The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #1

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    I don't where to post this so I just do it here. I wonder how many of you forget tunes and the progressions after some time or how easy is it to get a tune completely to memory. I say this because I generally play the usual jazz type standards and have a lot of tune memorize I don't how many but my issue might just be me. I don't gig anymore and never gigged that much just because no work as such. Certainly playing many nights a week over and over is my guess that players really memorize tunes and repertoire the best.

    So given that I simply take tunes and play a chord melody arrangement of some kind and get that memorized. That seems to be easier than simply memorizing the melody by itself. The trouble is you still need to simply be able to play the melody and the changes independently. So lately I have been working on this because I rely too much on reading. I am a decent reader and pretty good sight reader at least for a guitarist. Then memorizing the changes it like working through a road map on the neck in series of the progression. Well sure enough got to memorizing tunes working on them daily then down the road I will forget them although relearning is easier. So how easy it is for most of you to forget tunes?

    Next I find some tunes I have played over the 40 years are just all there always like, ATTYA, Wine and Roses, A Foggy Day...the real meat of standards. However I tried to learn some tunes that are not played as much like Round Midnight. I got it memorized then stop playing it for awhile and boom it is gone. I guess my beef is I just manage to forget changes too easy. Normally my memory is pretty decent I teach Church History and remember dates and events no problem. I even remember zip codes of all the surrounding towns around here as I used to send lots of hand mail out in my day gig.

    Oh well would like to here some thoughts. My guess is that it is ears and you just hear the melody and go, but changes also.

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  3. #2

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    All I’ve got to say is use it or lose it.

  4. #3

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    I'm lucky in that once I memorize something it says with me for decades. For melodies I'm not sure I'm actually memorizing the notes but instead the melody itself; I.e. I have head a certain song (melody) many, many times and can play it by-ear even if I have never played it before.

    Now chord progressions are memorized. I sometimes do forget a "choice" chord or two; e.g. the first chord of the "B" section. (Once I recall the "choice" chords the rest just fall into place). To avoid this I try to play the chord progression of all the jazz standards I know at least once a year. This tends to be enough to commit said progression to memory.

    But again I consider this ability to be luck; an accident of birth.

  5. #4

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    I strive to be able to find the chords if I know the melody to a tune. I learn the tune, then figure out what the relationship of melody and chord root motion is. Then I practice the tune in different keys, as to not have chord name reference, but only chord movement.

    These days if I can remember a tune's melody I can play it. I think if you play 100-150 standards it gets a lot easier, as you keep seeing the same progressions, and in the end you can just figure them out most of the time.

  6. #5

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    Work each part of the tune separately to ingrain the tune more deeply. Play the bassline and root movement, comp it, play the melody only, play your chord melody arrangement, solo over the changes.

    Take it through several keys and that will ingrain it more deeply.

  7. #6

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    I think "memory" is one of the assets that set players apart. The controversy is about how to define "memory" in this context.

    "use it or lose it" as mentioned above, applies to most people. It's a universal law of nature, applicable to most things in life, unless a person is gifted/cursed with some sort of "photographic memory" or a similar condition. Some extraordinary people do have extraordinary gifts.

    "Muscle memory" is about reflexes, i.e the impuls goes direct from the spine to the hands without passing the brain. Muscle memory is about finger settings, which is a major factor for guitar players. When practicing/rehearsing we also train muscle memory as part of the internalization process.

    "Ear training" is about the ability to recognize harmony, melody and rhythm in a broader context, to guide the player in the moment. It's about internalizing the sound of a scale, a pattern, an interval, a progression or a tune etc. It's about the ability to recall a tune in any key.

    "Sight reading" is also about memory, the speed of reading and writing to ones short access memory. When we have seen the score plenty of times, an image of the notation is "burned into" our long term memory.

    "improvisation skills" is about "faking it", i.e playing spontaneously by ear and intuition. It takes a lot of practicing and relies on ear training and muscle memory and is very useful for transposing a song to a different key.

