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Post by Village Idiot on Nov 29, 2020 21:02:29 GMT -5
I'm not talking about a song you've written, that's a whole other story. I'm talking about learning a new existing song.
Mine can be hearing it for the first time and wanting to learn it, but 99% of the time it's hearing one I haven't run across for a long time, and realizing that I should be playing it. I'll listen the version I know over and over again, listen to other versions (how nice what we live in the age of YouTube) then listening to the version I'm familiar with over again until it becomes internalized. How can I make this work? What key? Anything interesting musically that I need to sit down and really learn? Giving it a very rough first-time run through to see how it will work for me. Listening again, playing again, until how I'm going to do it seems to pop. Not that I can play it yet, but having a roadmap on how to approach it. Then the learning process, how I'm going to approach it, realizing that I can make it fit me, begins. That's my favorite part. You?
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Post by billhammond on Nov 29, 2020 21:31:44 GMT -5
Todd, just curious, in addition to listening to YouTube vids of the song in question, do you ever Google the song title and the word "chords" to get an assemblage of what the "right" ones are?
I am a solid believer in starting out with a totally accurate version of the chords the songwriter penned -- if I think I can "make it my own" by subbing in some variations, that can be very cool. But in my years of hosting open mikes, I gotta say that I cringed most not at crappy voices, or really bad performer-written songs, but rather what broke my neck were listening to performers who did a cover of a cool or even great or obscure song and just flat got the chords totally wrong.
I remember hearing a duo do "Ain't Misbehavin' " using only I, IV and V chords. ARGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!
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Post by TKennedy on Nov 29, 2020 21:52:06 GMT -5
Amen Bill. I think I have mentioned this before here but I did have my own arrangements of stuff like Crazy and Fly Me To The Moon etc. I was kind of proud of them but after playing them for the old guy I took jazz guitar lessons from he said “that sounds pretty good Terry but that’s not the way the song goes”  My arrangements became known as “terrifying” a song and everything sounded a lot better when I ditched them. Odds are extremely strong that the changes the original writer used will always sound best. I had the same experience with Patsy Cline songs. We had our arrangements from other bands but when we did the play and got the actual studio charts it was an eye opener and although much more challenging they sounded SO much better. I have had to learn a lot of new and frequently difficult songs for a series of shows I have been in focused around songs and stories of important eras of American history. Civil War, Depression, 18th century migration, western expansion etc. Most recently Women’s Suffrage. Being inherently lazy I dread the hard work it always entails and procrastinate but it’s always satisfying when it starts to come together and you always come out the other side a better musician. Well that went on too long- |
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Post by dradtke on Nov 29, 2020 22:05:47 GMT -5
It's my experience that the chords and lyrics I find online are frequently not the right ones. And some of the blatantly wrongs ones appear in several versions because they were copied from somewhere else wrong.
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Post by Village Idiot on Nov 29, 2020 22:07:30 GMT -5
Todd, just curious, in addition to listening to YouTube vids of the song in question, do you ever Google the song title and the word "chords" to get an assemblage of what the "right" ones are? Oh, absolutely. I knew I forgot to mention something in my original post. I've learned tons from looking up chords to things, even if the original key is G. I'll look at something and think how can that chord possibly fit into what's going on, and strumming through it might sound funny at first, but it does make sense after a bit. Doing so has also enlightened me to what some of you folks call walking chords, which in my mind are transitional chords. |
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Post by Village Idiot on Nov 29, 2020 22:08:56 GMT -5
It's my experience that the chords and lyrics I find online are frequently not the right ones. And some of the blatantly wrongs ones appear in several versions because they were copied from somewhere else wrong. Yup. I agree with that. Who knows who is going to post what, and many times the chords posted are easy to get away with chords, not the real thing. |
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Post by billhammond on Nov 29, 2020 22:12:29 GMT -5
It's my experience that the chords and lyrics I find online are frequently not the right ones. And some of the blatantly wrongs ones appear in several versions because they were copied from somewhere else wrong. Yes, but it's easy to do due diligence and find reputable chord sources, like from the songwriters themselves. Then you cue up a Youtube vid of the original, play the chords you've written down and verify by ear that they match. |
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Post by Village Idiot on Nov 29, 2020 22:32:36 GMT -5
I do that Bill, and I assume dradtke does the same. Background knowledge helps.
