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Learn a lot of songs or master a few??

Chinchano

Chinchano

Jan 18, 2015
246
133
39
Atlanta, GA
#1
When it comes to vocabulary we always hear to learn songs or transcribe. I wonder what's the most efficient way to increase vocabulary. Of course over time your list of known songs increases but what are you focusing on right now? Do you focus on volume as far as transcribing as many as you can to at least play cleanly? Or are you focused on mastering one at a time no matter how long it takes?
 
#2
Chinchano said:
When it comes to vocabulary we always hear to learn songs or transcribe. I wonder what's the most efficient way to increase vocabulary. Of course over time your list of known songs increases but what are you focusing on right now? Do you focus on volume as far as transcribing as many as you can to at least play cleanly? Or are you focused on mastering one at a time no matter how long it takes?
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I'll answer it this way. It depends on several things. My music is Praise played each Sunday at church. So is this a new song for this Sunday? If so then yes I concentrate on learning that song.

As to volume. 99.0% of what we do is from sheet music (fake chord) and every song's sheet music ends up in a gig book. Ready to be used again. I'll get this week's song list and pull those songs from the gig book and take them with me. No need in reinventing the wheel each Sunday.

Say this is a new song. Here I'd have the chord progression and could just follow the active chord pounding out roots or using one of my tried and true bass lines like R-5-8-5. I'd call up a video of the song and play along with the video and if I liked what I'm doing with it I'd put that song down and do the same with the next one we were going to play this Sunday. We play a total of seven songs each Sunday; most of them we have done before.

Back in my Country rhythm guitar days, yes again we had fake chord, but, as we did the same 50 to 70 songs over and over; lot of times the sheet music stayed home and I just winged it from memory. Winging Country is not that complicated, it'll probably by major and three chords. I could look over at the rhythm guitar's hands to check out what key. Loy sang in D, Shirley sang in A or G. If Tom took a song it would be in C. It was not rocket science.
 
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#5
as the old Proverb says...
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day...teach a man to fish and you feed him for a life time."

Learn the instrument and the fundamentals of music and learn to recognize chord progressions by hearing them. Then not only will songs will be learned easily and faster, you'll be able to quickly learn all the songs you want.
 
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#6
I think it can be a useful educational exercise to take a fairly complex piece of music and transcribe it note-for-note and practice it until you can play it exactly like the original. But to me, that's still basically an academic exercise. It forces you to learn how other (hopefully great) bassists built their parts rather than falling back on your own comfortable shortcuts. And I hardly ever do it.

But if your aspiration (like mine) is to gig, the driving question is, what do I need to do to be ready for the gig? And there, @Biggbass is right - knowing the fundamentals of music so that you can produce an entertaining rendition of a song in time for the show is what's most important, not so much intense note-for-note transcriptions. Heck, I was just in the car listening through a CD of half a dozen tracks I played on for a friend's originals project - and I don't think I play most of those fills the same way twice or in the exact same places. And I'm the one who came up with them in the first place!
 
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#8
I think the thing I'm curious about is it may be somewhat easy to learn the progression but any phrasing or licks may take a lot longer to the point where it may slow down learning other songs. Unless any difficult passages should just be considered separate practice anyway
 
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#9
Chinchano said:
I think the thing I'm curious about is it may be somewhat easy to learn the progression but any phrasing or licks may take a lot longer to the point where it may slow down learning other songs. Unless any difficult passages should just be considered separate practice anyway
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This becomes do you want to play note for note, or is note for note important to you. It's not for me. I do understand other do want to be note for note.

After all how much of the actual notes we play are heard, I think it's more a rhythm and feel thing. So as long as I'm catching the chord changes dead on and have locked with the kick drum - hoping for a groove - and are not stepping on any toes I'm happy. That does allow more time for the fun stuff.

Sounds like you are more comfortable with note for note and because of that you will just have to allow more time. Nothing wrong with that it's your time use it the way you want.

Memorizing the song -- how long before you will use it again??
 
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#10
MalcolmAmos said:
This becomes do you want to play note for note, or is note for note important to you. It's not for me. I do understand other do want to be note for note.

After all how much of the actual notes we play are heard, I think it's more a rhythm and feel thing. So as long as I'm catching the chord changes dead on and have locked with the kick drum - hoping for a groove - and are not stepping on any toes I'm happy. That does allow more time for the fun stuff.

Sounds like you are more comfortable with note for note and because of that you will just have to allow more time. Nothing wrong with that it's your time use it the way you want.

Memorizing the song -- how long before you will use it again??
Click to expand...

Thanks for the response! It kind of depends because we may use them at church or not but most of what I learn on my own time outside of that is purely for vocabulary and ideas on how to play certain things. So I can use those ideas in other songs
 
#11
It... Depends.

If I am in a new band with a ton of easy songs, I just need to remember keys and breaks and I tend to gloss over the details. There will usually be one or two more challenging songs, so I focus on them.

It's always good to know those songs ahead of time- to anticipate. "I wish" is a good example - a ton of bands play that tune, and it's not a song you can just wing on bass. So learn it even if you have no need. There are plenty of others.
 
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#12
Biggbass said:
as the old Proverb says...
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day...teach a man to fish and you feed him for a life time."

Learn the instrument and the fundamentals of music and learn to recognize chord progressions by hearing them. Then not only will songs will be learned easily and faster, you'll be able to quickly learn all the songs you want.
Click to expand...