    "Written arrangements" are often required, on some level, for classical pieces and for chord melody. Such arrangements occupy a larger portion of the available access memory, compared to single line melodies and chords. Some guitar arrangements simply cannot be transposed to a different key, but that don't make them useless.

    A bar piano player, entertaining for hours, playing standards on request, must have excellent memory; must have

    • Ear training
    • Improvisation skills
    • Thousands of hours of rehearsal, playing the genre, internalizing written arrangements.



    For what it's worth; My "memory" improved dramatically when I started to document my work. Prior to this eureka moment, I had to reinvent the wheel, starting all over each time I was about to pick up a forgotten tune. I rehearse and document my arrangements. If I forget a tune, I revisit my notation. In this way I "burn" it into my long term memory.

    Memory is a relative thing and about expectations; Some people like everything to be improvised, others are more demanding. I can perform solo/trio playing precision arrangements for about an hour, or play sloppy for about two hours, or fake it through the night, hiding behind the band and get rescued by people that "know the song".

  8. #7

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    Only much I can keep in my repertoire at any one time. Otherwise I need a lead sheet or chart. Sometimes I work on a tune for weeks then abandon it but when I revisit it comes back quick.

  9. #8
    You raise an important point. Memory. Some of us are gifted with it, and some aren't. I'm not aware of any research that has looked into the Jazz musician's brain from a memory standpoint. Some pro's claim to have memorized 100's of tunes. That may be helped by the fact they are playing regularly, and/or have a system for remembering tunes and harmony. Someone like Coker (I can't remember) wrote a book on this, which uses a system that categorizes tunes into several forms and progressions. I read it years ago and found confusing and not much help. Unless you're a seasoned pro I see no harm in having the music in front of you. The disadvantage is you are listening less. The advantage is you don't tax your memory.

  10. #9
    I could sit down and play solo I believe 3 set of 50 minutes or almost 3 hours probably chord melody on tunes. I could probably even do this from memory but if you told me to sit down and start playing in a group the same tunes I could not simply because I would forget a bridge or some chord change. Playing solo chord melody you can sort of fake your way through parts of a tune.

    Good point on using music maybe I should not be too worried as I can sight read any chart with changes and melody and come up with a decent listenable chord melody instantly. I am consider myself a seasoned guitarist but simply not in the category of a season pro who makes there living at it and can play 100's of tunes on the fly. The one time I played in a big band o 17 piece for about 2 years I notice things getting better pretty fast. After a while I could tell ears and sense of time getting better. The great Johnny Smith always said that practicing was practicing, but playing and playing out was what got a guitarist better.

  11. #10

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    A lot of the old jazz guys I have talked to have stressed the importance of learning the lyrics to the song and being able to sing it to yourself while playing. Probably that creates a mnemonic mapping for procedural memory (also known as muscle memory). They say that this helps in remembering the song, as well as in helping you keep your place when soloing.

    However, you can't prove that by me, because I never get around to learning the lyrics to most songs in the jazz canon. And a lot of the songs that I prefer to play are "jazz" songs rather than standards, such as tunes by Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, etc. For whatever reason, I generally don't much care for jazz vocalists, although there are exceptions, and prefer instrumental music for jazz. As a result, I don't usually hear the lyrics to begin with.

    So I guess don't practice what I practice because it may really not work all that well, and might explain a few things in my deficits as a player.

  12. #11

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    If I learn a new tune by playing it once or reading it a few times in the shed, I'm likely to forget the melody on the bridge or something like that.

    Tunes I've played for years, I do ok.

    Learning the lyric seems to help, but it's far from 100%.

    If I can remember the melody really well, I can generally pick out the chords, although maybe not for a complicated harmony if I'm tense on a bandstand and the tempo is brisk.

    And, except for the most standard of the standards, I'm prone to forgetting.

    I don't know where my keys are. Why should I know the bridge to Upper Manhattan Medical Group?