Examples I think of are how many people think Willie Nelson wrote Pancho and Lefty, or how many people think Arlo Guthrie wrote City of New Orleans. And if you go with that, many times the chords aren't what they are supposed to be. It does take some research.
And it makes for some interesting reading about songwriters I haven't been familiar with. For instance, I'm learning at lot right now about a guy named Michael Burton.
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Post by Russell Letson on Nov 29, 2020 22:56:23 GMT -5
My favorite part is getting the damn earworm to stop playing in my head. Sitting down and figuring out a tune usually works for that.
As for getting it right--I have a library of charts and arrangements, some of them (like the Frank Mantooth "Best Chords" series) very accurate (with footnotes, even). I then proceed to adapt as needed to accommodate my voice and technical limitations. It's also satisfying to work up an arrangement in two keys, just to see how the structure works. Or to strip down a sophisticated arrangement to its simplest reasonably faithful elements, as the one of the instructors at the Augusta slow jams used to to. And to get rid of pianistic chord extensions that are useful mainly for chord-melody arrangements. Who wants to play a m7#9 anyway.
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Post by billhammond on Nov 29, 2020 23:12:47 GMT -5
And it makes for some interesting reading about songwriters I haven't been familiar with. For instance, I'm learning at lot right now about a guy named Michael Burton. I will check him out. With a similar name, check out THIS guy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Bruton |
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Post by Marshall on Nov 29, 2020 23:27:47 GMT -5
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Dub
Administrator
I'm gettin' so the past is the only thing I can remember.
Posts: 19,910 
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Post by Dub on Nov 29, 2020 23:32:00 GMT -5
Sometimes I'll hear an unfamiliar number played and think, "Wow! I've got to learn that" That doesn't happen as much with songs as it does instrumental numbers. With songs, I'm more likely to decide to work one up that I've heard for years. Being classically trained, Fiddlerina sight-reads at speed. So she'll page through a book of hundreds of fiddle tunes playing each one once and stopping when she finds one she likes. Then she'll call me to bring my guitar and we'll run through it a few times to see if it's something we might work up.
When I decide to work up a song, I'm probably already familiar with it but may never have tried to sing it. Still, if I've heard it a lot, even fifty years or more ago, I probably have most of the lyrics filed somewhere in my head along with some semblance of the melody. If I need help on lyrics, I'll bring the song up on Apple Music or Amazon and copy down the lyrics from the recording. Finding reliable lyrics online is a rare event. I have the idea that most lyrics posted online were submitted by someone whose native language was not English and has no familiarity with regional idioms.
For the material we most often do, I can usually hear the chords without needing to look them up. Jazz and swing is a different story. I maintain a library of Real Books and other reputable fake books to check for the canonical keys and chords.
A sight-reader can play numbers from sheet music that they haven't actually learned but the next day they can't play it unless they have the dots. I can sight-read the dots but not at speed. I can slowly work through a lead sheet and eventually learn the tune but it's the slow way for me. I'd much rather listen to a recording and pick it up from that. I learn it faster that way. The exception is thumbpicking stuff (Travis, Ike Everly, Mose Rager, et al.). For that stuff, hearing often isn't enough. Even when it's carefully tabbed out it's hard to get right unless you can see one of them actually doing it.
