is a hack, as hackish as it gets.

Use interleaved and varied learning. What the hell does interleaved mean? Okay, so that means it's supposed to mass practice. So this is something that I've been studying. There's a great book called Make It Stick by a couple of psychologists based here right at Washington University in St. Louis. It's an amazing book with... Go bears!

It deals with some of the latest scientific research on how our brains actually remember things and how people learn things. The latest 19th century. The latest 21st century on how people learn things. And so interleaved learning and varied learning is actually one of the most effective ways to actually make things stick.

What that means is, as opposed to mass practice, i.e., just practicing the same thing, one thing, over and over and over again, in the same way, all that does is put it in our short-term memory. Right. And four or five days later, in every single study that they cited here, people know it a lot worse than if they do this other way, which is to mix it in with practicing other things.

So it forces you to space it out over time so that you forget it a little bit and have to recall it. When we recall information after moving on from it, that's when we actually store it deep in our long-term memory. So what I like to do is if I'm going to learn a standard, I'm actually going to learn three standards. And I'm going to interleave them throughout my practice. So I'll play one. Interleave.

I'll play one maybe four or five times through or maybe I'll set a limit three times, right? Then I'll go on to my next one. I'll play that three times. And then I'll play the third one three times. Then I'll go back to the first one. Having gone through two other songs, I've forgotten that first one a little bit. Right. And it forces me to remember it.

And it makes it a little bit harder. it makes it stick a little bit better. That's interleaf practice. Very learning is when the second time I go back, not only am I having to recall it, but maybe this time I'm going to do it instead of the key of B flat, I'll do it in the key to E flat.

Oh, a little mental gymnastic. Again, making it a little bit harder on myself, and that forces me to have to think about it as opposed to just recalling it from my short-term memory. It makes it stick. And again, the latest studies, the latest science on this is, this is actually the things that we know

We know because we've had to learn them deeply like this. Not that we've just mass practiced in the same way over and over again. I mean, how many things have you mass practiced that you couldn't probably play for us now? But the things that you've been forced to. It's the same thing with like I had to perform it. Yeah. Right. That is some.

That's already forcing you to a different situation. Right. That's some varied learning there because you're like, oh, what am I going to do? You know, it really kind of forces that varied learning on it. Yeah. And I think that we, you know, we see examples of this all the time when, you know, you think that you've, learn something or maybe even you know in some cases like you reviewed up to oh yeah I know that but then you get on the gig or on the live stream and all of

a sudden you're thinking about wait what's no like you're not in the optimal situation where everything just flows because something's different so now you got to sort of think about it and then you're like wait let me not think about it wait where does my finger you know everything feels different like you've got to put yourself in as many of those varied situations on your own to know that you really know something you if you're one of those people that's like I know the tune if everything is perfect and the lighting is correct and nobody's watching me

and I'm doing, you know, then it's never going to work. Ever. Never. Number four. What's number four, Peter? Make your own arrangement of it from the start. I love this one.

And this is a little bit of a variation on the varied learning in a way. For sure. Yeah, you just kind of make it your own. Yeah. From the get-go. And what that does is forces you,

it forces you to like remember it in a very personal way. And to own it. That's exactly right. This is actually another technique from the Make It Stick book, it's basically, if you put something in your own words, if you attach it to memories

that you already have in your long-term memory, which is maybe that's an intro or just music that you want to be a part of, it sticks better and longer. Right. That's great stuff. Cool. Well, man, this is, we're hacking our way down memory lane here,

aren't we? We are hacking our way down memory lane. I like that. Cool. And I think these are really good, again, you know, to learn standards for sure. You can extend it beyond that, but that's such a great framework

to really start working on your memory work. Awesome. Well, thanks, everybody. You can always leave us a rating and review. We never mind a rating and review. It's got to be seven stars. We're a seven star kind of podcast. And you know what?

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