Memorizing Jazz Standards

[vintagelove]

OK, I also know Autumn Leaves and 90% of Green Dolphin (can't quite get the turn around memorized, but I can kinda fake it).

I've got no problem with function harmony. I can analyze the hell out of a chart.

Ok right there is one big problem that once you learn to see, tunes will be MUCH easier to learn.


The turnaround at the end of GDS is just plain old movement through the cycle. If I was you I would right away start learning the cycle, once you can see it, it's everywhere.

Good luck!!!

[Boston Joe]

The turnaround at the end of GDS is just plain old movement through the cycle. If I was you I would right away start learning the cycle, once you can see it, it's everywhere.

I know, which is one reason it's so frustrating to be bad at this.

[Dana]

Whenever I'm walking, or waiting somewhere, or driving, whenever I have a free moment, I take a tune I want to learn, and name all the chord tones.

At first I just take a couple of bars, then I add two more, then two more, etc. Start simple. Start with only the first chord if you have to.

Take the first 4 bars of the tune All The Things You Are: F-7 / Bb-7 / Eb7 / Abmaj7

I start with the 3rd of each chord and name them. Ab / Db / G / C.
Then 5th. C / F / Bb / Eb.
7th. Eb / Ab / Db / G.
Then 9th, 11th, 13th.

Yes, it's hard. Really hard at first. But with practice it gets easier. And it forces me to really know the changes. I do this in the morning while I'm working out and the time flies.

Also, stop telling yourself you suck at memorizing tunes. Unless you've had a brain injury, there's no reason why you can't memorize something. It's just hard work. I think sometimes that people (I'm not saying you) will say, "I suck at ****", when what they really mean is, "This doesn't come easy to me, so F** it, I won't bother to work on it. I'll just use the excuse that there's something in my brain that prevents me from doing it."

BTW, I got this exercise from a Jerry Bergonzi book.

[henryrobinett]

I think what he means, or what I mean, is to just take that turnaround and don't go any further that that for a long while. Those turnarounds are ubiquitous in jazz. Do it until it's memorized and then some.

[Boston Joe]

Also, stop telling yourself you suck at memorizing tunes. Unless you've had a brain injury, there's no reason why you can't memorize something. It's just hard.

At my age, I'm pretty in tune with what I'm good at and what I'm not. I'm good at writing. It's what I do for a living. I'm good at tech stuff (for the most part - I'm not a coder or anything, but I could be). This stuff seems very natural to me.

I'm bad at memorizing things in general. I'm not saying I CAN'T, just that it doesn't come naturally or easily to me. I have friends who seem to remember everything, and I really envy that ability.

So you're right, I can do it, it's just hard. But it's harder for some people than it is for others. I accept that this is going to take a good deal of work.

I like the exercise. I may try it.

[henryrobinett]

I am of the belief that anything can be done or memorized if you know how. I think most of my students don't know until they actually do it how I tell them to. They just don't get it. They'll say they do and will do the exercises but they don't do it. When they do they memorize. It's not magic. It's work. Everyone takes a different amount of work because everyone is different. But it will work and you will memorize.

[Stuart Elliott]

I might suggest, like I do everything, break it down into smaller chunks. Don't try and memorize the whole song at once. Take the first two bars.

Breaking the tune into smaller chunks as Henry suggests is a good idea. However, there is a special strategy which many find helpful to learn new tunes. Start at the end and work backwards to the beginning. Iow, memorize the last two bars, then the two bars before that, etc.

The idea is that you'll be playing the bars you are working on then going to the material you've already learned.

And, of course, use the structure of the tune to help the memorization.

[henryrobinett]

Interesting. Howard Roberts said something like this. I've never done it though. Good idea.

[dingusmingus]

Thinking functionally and transposing are great ideas. Indeed, transposing forces me to think functionally.

I got a lot out of this Bruce Forman lesson:
https://www.mymusicmasterclass.com/p...-bruce-forman/

He distinguishes between "memorizing" and "learning" tunes. I don't want to give away the whole lesson, but he emphasizes knowing the melody well, and thinking in big functional chunks, like going to the IV, or the vi.

There's nothing earth-shattering, but I always enjoy and get a lot out of Bruce's lessons, especially if I watch them a number of times a few months apart.

Separately, I'm slowly realizing that ear training is a big part of retaining tunes. I have maybe 30 tunes I've learned and could play without a lead sheet, at least when I learned it. If I come back after months of not playing it, I can still sing the melody, and mostly hear what the chords are, but sometimes I can't play it right away. That's just a problem with my ears. (I'm working on it!)

[MarkRhodes]

Breaking the tune into smaller chunks as Henry suggests is a good idea. However, there is a special strategy which many find helpful to learn new tunes. Start at the end and work backwards to the beginning. Iow, memorize the last two bars, then the two bars before that, etc.

Never thought of it that way. It does help to know where one is going, and this way the end would always be the thing known. Kind of like backcycling: you have to know where you want to end and how many steps (changes) you need to take to get there....

[Dana]

I might suggest, like I do everything, break it down into smaller chunks.

Me too. Most times when I'm having trouble learning something, it always boils down to trying to do too much at once. As soon as I break it down into smaller pieces, I'm able to get a handle on it.

[MarkRhodes]

Me too. Most times when I'm having trouble learning something, it always boils down to trying to do too much at once. As soon as I break it down into smaller pieces, I'm able to get a handle on it.

Small chunks at a slow tempo make near anything doable. Somewhere along the line I read, "If you make a mistake, you're playing too fast." Worth thinking about...