  13. #12
    I think a good memory is a real advantage for jazzers. I watched a documentary about London taxi drivers' brains. They do have a unique ability. I'm certain many jazz musicians have as similar brain pattern for storing and recalling. This also goes for recalling ideas, licks, etc. And I think a lot also has to do with the age you start. The younger the better as so much remains with you. The brain stores different things, for example names, in different parts of the brain. Damage to that area of the brain can lead to memory loss just for certain things. It's an interesting topic. My guess is some jazz musicians have the aural equivalent to photographic memory. However, I don't think a great memory necessarily makes you a better musician. In fact, it may be that strong memory recall inhibits the creative side of the brain.

  14. #13

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    At the start of the covid era, i watched a couple of forum member Jonathon Stout's porch videos/practice sessions on acoustic archtop. I decided to imitate him and began to practice a list of 100 tunes or more, 20 per day, all 100 per wk. I was teaching remotely and didn't have a commute, so it grew to 2 hours and even four sometimes, and i would work at least half of the list daily. I've noticed since i went back to teaching in person that i'm needing to glance at the ireal changes occasionally, but it comes back much quicker. So i'm renewing my commitment here and now. I found it helpful to keep the list in a page protector, out front on the music stand and guitar out of its case and ready to go. So spaced repetition has helped me Deacon Mk.

  15. #14

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    Hello everyone, new forum member here. Im a Jazzguitar Player from austria and Looking forward to share some knowledge and experience through this forum.

    Talking about my experience learning and memorizing tunes:
    To me there are different phases of memorizing a tune, mostly depending on where u are at understanding harmony.
    If u are trying to remember 100 tunes by thinking about chord Symbols or realbook Page, then yes its just about memorization.
    But if u know the Song from listening to different Versions, are able to identify harmony by ear(doesnt have to be Quick),
    and can sing the melody u will integrate it.
    What also helps is how u mapped out the guitar when trying to play for example a melody.
    It makes much more sense to play like u hear it rather than play how it might feel comfortable at first sight.
    If anyone is interested i could elaborate further on this, just my 2 Cents for now.

  16. #15

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    Bruce Forman has a great video on learning tunes at My Music Masterclass:

    Bruce Forman - Learning Tunes for Jazz Guitar - My Music Masterclass

    Bruce’s approach is to use the melody as your anchor.

    I can’t tell you how long I memorized just chord progressions when I started playing jazz, because some horn player or singer always took the melody. I don’t think that’s the way to go. When I got more serious, I wouldn’t even work on the progression until I could play the melody starting at any random string and position on the neck.

    Another route that helped me learn standards was to find an old pop vocal version - not a jazz singer - and learn the melody and chords by ear. Doris Day or Tony Bennett will usually give you a pretty faithful rendition of the melody, Billie Holiday will not. I think learning by ear will help you later if you forget a chord - you might still “hear” it in your mind and remember it better than some letters and numbers and punctuation marks in a fake book.

    Of course, the easiest way to remember tunes is to have to play them over and over, night after night, on the bandstand, a different way every time. But alas…

  17. #16

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    You make a four week business trip overseas. When you get back home you haven't touched a guitar since you learned a pair of songs before the trip, and you discover that the standard you learned from the sheet/book has been largely forgotten, but the original tune you composed at the guitar by ear is still with you.

    I am always amazed that people forget songs, but I know why, and I know why I don't. I learn, practice, compose, play, perform, and grasp everything by ear. When an existing song is learned by ear, the nature of figuring it out is almost identical to composing a novel song - everything is tested for whether "that's it".

    The question remains, why is making up a new song (which sticks with you) different from learning a song from sheets, books, or lessons (which tends to be forgotten)?

    Sheets, books, and lessons are external elements. Learning through them means adopting external elements and trying to ingrain and integrate them into yourself... this is the production of new internal structures composed of new external elements.

    Figuring out an exiting song (or making up a new one) by ear is different in that the same new internal structures are being constructed from existing internal elements that are a part of yourself with which you are already extremely intimately familiar. The ingraining and integration is naturally intrinsic, the speed of recall and recognition is virtually instantaneous, and the level of effort to manipulate and organize these things is close to nothing.

    The difference is the "language" of the external concrete representations vs internal abstract representations (their symbology). The external symbols require translation and interpretation, and these elements have a "foreign" aspect until they have been internalized through considerable time so that their symbols are eventually exchanged for intrinsic internal symbols.

