Author: Impact Guitar

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How to Learn Songs Faster (and remember them for longer!)

When I started learning the guitar, my learning process for a  new song was “First fret, sixth string…move this finger to the first fret, fifth string… then slide it up to the third fret…”

There’s nothing wrong with this – it’s how we all learn in the beginning. As I learnt more songs and studied music theory, I developed better ways to learn pieces more efficiently.

1.Sequence

Just because we listen to music from start to finish, doesn’t mean we have to start learning a piece from the beginning. My preferred method is to listen to the whole piece first and identify the tricky parts; if there is a difficult lick in the solo, for instance, you can start practising that now whilst learning the rest of the piece alongside it. We can master things quickly by learning them in parallel, rather than sequentially.

2. Give yourself a deadline and stakes

I find myself more motivated to learn something if there is a definite deadline and some sort of pressure or stakes involved. If I know I will be performing a song in a gig, the pressure will motivate me to make sure I learn the piece thoroughly and to a higher standard. Other ways to motivate yourself might be to play the song to some friends, teach the piece to someone else, or upload a video to YouTube.

3. Tempo

It might sound obvious, but practicing with a metronome really helps me to stay focussed on my timing as well as gradually building speed on any difficult sections. Once I can play the piece at the correct speed, I will then play along to a backing track to improve my musical feel.

4. Technical ability

This refers to how well your fingers are connected to your brain. Developing this should be a daily part of your routine, usually by playing exercises, but you can also use the piece you are currently learning to develop your technique: if you are struggling with a legato lick or a particular chord change, you can make this into an exercise by playing it slowly with a  metronome and gradually speeding it up. Also try moving the pattern around the neck or onto different strings. Many of the musical patterns we encounter will repeat in various other songs, so it all helps to build our musical repertoire and makes it easier to learn future pieces.

5. Sing as you play

When you are learning something new, sing along with what you are playing on the guitar. I started doing this when I was learning a lot of solos and it really helped me build the connection between my fingers and my ear, meaning I could learn the solos quicker and also remember them for longer. If you are learning a chord progression, you could either sing the root notes of the chords you are playing, or you could sing the whole arpeggio.

6. Look for familiar patterns

If I really understand what I am playing from a music theory perspective, I find I can learn it faster and remember it for longer. By having a solid understanding of theory, you will be able to analyse the scales which are being used and also the harmonic framework of the chord progressions. Most songs follow very similar chord patterns, so understanding common progressions like  ii-V-I , I-IV-V, and I-vi-IV-V  allow me to “chunk” the piece into familiar patterns, so I don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time I learn a new piece.

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Making Smaller Circles

“It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set.”

Josh Waitzkin – The Art of Learning

Whenever we start learning a new skill – whether it’s yoga, martial arts or a new instrument – we naturally measure our progress in terms of how much we know: learning more scales, more techniques, more songs and more licks gives us a great sense of progress and makes us feel like we are getting better.

Usually, however, we are not. In fact, I recently learnt that doing the exact opposite can elevate your skills to a much higher level.

When I was a teenager learning the guitar, I was obsessed with how many scales I could learn: harmonic minor, Phrygian dominant, Japanese pentatonic scales. I really believed that the more scales I knew, the better a guitarist I would become. When I later started playing in a band, I realised most of these scales were totally impractical and redundant. Not only that, but because I was cramming as many scales as possible into my brain, I had learnt them all in a very superficial way and usually in only one position on the neck. I was making the common error of over emphasising the quantity of what I was learning, and not developing the depth and quality of what I was learning.

In his excellent book ‘The Art of Learning’, Josh Waitzkin discusses the idea of “making smaller circles” – a concept he used to become a chess champion and then a martial arts master.

The principle of “making smaller circles” is to start with broad movements which are then gradually narrowed and refined. In chess this might mean that you start learning the End Game first, with only a few pieces on the chess board. When learning a new guitar solo, this might mean playing through the solo once and highlighting the difficult sections, before narrowing those sections further to isolate a particularly tricky phrase, and then narrowing further again to a small sequence of notes.

Once I have zoomed in and identified a problem, I usually find that the stumbling blocks are just a handful of notes or a particular technique that needs to be drilled repeatedly as an exercise.

