Learning songs to teach technique

[Aaron Saunders]

I've heard talk about how U Can't Hold No Groove was written by Vic as a kind of way to practice his double-thumbing. Well, that got me thinking on this subject.

I started to learn Portait of Tracy, which forced me to improve my technique for voicing harmonics -- natural, artificial, and tapped (I've even almost managed to get that last chord out) but I have no actual inclination to really hammer it out and be able to play it like I know I would be able to, had I the desire to do so. But I have benefitted a lot technique-wise from learning the parts of the song that I have (I've got the first two of that small rash of harmonic chords near the end, but nothing past that until the last chord) and I will eventually learn the rest of the song -- it's a great song and it'd kill at a Coffee House.

For the next while (probably several weeks) I'll be taking a shot at doing the Victor version of Overjoyed, as transcribed in the UK BG. My tapping chops are ok -- I learned about half of Moonlight Sonata (never got around to retabbing it -- the one on Hamm's site has you jumping all round where you don't need to go) and I think that's built the chops up to the point where I can start to tackle Overjoyed.

Does anyone else do this, or have experience doing it?



Note: I don't have any aspirations to be a chopswanker, but I think about music as a second language: if I want to say something, I don't want to be left without the vocabulary to do so.

[geoffkhan]

It's best when music is your first language. But you know that.

Learning songs is a great way to progress. Composing challenging songs is also good.

[Adam Barkley]

Songs that teach techniques

Those Damn Blue Collared Tweekers (Primus)- palm muting/double stops/slapping/three finger technique

Classical Thump (Victor Wooten) - double thumping and tapping

Parallel Universe (RHCP) - picking