    Our native internal representations of symbolic abstractions already contain their attributes and relationships between each other; they are ready to produce and construct symbolic representations in the "native language" of audition without external transfer or translation. They are already fundamentally constructed of the stuff (phenomenological substance) of which we are made.

    Anyway, my experience and thinking about this...

  18. #17

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    Back around 2002, my wife and I went on a cruise. I spent time with the guy who played cocktail piano in the afternoons, asking him about just this kind of thing. He showed me his pile of dog-eared fakebooks and said that the skill he developed to do that kind of work was to develop a solid music vocabulary so as to be able to translate a fakebook lead sheet into an arrangement on the spot and never play it the same way twice.

    This is what Robert Conti teaches in his chord melody materials. He provides the harmony approach and you provide ways to make it flow (i.e. breaking up the chords in various ways, harmonizing passages in thirds, sixths, etc.). I never had a good memory in grade school for memorizing poems, speeches, etc., and I have never been very good with trying to memorize somebody else's chord melody arrangement. But developing that vocabulary seems to work well for me.

    Tony

  19. #18

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    No use asking me, I can only do Summertime without looking and we're not sure about that

  20. #19

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    Thing is, it's got to go in the long-term and normally it doesn't get the chance. A few day's practice might do it for the short-term, after that you're on your own. Have to join a band and play them every night. Shame, but there we are.

    Or be obsessive, I suppose, but we don't want that.

  21. #20

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    I can remember a couple dozen tunes. ATTYA was the first song I worked out for chord-melody, and I’ll be playing that after I’m dead.

    I can reremember another several dozen songs, maybe a hundred, after looking at the chords on the Realbook and playing it through once or twice. Or just playing it through once. Lush Life is like that.

    Sometimes the more complex the chording (or fingering for classical), the easier it is to remember. Probably because you’ve invested so much effort in learning the song in the first place.

    Some songs I’ve just never taken the time to learn. Sometimes it’s because I just don’t care for the song per se.

    Interesting article in one of the major papers last week on frontotemporal dementia. I can’t find it right now. Very interesting if unfortunate condition, where people retain their long-term memory, but lose short-term and then can’t make use of their long-term memory. For instance, they might be given a spoon, and know that it is a spoon, but can’t eat soup with it.

    They also develop impulse control issues and hypersexuality. Unfortunately for their caregivers, physically they’re often fine and live for an average of a decade after diagnosis. Unlike Alzheimer’s, FTD patients often function too well to be in a nursing home.

    Sometimes I think I might be getting this. I remember the names of who played on an old Herbie Hancock album (well, most of the time), but can’t remember if I shut the garage door when leaving the house.

  22. #21

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    I remember the names of who played on an old Herbie Hancock album (well, most of the time), but can’t remember if I shut the garage door when leaving the house.
    There's no answer to that :-)

    Is today Tuesday?

  23. #22

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    Tbh depends. For a lot of standards stuff it’s aural memory now… oh that chord does that. That’s the melody.

    I find other forms of memory are a bit fragile. If I get it into the ears it’s all good.

  24. #23

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    Yea... I have most trouble remembering titles or names of tunes. Tunes are all just Chord Patterns and embellished licks... or melodic patterns.

    I always relate to tunes by their Form and just fill in the blanks.

  25. #24

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    For me, a tune is a melody (lyrics if I know them) and a "sound". The "sound" is the harmony of the tune.

    The idea is that anybody can memorize a melody. Everybody who can sing a pop tune is doing that.

    The issue, I think, is whether you can find the harmony on the fly, by ear. Best if it seems like your fingers go to the correct chord automatically.

    And, if you do it that way, you can play the tune in any key. One key becomes as good as another.

  26. #25

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    For me, the hardest part is recalling the name of the tune itself. If I can recall the name, I can usually fake my way through it, although there may be some clanks getting through it the first time or two. But sometimes I just can't think of a tune even though it was in my head not so long previously. My long-term memory is much better than my short-term memory these days.