Refining one small element can then have a  massive impact on your overall skill, elevating everything else onto a new level.

“Making smaller circles” is something that Steve Vai uses in his own practicing, where he focusses on a narrow technique for an hour and tries to expand and develop that technique. An example of this is where he focussed on his finger vibrato for an extended period and realised that he could combine the typical Rock vibrato (i.e. bending and releasing the string) with Classical vibrato (sliding your finger up and down within the fret) to create his own distinctive ‘circular’ vibrato.

Although I wasn’t previously aware of the “smaller circles” concept, I often applied it intuitively when teaching others. When I recently taught someone how to play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ by Led Zeppelin, he was struggling with the chord changes in the introduction. He had been practising the song at a slow-tempo with finger picking, as it sounds on the record. I suggested he isolate the chord changes by strumming each chord once, whilst playing the chord sequence in a repetitive loop. This meant we could focus on improving the speed of the left-hand chord changes without using lots of cognitive space worrying about the right-hand finger-picking. Strumming the chords also took half the time as finger-picking, so we could get more repetitions into a practice session, again “making the circle smaller”.

In my own learning, I realised recently that my knowledge of pentatonic scales was a little superficial, partly because I’d spent my teenage years learning loads of fancy scales that were not as useful as the humble pentatonic. I decided I would “make the circle smaller” and concentrate on learning the pentatonics deeply, mastering them in all five positions across the entire neck. I came up with a  host of different techniques to really understand the pentatonics and internalise the feel and sound of them rather than just trying to ‘shred’ through them. I looked at where the root notes occur within each shape; where the major or minor tonic chords are within each pattern; I also sang the scales as I played; I would improvise a lick, then try to play it in each pentatonic shape across the neck. I also looked at how far I could bend notes whilst staying within the pentatonic scale.

After all this in-depth pentatonic practice, something strange happened. My student was ready to learn the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ solo and I said “yeah, that’s fine, I’ve played it loads of times – it’s all pentatonic scales”.

Only it’s not.

As I was playing the first bars of the solo, I realised that Jimmy Page steps outside the pentatonic scale to play an ‘F’ note. I thought: “Hmmm, I’ve never noticed that before. Why does he do that?”

I realised that by moving outside the pentatonic, Page gives the solo an added sophistication, highlighting the root note of the F Major 7 chord he is playing over, even though he could have stayed within the pentatonic scale and it would have sounded fine. I then looked more closely to see if he always played the ‘F’ note each time this chord arrived and I saw that he later plays the unusual note of ‘G’ over this chord (the ‘G’ is in the pentatonic scale but is not in an F Major 7 chord, so the note functions like a jazzy major 9th). I began to see all the nuances I had previously missed when I first learnt the solo, as I had superficially assumed it was all pentatonics and didn’t have the deep knowledge of pentatonics to realise otherwise. I had made my circle smaller.

So, if you really want to improve your playing, focus deeply on one thing and explore it fully before moving on. You will find that this new-found mastery spills over into other aspects of your playing, giving an extra dimension to your knowledge and musicality.

My latest book ‘Guitar Gymnasium: Habits, Hacks and Tricks to Accelerate Your Playing‘ is available on Amazon now.

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5 Ways to Find Your Own Style

All great guitarists have their own distinctive style. Steve Vai, Tom Morello, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain have a sound and style which is immediately identifiable. Below are five tips to help you find your own style.

Don’t just ask “How do I do this?”

When we want to learn something new our first instinct is to find a tutorial video on YouTube, which is absolutely fine and is a great way to learn. However, once we’ve learnt a new song or technique the temptation is to quickly move on to the next thing, learning everything in a superficial manner. To really master something we need to go deeper.

For instance, once you understand two-handed tapping, expand on the technique and develop your own way of doing it. Some experimental ideas are: mix tapped harmonics with normal tapping, bend whilst tapping, slide whilst tapping, tap across multiple strings, include the whammy bar whilst tapping, detune the tuning peg whilst tapping, tap on the pickup rather than the neck. Once you have found something that sounds good, start writing lots of different licks based around the new technique to incorporate it into your playing.