A follow-up tip for this approach:

Get some song books for whatever genres you like so you don't have to guess (often incorrectly) the chords being used.
As someone who has learned hundreds of bass lines while not knowing the underlying chords, despite knowing considerable theory, I have a terrible time recognizing chord progressions and it's a serious handicap as there are a handful of progressions that are used OVER AND OVER but you wouldn't know it if you don't slow down and learn to recognize them.

I have been working on my ear for the past few months (just intervals, not chords) but for the past couple of weeks, after a friend recommended it, I have broke out some songbooks and have been listening/playing along while looking at the chord books. It will help to have a keyboard as you are learning so you can play the chords in root position and clearly hear them. Many times, chords in recorded music are incomplete or inverted and will throw the novice's ear off. Start very basic and get that ground in.

If you are just playing bass lines, you can easily be tricked as the bass is oftentimes not playing the root and you will be assuming the wrong underlying chord and think things are more complicated than they really are.

Though I am just starting this approach, I assure you that it is a better idea than just playing bass lines if your ear isn't great and you want to learn to recognize common chord progressions.
 
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#13
Get gigs. Learn material for the gigs. If you run out of material to learn, take fill-in gigs.

I play mostly fill-in gigs. I also play in church. I am constantly learning songs. It's kind of funny. These days my wife and I will go hang out at a bar for beer and wings. I can hear 25 songs played at the bar and I have played 24 of them live. It doesn't matter what style of music they play (rock, soul, funk, country, blues, etc.), I have played most of the hits in that genre at some point. The set I am currently learning is classic rock (I already knew every song in the set) and country with a couple pop songs. In a 50 song set I am having to learn 7 songs from scratch and brush up on two more in a different key (backup or lead vocals on every song). Between now and that gig I will play five songs on two different occasions in church.

The short version is that I am CONSTANTLY learning new material, but not just at random. I am learning them for work. You will stay much more motivated if you have a goal and a deadline. Just waking up every day and saying "I'm gonna learn me some songs today" won't keep you pumped up to follow through.

Get work. Prepare for that work. Your vocabulary will grow quickly.
 
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#14
two fingers said:
Get gigs. Learn material for the gigs. If you run out of material to learn, take fill-in gigs.

I play mostly fill-in gigs. I also play in church. I am constantly learning songs. It's kind of funny. These days my wife and I will go hang out at a bar for beer and wings. I can hear 25 songs played at the bar and I have played 24 of them live. It doesn't matter what style of music they play (rock, soul, funk, country, blues, etc.), I have played most of the hits in that genre at some point. The set I am currently learning is classic rock (I already knew every song in the set) and country with a couple pop songs. In a 50 song set I am having to learn 7 songs from scratch and brush up on two more in a different key (backup or lead vocals on every song). Between now and that gig I will play five songs on two different occasions in church.

The short version is that I am CONSTANTLY learning new material, but not just at random. I am learning them for work. You will stay much more motivated if you have a goal and a deadline. Just waking up every day and saying "I'm gonna learn me some songs today" won't keep you pumped up to follow through.

Get work. Prepare for that work. Your vocabulary will grow quickly.
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Can't argue with this.
One caveat: OP, as a vocalist, too, two fingers clearly has a well-developed ear. If you do not have a great ear, get on it. If you learn only mechanically, you will not remember song #1 by the time you are on song #10. Be sure that you can sing or hum, no matter how poorly the timbre, what you are playing. This will delay things a bit but the sooner you start, the better. See my earlier post, I have learned hundreds of songs, and forgotten most of them because I didn't truly hear them.
 
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#16
If I do practice with a recording like the original CD of the artist, I'll have to play note for note what the original artist did.

If I'm provided with a lead cheet or something like the real book then I'll create on the spot
 
#18
I've always focused heavily on the deeper structure of the songs I'm playing.

After awhile, definite patterns start emerging, and you notice how certain combinations and sequences start repeating in different songs. Those chunks of music are my vocabulary when mixed with a heavy dose of theory.

I'm always thinking things like: That chord sequence he's using there is the same one used in ____ and ____. And the whole structure of the song is identical to ________, except in this case the bridge switches to a minor key before it folds back to the major...

My approach is: learn once - use for many.
 
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#20
MalcolmAmos said:
After all how much of the actual notes we play are heard, I think it's more a rhythm and feel thing. So as long as I'm catching the chord changes dead on and have locked with the kick drum - hoping for a groove - and are not stepping on any toes I'm happy.
Click to expand...

Not to get on your case personally, Malcolm, but your rhetorical "...how much of the actual notes we play are heard..." reminds me very much of the kind of rationalization one encounters here on TalkBass with regard to phrasing, as well as with tone (i.e. ...'you're just the bass player; nobody is listening to you anyway...' or 'your sound will get swallowed up by the room, and half the audience is drunk so they don't care). It's a question that I find a little off-putting, simply because once you compromise the quality of your playing, then rationalize your decision accordingly, it can be a very slippery slope to a sloppy attitude that manifests itself in sloppy playing in general - something that's the kiss of death for any real musicianship.

IMO, if you're going to play cover tunes, there are two legitimate paths to consider: 1) if you're going to reproduce the song as the original artist has done (or the artist that recorded the most successful version of it), then one should strive to learn it note for note, tone for tone, phrase for phrase, etc.; or 2) if you wish to take some liberties with the song, then come up with your own arrangement of it - one that is very different from the original version - and make it just as clever and creative as you can. The middle of the road approach, kind of like the original song but missing something, is where you don't ever want to be.

MM
 
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