You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Secrets to Learning Tunes FAST - #6

Episode Date: February 5, 2018

The secrets to learning tunes fast and thoroughly. You're welcome. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Peter Martin. And I'm Adam Manus. Welcome to the You'll Hear It podcast. Today, we're going to tell you the secrets to learning tunes fast. Now, you're not talking about learning tunes playing fast. You're talking about absorbing tunes in a timely manner. Exactly, exactly. So the first thing I think is important to absorbing tunes in a timely manner or learning tunes fast is,

and this one's a little bit of a cheat in a way because you have to have some preparation. before you actually get here. But it's by really knowing the tune by ear, away from your instrument. And I mean, like, you've listened to it so much either from a recording or live performances or both that you already can sing the song.

Like, you can sing the melody, you can hear the chord changes, you know the form, even if you haven't plotted out the form or ever seen the music or anything, it doesn't matter. I mean, that you really know it. The same way, like,

if you were going to learn to recite a poem, a poem, is that the way we say it? Poem, So erritude of you. You know, if you wanted to be able to recite any kind of prose, but you'd heard it many times and read it before you even opened up your mouth, you're going to be in a much better position to be able to learn it. So a lot of times we get excited about learning a tune and all of a sudden we pull out the chart and the music

or we'll listen to the recording and try to learn it. But do yourself a favor. Listen to it a lot. And you can actually do this pretty fast. I mean, if for a couple of days, you know, you get your headphones on and you're going out for a while, Just listen to the same song over and over again, maybe a couple of different versions. Sing along with it, really absorb it. Then when you sit at your instrument, you're going to have a big head start.

It just makes it so much easier to learn it if you already know it. Exactly. You know what I mean? So even if you don't know it, know it in your head and you can sing it and you know how the melody goes and you know what the form is before you even sit down at your instrument, I mean, that just saves yourself a ton of bandwidth in your brain for learning this tune. Absolutely. And, you know, you mentioned different recordings.

another great way to learn tunes fast is to listen to all sorts of different reference recordings. Find the most famous version. Find your favorite version. Find an obscure version that maybe does some crazy stuff with the tune. Even find, try to find, especially the original recording of whatever tune you're trying to learn. Is that like the ones with the big cone coming off of it? In some cases, yes. In some cases it's a piano roll.

The piano roll, the actual original recording. No, I mean, because if you go all the way back to the source, chances are you're not going to get the wrong changes. I mean, that could even apply to, you know, doing a quick Google search for the original sheet music and seeing what the original copyrighted sheet music was, seeing what the original chord changes were, the original melodies are. You know, jazz musicians notoriously mess things up over the years and put their own thing on melodies, put their own changes on it that are easy to blow over. It's some of the charm of the music, wouldn't we say? I totally agree with that, but it doesn't hurt. to see what those jazz musicians saw before.

And actually, you can learn a lot about what those musicians were thinking as they changed the song. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, the next secret to learning tunes fast is, now a lot of this is kind of preparation we're talking about before you actually get into sitting at your instrument, but these things are going to help you to go through it very quickly. So the next thing is understanding the form before you actively try to learn it, quote unquote. So if you've been listening to it and you've got to really, you can sing along the song. Maybe you haven't really thought about the form, but you can kind of feel the form.

Now is the time to really understand the form first before you even try to learn it. So that can be as simple as saying, oh, this is a blues, so it's 12 bars long. And it's four bars of the one chord and then to the four. Or it's an AAB form. And this is a great thing to kind of go through and learn as you're listening so that you've got the form plotted out. And then you should take this even if you're moving then to looking at the music at this point, if you aren't able to kind of learn it by ear, you're looking at what the form is.

And so the concept behind this is once you get into learning it, you've plotted things out in advance. It's kind of like if you're going to go drive from Chicago to Los Angeles. If you just start saying, I'm going to drive west and just take whatever road you see, you're going to get into a little bit of a problem as opposed, well, it's not going to be as quick to get there as opposed to looking at a map, which is like the form, the map of the music, and saying, okay, this is the route that I'm going to take. This is, you know, the best way to go.