Learn from other instruments

Other instruments have a range of techniques we can blend into our own style. Violinists can make the volume of a note “swell” from very quiet to very loud and this technique has been copied many times on the guitar by using the volume control. Maybe you could use the volume control in a different way?

The gamelan orchestras of Bali do not tune to a standard pitch, giving each  orchestra its own unique sound. What would happen if you tuned your guitar in a non-standard way or your whole band tuned their instruments in a different way?

Saxophone players breathe between phrases and this can be copied on the guitar by leaving a moment of silence between our licks. What if you left more silence in your playing?

Because pianists have ten fingers, they can play ten notes at the same time – could you think of a way to do this on the guitar, even though we only have 6 strings?

Don’t just learn songs – master them

Often we learn songs and then forget about them, or we might dust them off when Auntie Dorothy comes to visit and wants to hear us play.

Instead, our aim should be to master songs. We can do this by going deeper and understanding the musical framework of the song: why are certain chords used? How do these chords fit within the key structure? What if we re-harmonised the song using different chords?

If you have learnt a solo, analyse the scales used and how they fit with the underlying chords; write ten variations of the solo; use different areas of the neck to play the solo; write your own version of the solo but only using two strings.

By building up our mental models, we can understand the musical structures and retain the music in our long-term memory.

Learn from your hero’s heroes.

We all have favourite guitarists and it is a great idea to find out who they were inspired by and see if we can learn from them.

If you love Van Halen, go back to Eric Clapton; if you love Steve Vai, listen to Frank Zappa or go back even further to Zappa’s big influence, the classical composer Edgar Varese. You may find that you don’t like the music or you may find a new favourite musician to learn from.

By finding commonalities between our heroes and their mentors, we can figure out exactly what it is we like about their style and incorporate it deliberately in our own playing: Steve Vai’s use of the Lydian mode is derived from both Frank Zappa and Joe Satriani; Van Halen’s use of two-handed tapping is derived from Allan Holdsworth’s long legato lines, but his aggressive bluesy soloing is influenced by Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page.

Once you dig into their style, you can follow the process of Learn, Assimilate, Expand –  meaning that you learn it, merge it into your playing, then expand on it to make it your own.

Inner States and External Music

Our inner state affects everything we do on the guitar. Certain guitarists will play very aggressively, like Zakk Wylde or Dimebag Darrell, and that aggression will manifest itself externally by angling the pick for a more aggressive sound or hitting the strings harder. Others guitarists like Eric Johnson or Lari Basilio will have gentler or more playful personalities and this will be expressed physically by picking with their fingers or pressing a chord down very gently.

Our inner state also affects whether we play very short aggressive phrases or long flowing melodic lines. It will dictate which notes we end each phrase on and whether we play all over the neck or stay in one position in the middle of the neck.

As humans we all experience a wide spectrum of emotions and feelings, and the guitar is a great instrument for expressing these. We can set our intention before we even pick up the instrument and can deliberately focus our emotions to be calm, aggressive, melancholy, joyful or excited and the guitar will respond to these feelings. Practising scales and exercises is essential, but only so we can express ourselves fully on our chosen instrument.

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DEVELOPING AN EFFECTIVE PRACTISE ROUTINE Part-Two: Turning Weakness into Strength

Often when we sit down to practise, we actually end up playing. Practising means working on the things we can’t yet play.

Playing is really important, after all that is why we practise so much in the first place and ripping through some solos is really fun and satisfying. Practising – like the large section of iceberg that sits under the water –  is the part no-one else ever gets to see.

The purpose of practising is to find our weak spots and turn them into our strengths, but this is the part that can be challenging. Psychologically it is difficult to admit that we are not perfect.

In his autobiography ‘Total Recall’,  Arnold Schwarzenegger mentions how as a teenager he never worked on his calf muscles, with the result that he had a great upper body, but skinny calves. Some of his early photos even had him standing in water so his legs couldn’t be seen. When he later decided to work on his calf muscles he would wear shorts all the time, showing the world his weak spot and often being ridiculed by other bodybuilders in the gym. But he knew this would give him the motivation he needed and eventually his calf muscles became one of his strengths.

Identifying Your Weak Spots

A good to find your weak spots is by learning lots of songs. I always use a backing track for the song I’m learning, as it ensures I stay in time and learn the music at the right speed. Playing without a backing, it’s easy to unintentionally slow down at the fast bits and fool yourself that you’re playing it at the right speed.

