|
Post by Marc on Jan 12, 2021 3:20:08 GMT -6
How do you go about learning songs?
I’ve spent the last couple of months trying to learn a day in the life of a fool (it feels like forever). I feel pretty comfortable with the rhythm guitar and I can drag my teeth though a chorus in a solo.
This week I decided to move to a new song “all of me”. I’ve been working working in parallel with a couple of Frank Vignola’s Fake book true fire courses. One course on rhythm and the other soloing. “All of Me” is song number two in that fake book.
The reason I bring this up is as I’m going through this I’m questioning my self and wondering if it would be better if I learned are more vanilla version of the song before even taking up with Franks course?
In a very long-winded way, I wanted to see how other people learned some jazz songs.
|
|
|
Post by Phil on Jan 15, 2021 9:26:52 GMT -6
Marc,
Here's how I do it. I learn the basic melody first. Then I learn the chords. I memorize both. Memorizing them is important. Soloing is not that important at this point.
Recently I started to spend some time looking at how the melody fits in with the underlying chord. That means moving the position of the melody to the same position as the chord or vice versa. Frank Vignola can play a portion of a melody and immediately play the underlying chord. He always knows exactly where he is in the song. If I can ever get good at this then coming up with chord melodies will be easier.
Tony points out the value of learning the shell voicings first without any extensions. I totally agree with with this. This is one of my criticizisms of the Mickey Baker book and all the big chord voicings he teaches. Experienced players would use these sparingly according to the circumstances as Tony mentioned.
Vignola pretty much teaches the basic vanilla versions on his channel. I'm not sure what he does in the Fakebook courses. You can always check out the vanilla chords at ralphpatt.com
The more songs you learn the more you will notice similarities in the chord progressions and the easier it gets to memorize the progressions. Melodies seem to stick with me easier than chord progressions.
One more thing: don't look at chords as isolated entities. Chords are always coming from somewhere, going somewhere, or both. In other words, they are always part of a progression. The sooner you realize this the easier it will get to memorize songs.
|
|
|
Post by Phil on Jan 15, 2021 10:03:27 GMT -6
|
|