[henryrobinett]

Small chunks at a slow tempo make near anything doable. Somewhere along the line I read, "If you make a mistake, you're playing too fast." Worth thinking about...

Yes. And/or you don't understand what your fingers are doing or why.

[MarkRhodes]

Yes. And/or you don't understand what your fingers are doing or why.

Absolutely. Or in my case for a long time, my picking could be cockeyed! (That's another good adage: "Separate the hands." Find out where the problem lies, right hand or left.)

[Boston Joe]

Somewhere along the line I read, "If you make a mistake, you're playing too fast." Worth thinking about...

Hm. I like the way this sounds, but I'm not sure. In order to improve, don't you need to push yourself and make mistakes?

[henryrobinett]

I would say, you need to find out why you are making mistakes.

[Bob P.]

Boston Joe, You sound like my "twin". i've had the same issues for many yrs. Question for everyone. While you are playing a tune, what is your thought process? Are you consciously thinking about the chords, melody, and rhythm as you are playing the tune? Or, are you on another level of just "hearing" it. Joe Pass always talked about just playing what he heard. Granted, he was in the stratosphere of players, but does one need to be able to do that on some level? Don't know if i'm expressing this very well, but any comments would be appreciated. Thanks.


Bob P.

[henryrobinett]

Boston Joe,You sound like my "twin". i've had the same issues for many yrs. Question for everyone. While you are playing a tune, what is your thought process? Are you consciously thinking about the chords, melody, and rhythm as you are playing the tune? Or, are you on another level of just "hearing" it. Joe Pass always talked about just playing what he heard. Granted, he was in the stratosphere of players, but does one need to be able to do that on some level? Don't know if i'm expressing this very well, but any comments would be appreciated. Thanks.


Bob P.

Yes. You need to be able to do that. But you can't just do it. It comes from reeling thinking about it over a long period of time. Like many years. You need to consciously think about it visualize it look at the fretboard while you're playing, think about it think about it think about it. Then eventually you won't think about it. You will just play. But there isn't a shortcut. You can't just just play. You can't just not thinking. You have to go through the process of thinking about it. There's no shortcut.

[Boston Joe]

Boston Joe, You sound like my "twin". i've had the same issues for many yrs. Question for everyone. While you are playing a tune, what is your thought process? Are you consciously thinking about the chords, melody, and rhythm as you are playing the tune? Or, are you on another level of just "hearing" it. Joe Pass always talked about just playing what he heard. Granted, he was in the stratosphere of players, but does one need to be able to do that on some level? Don't know if i'm expressing this very well, but any comments would be appreciated. Thanks.

The rest of the thread not withstanding, If I'm playing a tune I know well, like blues or Autumn Leaves or something, I don't really think about the chords much. I think about the overall tonal areas and what I want to hear.

[pkirk]

One thing I found that helps me in this area is to invent and memorize a chord-melody arrangement whenever I want to learn a new tune. Thus you learn all the levels of the tune at once. The added bonus is that after you do this with a bunch of tunes your brain reverses the process and you start to get the skill of doing chord-melody arrangements on the fly.

And, while I have your o(or anyone else's) attention, I hope you don't use the real book changes to "four", since they are famously wrong.

[Spakryan]

I find when learning a new tune, (if available depending on the tune) I listen to the original version quite a few times to internalize it and then work out at least the root movement on my guitar before even looking at the charts.

I find that if I at least know this, my ear will tell me the chord quality after the listening stage and it's much easier to keep that info in my head when going through the initial learning stages of the tune without relying heavily on the chart.

I guess different strokes for different folks when it comes to memory though.

[christianm77]

I think the important thing here is to spend some time away from the instrument. It's good to have a strong 'picture' of the tune away from the instrument. In the simplest case that might be just the melody.

I think changes etc can come later. I tend to go - melody, bass, inner voices when learning. I usually learn from a vocal version, so the words help me with memorising the tune.

I think it's good to get into singing these things in the shower, so to speak. Obviously for instrumental things like Footprints you'll have to scat them.

A lot of people are shy about singing. But you got to remember that it's not for performance. It's to help you internalise the music.

[grahambop]

The rest of the thread not withstanding, If I'm playing a tune I know well, like blues or Autumn Leaves or something, I don't really think about the chords much. I think about the overall tonal areas and what I want to hear.

That's very much how I hear it once I'm comfortable with a tune. So the trick is to get to the same point with more tunes.

As suggested already, it's worth getting really familiar with common cycles and 2-5-1 patterns because then you can sort of reduce the important chords in a tune to leave those patterns out, as they are so familiar.

[MarkRhodes]

A lot of people are shy about singing. But you got to remember that it's not for performance. It's to help you internalise the music.

That really helps. Some musicians say they hum the head during solo sections because it helps them keep their place.

Herb Ellis was big on singing while improvising. (Oscar Peterson did that in a way that is audible on his records.) Herb said he "sang" everything he played. He said Joe Pass did too. He also said the horn players he knew did it too but you can never hear them because they have a horn in their mouths and you're hearing the horn. But he thought 'singing what you play' (or 'playing what you sing') connected one's inner musical voice with one's instrument. It's the difference between something that sounds like you and something that sounds like memorized patterns / licks / phrases.

Herb can be heard doing this on his instructional CDs.

Here's a bit from a instructional video he did. (Ray Brown is playing the bass.) The progression is A- / D7 / G / G. Herb plays four bars, then comps so you can play four bars. Anyway, you can hear some of his "singing" while he's playing.

[smokinguit]

I think it's good to get into singing these things in the shower, so to speak. Obviously for instrumental things like Footprints you'll have to scat them.

That depends on how good a singer you are. I actually love singing the head to Footprints.