As I play through the song I highlight the difficult sections, then use a metronome to find the current speed I can comfortably  play them, writing this tempo on the tablature.

I turn each tricky section into an exercise, playing it in isolation with a metronome, gradually building up speed and accuracy, and marking my new speeds on the tablature. This may take many weeks, but you can see your improvements in the new speed markings. You can even record yourself each day to hear yourself improving.

It’s important to decide on the most comfortable fingering at an early stage, as you want to use consistent fingering to maximise your practise time. Once the tricky part is at the correct speed and feels comfortable, you can put it back into context and play along with the backing track. Record yourself and listen back: does it flow? If it is a fast part that you find tricky, build up speed until you can play it a little faster than the actual tempo; when you play it at the normal speed it will feel easier.

When you find a weak spot in your playing, try to identify the underlying cause of the difficulty. For instance if you have difficulty switching from a D chord to an A chord, play really slowly and watch what your fingers are doing. Can you play each chord on its own? If not, practise each chord in isolation. This is the idea of ‘tightening the circle’ where we start with the biggest movements and gradually refine them in smaller and smaller detail. This concept is mentioned in the excellent book  ‘The Art of Learning’ by Josh Waitzkin, who is a chess master and martial arts champion. The smaller we make our circle, the faster we can target our weaknesses and turn them into strengths.

Play with Other Musicians

Another great way to find your weak spots is by playing with other musicians. A major benefit is that you will be exposed to songs you may not usually listen to: if you are mainly a rock player, but you are asked to solo over some jazzy chords you may realise that you aren’t comfortable soloing outside of a pentatonic solo.  Or you may realise that your rhythm playing isn’t quite as tight as you thought it was. Or you may discover a new love for Latin Disco Techno-Funk!

When I was a teenager playing in my first band, we used to learn songs from CDs and tapes. I realised that my ear wasn’t very good at identifying chord progressions, so I started making my own ear-training tapes to improve my relative pitch. I would never have done this if I’d just stuck to learning songs from tablature.

Emulate Your Heroes

Find a backing track to one of your favourite guitar solos and then emulate the solo, but don’t copy it note-for-note. Just copy the overall shape of the solo.  I tried this with Zakk Wylde’s solo from ‘No More Tears’ by Ozzy Osbourne, following the overall shape of:

  • Smooth melody (starts at 4 minutes 13 seconds into song).
  • Aggressive pentatonic solo (starts at 4 minutes 41 seconds).
  • Climactic build up, using ascending legato patterns (starts at 4 minutes 56 seconds).

I realised that I found it difficult to use fast pentatonic patterns to build to a climax, mainly because I didn’t know my pentatonic scales well enough across the entire neck. I had discovered my weak spot and could begin making it a strength.

Steal from your heroes

Once you have learnt a new solo, take some of the licks and write ten variations to use in your own solos. When we engage with the things we’ve learnt it makes us process it in a deeper way and helps us retain it for longer. This makes our new knowledge “disfluent”, meaning its more difficult to initially absorb, but is more memorable for our brains. See the book ‘Smarter, Better, Stronger’ by Charles Duhigg for a great chapter on this.

Practise with “Emotional Content”

Bruce Lee said it is better to practise a punch once with focus than practise a punch one hundred times with no focus. He called this “emotional content” and we can apply this by practising with our full attention. Allocate a realistic time period for your practise session with a clearly defined goal (i.e. “I’m going to practise for 25 minutes and learn an A Major 7 arpeggio in five different positions on the neck”. This will help you maintain focus. Make sure you have a break when the time limit is up as it is vital to rest your hands and mind.

One of the great things about music is that it is a life-long endeavour and we all have areas that we can improve. Never let your weaknesses discourage you, as each weakness is a gift that will push you closer to being the best musician you can be.

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Developing an Effective Practice Routine

Part One: How to Set Goals

“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

Steven R. Covey

I’ve been there before: I know I have practised over the year, but I don’t really feel like I’ve made any progress. This is a common problem for professional and amateur musicians alike – we don’t have enough time to practise so we grab a few minutes here and there, but it is all a bit unfocused..