One of the hardest songs I ever undertook to learn was Woody Guthrie's East Texas Red. It's long to begin with and often the lyrics are sort of arbitrary so they just have to be memorized. Most lyrics just fall in place because there are only a few words that make sense and follow the main idea. If you forget, it's pretty easy to fill in the missing word or line. But not East Texas Red. You just have memorize the lyrics and the order of verses or it isn't right.
One thing I will never do is perform in public with lyric sheets or an iPad in front of me. In Bob Dylan's song Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall he wrote "And I'll know my song well before I start singing" and I've always taken that to heart.
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Post by TKennedy on Nov 29, 2020 23:43:36 GMT -5
Mark I still have that big file of Real Book charts you sent me. I have a bunch of books but I have never found anything better than what you sent. Frequently there will be several different arrangements of the same song.
Thanks again!
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Post by Marshall on Nov 29, 2020 23:51:58 GMT -5
I am a solid believer in starting out with a totally accurate version of the chords the songwriter penned -- if I think I can "make it my own" by subbing in some variations, that can be very cool. But in my years of hosting open mikes, I gotta say that I cringed most not at crappy voices, or really bad performer-written songs, but rather what broke my neck were listening to performers who did a cover of a cool or even great or obscure song and just flat got the chords totally wrong. Yes, and no. A lot of what passes for chord chards on the web are kiddy chords or wrong. They use simple chord letters and don't get into voicings very well. I mean. I do check these things out, but I always go back to the audio song and check it out for accuracy. |
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Post by RickW on Nov 29, 2020 23:54:59 GMT -5
I’ll go and find the arrangements online, and then work through and try them. It’s funny how often I hear something and think, oh, I have to do that, and then learn to play it and realize that it sounds great with a full band, and just doesn’t work very well by itself.
But sometimes it does work, or I can take the chords and work up an arrangment. The part that I really like, and this is true of other peoples’ songs, and my own, is when I get it down so that my hands can deal with the guitar nicely, and I can sing well over it, and it all just works without having to think about it too much. This takes a while, and many times through. Not having sung much in my life, this probably takes a bit more time than with some folks. But that’s the satisfying part, where it all comes together like that.
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Post by Marshall on Nov 29, 2020 23:59:44 GMT -5
To the original question, there's not one favorite part. usually it's one version of a song I've heard that gets me going. Then there's the figuring it out. Changing a key? Working on a guitar part that can stand on it's own in support of the song. Then the memorization. And finally the vocal nuances to "make it my own." And finally, finally actually performing it somewhere somehow. The song arrangement is not finished until I can make it "happen" in a performance. Sometimes, a song will fail at that final step. I'll play it out, and decide I never really connected with it. Or I can't portray it in a successful fashion. Then it gets shelved.
But I suppose the best part is when I get to a level that I know I can make it mine. That's a fun moment and a great feeling.
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Post by Cosmic Wonder on Nov 30, 2020 22:41:25 GMT -5
My favorite part is when I get to play that Adim7 chord VI taught me. 320003.
Mike
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Post by millring on Dec 1, 2020 5:13:22 GMT -5
Finding the one right voicing.
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Post by majorminor on Dec 1, 2020 9:55:28 GMT -5
I'm at that age where I can do pretty much what I want on the guitar but now can't seem to remember a whole songs worth of lyrics any more.
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Post by Cornflake on Dec 1, 2020 14:10:47 GMT -5
"But I suppose the best part is when I get to a level that I know I can make it mine. That's a fun moment and a great feeling."
For me it was that moment where I knew I'd made it mine. Sometimes that moment never came and we usually jettisoned the song unless Barbara was singing it.
I'd always customize the song. In a couple I tweaked the lyrics or phrasing. I can't recall changing the chords much but on "To Live Is To Fly" I did a bass figure that Townes never used. Several times I heard other people do songs I'd written and they usually changed the songs in one way or another. I thought that was fine. They had to make it theirs.
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My arrangements became known as “terrifying” a song and everything sounded a lot better when I ditched them. Odds are extremely strong that the changes the original writer used will always sound best.