And so we really want to get a handle on the form. We want to always jump in and get that melody and get the changes and stuff, but the form is what holds everything together. So let's get a good understanding of that first. Absolutely. So now we've learned the tune in our head. We know exactly how it sounds. We understand the form.

We understand how long each section is and the overall form. And now when we pull in from that big picture, we're going to learn that. the tune phrase by phrase, not line by line, not the big picture on this, but we're actually going to learn each phrase individually from the start and then go on to the next one. And what that's going to do is allow us to remember all of the details of the phrase, rhythmically, melodically, harmonically what's going on. So you know the bass movement, you know the quality of the chords, and you understand the

melodic movement and rhythm of each phrase individually and how that relates to the next phrase coming up. Yeah, and I think it's so important. Let's remember, you know, when Adam says phrase by phrase, he means phrase by phrase, not line by line, as in if we're looking at the music, and this is the danger of just learning music from the page only, is that, you know, a lot of, for a lot of us, if we're more visually oriented, you're going to segment the music based upon how many bars are on each line. And that's not always the way the music actually flows. And it's so much easier for us to absorb music, and the way we naturally hear it is by phrases the same way we hear poetry or somebody speaking to us by sentences and then within

paragraphs but that's not always like could you imagine trying to memorize a paragraph and you memorize one line at a time as opposed to memorizing one sentence at a time yeah just makes so much more sense so you want to be thinking musically don't fall into that trap of looking at the page and say i'm going to learn the first line then i'm going to learn the second line or even worse i'm going to learn measure by measure because music doesn't normally flow measure by measure i mean sometimes it does but not usually. Well, that brings us to our next point, is memorize as you go, not at the end. As you're learning these phrases, memorize them.

Be able to play the first phrase of a tune, and then once you learn the second phrase, be able to play the first and second phrase together. Make sure you can do that. Then memorize the third phrase on its own, then be able to play the first, second, and third phrase, then maybe you're at the bridge at this point and keep going. Don't wait until you've already got to the end to start your memorization process. Yeah, and I think that that's, you know, that may feel. counterintuitive to many of you because the title of this is Secrets to Learning Tunes Fast

and you're saying, well, if I got to memorize it as I go, that's going to slow me down. But when we say learning tunes, what we mean is learning them, really knowing them, having them memorized. Now, of course, you're not going to be able to learn and memorize every tune. I mean, that's sort of the goal. But I think if you want to have them learned and memorized, it's a much more efficient way and you will be able to do it faster and more thoroughly if you memorize phrase. by phrase and section by section as you go as opposed to so-called learning the tune where you get it

in your hands on your instrument and then you go back and say now I'm going to memorize it and I mean the main reason for that is most songs have patterns in them and certain things that repeat so if you're memorizing as you go once you get to that next phrase or a permutation of it you're like wow I already kind of know that absolutely now we have memorized the tune we can sing it in our heads we know the form we've gone phrase by phrase, we memorize it. The best way to lock this in so that it's in your hands forever is to actually get it out of the muscle memory

of the original key you learned it in and take it through at least two or three keys. I mean, going through all 12 is ideal, but if we're talking about learning it fast, even if you just take it to two, three, four, even five different keys, just getting out of the muscle memory of the original key and thinking about it in relationship to intervals

and how the melody works in different keys really helps you retain that tune as opposed to just learning it sort of by rote by muscle memory. Whoa, you're going next level here. Yeah, sorry, maybe that's not so fast. No, that's good. V2, 2.0. It helps me lock it down for sure. Yeah, absolutely. No, but that's a very important point. When we're learning tunes fast, that doesn't mean we're not learning them thoroughly.

So if you commit to incorporating some of these techniques in your practice, they may seem like more than you're presently doing, but they will get you to that point of really learning that tune faster than just kind of looking at the page and learning measure by measure for sure. Yeah, if you do these steps, you will not have to relearn this tune ever. Exactly, exactly. You'll know it for life. All right, happy practicing. That's it for today's episode of the You'll Hear It Podcast.

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