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How did you learn songs before the internet?

#101
Buy the 45, write down the lyrics with a pencil and many repeated tone arm drops, figure out the chords, then bass part, take to rehearsal and teach the other guys their parts. Much easier and faster today than the 60's with our cd's & mp3's and computer printers, but the method is still very similar.
 
#104
In my first band in1970 my drummer would do all the singing so we left it up to him to write the lyrics down. We were working on Neil Youngs Cinnamon Girl, he starts singing... "the tinsel reflaxes, a bass with a bow" we all stopped and just about fell over laughing.

Cheap mono record player and a lot of singing back the bass part while playing along. Very tedious.
 
#105
Juliette_8_track_Stereo_C.jpg



I had from the early-mid 70's a Juliette AM-FM Stereo/8-track/turntable that I learned on. I also used sheet music for the difficult stuff but did prefer to learn by ear. Later on I used cassette's, and then CD's.

I really think the most comfortable way for me was using records and flipping the arm back repeatedly. Hmm.....
 
#108
Well, back to the tone-arm-drop-453-times until you actually heard all of the parts....learned Blood Sweat & Tears and Chicago's first albums that way in the '60's, then couldn't understand why people liked 3 chord rock so much. Put it together later, but had developed the ear to a point where jazz training came easily so that real books & charts were fun. Oddly, wound up playing in casino cover bands with tons of vocal layering, but it sure is fun to do it & not have to use a 45 or LP anymore. Mind you, the challenge is gone too!
 
#109
sowilson said:
I still like to use a Marantz PMD-201. It's a cassette deck that can record/play at half speed. A great tool for trying to learn traditional Irish music, guitar solo's, and bass lines

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These Marantz were IT. When I was at Berklee in '81, these were the things to have. You could actually slow the tape down to learn the passage. Of course, I could not afford one and never had one.

When I was younger, I had to learn off the vinyl on a stereo similar to this:

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl...74p_k2EXq3waM:;2aCci9XPSYTYYM;y74p_k2EXq3waM:

You had to lift the cover and then move the needle back to the spot you wanted.

Then there was the recording off the radio trick like everyone else.
 
#110
In my day, we had to go to the tribe shaman's hut, and bring him the milk of a toad, so that he might speak to the gods and play us the music on a conch shell.
Then you had to go to the custom shop hut and have them make you a conch shell like his, but they never did get it just right. Close, but you know the story.

I just used to play the tape over and over, or maybe dub it a few times in a row to save the extra effort. When CDs came around, one could just keep hitting the "back" button. When I do bass work for a friend of mine, he just burns a CD with the song a bunch of times so it just plays and plays as I play with the song.
Nowadays, most of the songs my band does can be found on YouTube, which is pretty awesome.
 
#111
bezbass said:
The same way I do now! By ear!
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This. I don't use the Internet to learn songs. I don't read tab and nobody uploads standard notation bass charts. Most songs are easy to pick up, anyway. I spend a minute or two figuring out what key a song is in, roll it back to the start, and slop through it a couple times to get the progression and basic riffs. After that, it's just listening and learning the details. Plus I like to put my own spin on things. Playing note for note 100% can be boring to me. My MIDI setup can already do a kick ass job at that!

Obviously, some songs are harder than others to pick up by ear. I never learned anything from Rush by slopping through it a couple times. But most of the stuff I listen to isn't that hard.
 
#112
I started playing in the early 90s. We had the Internet, but it was just slightly before the World Wide Web. I would log into the university mainframe and use this pinnacle of high technology to access Usenet groups like alt.guitar. Somebody posted a link to a Gopher site containing dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred tabs...

Any sufficiently advanced technology will be used to create horribly inaccurate tabs. And fools like me will use them instead of developing their ears.
 
#113
The adversity probably helped you guys develop a better ear than I have. Tabs helped me out because I had no freakin clue how or where to start with bass guitar. When a friend of mine showed me how to read tabs, I started seeing patterns in songs and getting a feel for how scales and roots of chords worked in a song for the bass part. I'm still developing my ear, but I can easily play in the correct key if I give the song a few listens and get a second or two to noodle around.

Very interesting to read everyone's experience with ear-ing these songs out. I will say this though, it is a LOT easier to make out the bassline when listening to records on my stereo and turntable than it is with MP3's on my computer...and my computer has a subwoofer.
 
#114
Usually on a cheap old cassette tape boombox having to learn a song 30 minutes before a gig. The bass was so hard to hear on those old cassettes I usually had to make up my own lines. Later when I heard the real bass part on a quality stereo system I was often surprised that I liked my part better. So, it had value for ear training.
 
#115
I still learn tunes by ear, the old school way, it just means hitting the back button on a cd player or computer screen now. I really believe the old way develops a better ear, or at least develops the ear faster...you had to, it wasn't a choice.

I also had a bunch of practice tapes with radio dj's talking over the intros and endings, so you got really good at focused, intent listening, tuning out the talk and picking parts out from underneath the chatter. And/or writing your own intros and endings. To this day I'm an extremely quick learner, can get the key from the first chord or 2 and write out the rest of the changes without an instrument in my hands if the song is somewhat simple, like most popular music. And I'm still a stickler for good tight endings.
 
#117
millsbass5 said:
Ugh..... You wouldn't believe the albums and cassettes I've been thru over the years. As a teenager, I'd stand in front of the stereo for hours on end, with my bass on, dissecting songs, note for note.
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I never had any interest at all in learning note for note. I'd learn the important riffs and the song structure and then play spontaneously within that context. Worked great, still does. I won't "wow!" anyone with my catalogue of famous riffs and superfine precision technique, but so what?... I get the same amount of props and play as anyone else around here ;)
 
#118
giacomini said:
Today I don't even use cd albums or have mp3 files in my HDD, I just build a set list in grooveshark.com or the like.
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Grooveshark is awesome as a learning tool! I can't seem to get anyone else in the band to adopt it...instead the BL keeps buying m4ps from iTunes and emailing them to me and which i immediately throw in the trash because it won't play on my Android.
 
#119
Joe Nerve said:
A little OT, but I've been thinking a lot lately of how people would manage these days in a lot of other areas, without the internet.
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or phones that run it.

The music part was tiny compared to some other things. But, we had to either buy physical copies of anything we wanted, find someone who had phsyical copies so we could make a crappy recording of it, or listen to the radio all day in hopes of finding what we wanted.
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And that my friends is why we are plagued with classic rock radio.
 

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