However, there are tactics you can use to overcome this hurdle and get yourself back on the fast track to becoming the best musician you can be.

This series will cover different elements of how to practise.

Without clear goals we tend to practise aimlessly  without really achieving anything. Having a clear idea of where you want to go will function like a road-map, helping reach your goals quickly and effectively. The five tips below will help you design your map.

1. Focus on the destination

The first and most important step is setting clear goals for the long-term, mid-term, short-term and next few days. Write your goals down to clarify your thinking.

  • Long term goals: think about where you ultimately want to be as a musician. Do you want to be able to play through every Beatles song in your bedroom, work as a session guitarist or write songs for your own band? Long term goals don’t need to be overly detailed and can just be a vision of where you would like to go. Remember you may adjust these as you progress on your musical journey, so you don’t need to be too rigid.
  • Mid-Term goals: This covers the next one or two years. Here you can write down clearer goals such as “write 20 songs to perform with my own band” or “learn all Beatles songs from the Revolver album”. I don’t like setting ‘Five-Year Goals’ as I find five years is a little too long for me to get fully engaged and motivated.                           
  • Short-Term goals: This covers the next few months or weeks, and could be goals such as “learn one Beatles song from Revolver album” or “write and record one song”.
  • Immediate goals: This would cover today or this week and could be things such as “learn verse chords to Taxman by the Beatles” or “write two riffs and record them onto my phone so I remember them”.

Once I have written down my goals, I find it useful to ask myself if the mid-term goals (1 to 2 years) can actually be achieved in a shorter time-frame of 1 or 2 months. Usually they can’t, but it is a good way to evaluate my goal setting.

2. Motivational Juice: (don’t make goals too academic or dry)

When setting your goals, don’t make them too academic or dry. Ideally your goals should be filled with emotional purpose and an easy way to do this is to use your goals to serve others.

If you want to write songs, an academic goal would be something like “I want to write 20 songs in a variety of keys, for a range of different instruments, using different song structures and lyrical content”. Or you could say it in a more exciting way: “I want to write songs so that people feel the fucking roller-coaster of emotions I’ve felt during my life.”

3. Schedule it in: (this will take away decision fatigue)

I sometimes think I’m ‘too busy’ to do the creative things I want to do. My solution is to write a weekly list of what I want to do, with a rough time of when I can fit it in. My creative time is usually after work in the evenings, so having a list really takes way the problem of trying to decide what I should be doing (this is called ‘decision fatigue’ where my brain is literally tired of making too many decisions).

I write my schedule every Friday evening for the week ahead. This lets me plan around things like cinema trips or evenings out.

The items I add to my schedule are based on ‘themes’ rather than exact details, so it might say “Saturday 10:00am to 10:30am – practise Queen song on guitar”. I used to write really detailed and exact goals on my schedule, but found that I would feel deflated if I failed to meet the exact goals listed. Find what works for you and keeps you moving forward.

4. Measure progress: (create a positive feedback loop)

We can check we are moving towards our goals by measuring our progress. Because we see our own progress in small increments, we often forget how much we have achieved, so measuring your progress should be a chance to critique yourself and praise yourself. When we see how much progress we’ve made, it encourages us to practise more, creating a positive feedback loop where our skills spiral upwards. Smart phones make it easy to record ourselves via video, audio or just typing notes.

5. Take massive action: (this could just be “consistency”)

Many motivational speakers talk about taking ‘massive action’ towards our goals, but I think this is sometimes misunderstood. Although Steve Vai practised his guitar for 12 hours a day as a student, this is not realistic for the majority of us who work or have families.

The idea of massive action could just mean working every day on our goals, even if it’s just for an hour. Let me say that again: every day. This might include your birthday, Christmas, the day you have an awful cold and the day you just don’t feel like doing it. But an hour every day might be the massive action that is available to you, given your other commitments.

When you measure your progress a year later, you will definitely feel, think and act like a different person. That’s how massive action affects you.

Next time I will discuss how we identify the weak spots in our playing and how to turn them into our strengths.

Once you have an effective practise routine in place, you want to make sure that you are learning in the most effective way. My ebook ‘Guitar Gymnasium’ shows how to accelerate your learning with simple learning hacks.