And to clarify, I'm not suggesting I feel maxed out. More like, "Could I learn 10,000 songs? That seems like a lot."
If you were really determined, you could. There are some jazz musicians reputed to have a memorized repertoire in the thousands, for instance, Harold Mabern.
[insert obligatory dumb drummer joke here]
IIRC, Brahmins learned to recite the Vedas in their entirety over 14 years with a rigorous memorization routine. In the pre-Reformation schola cantorum, singers would learn all their plainchant in about 12. You have plenty of capacity and plenty of time. Apply yourself, young Stanley!
Could I learn 10,000 songs?
You could if lots of them had the same drumbeat.
i can't quitei tell what you are saying. is there where we complain about the lawyers who deleted the tabs off the internet? IP is theft.
Yeah, what 3 said. Ditto skaldic poets, 'bards', people learning the Qu'ran, traditional story tellers, and all kinds of other people working in 'oral' cultures.
The cover band thing always impresses me, I have friends who play in covers bands semi-professionally who have working repertoires of hundreds of songs [guitar players, mostly]. One friend takes it seriously enough that he has not just the basic structure and chords of tunes memorized, but note-for-note guitar solos for many dozens of them. I'm a very very lazy guitarist, so I rely on sheet music and cheat sheets and never know more than a tiny number of tunes at one time, so knowing hundreds always seems like voodoo.
re: jazz, yeah, I've been to a few lessons with decent jazz players, and conversations always go like:
"so, what tunes interest you?"
"Blahblah"
"OH, yeah, the A-section to that is Gm7, Fm7, Ebmaj7, C7#9, but such and such always subs the Ebmaj7 with etc"
I've almost never stumped them.
Isn't it at least in part training though? The people referred to in 2, 3 were taught memorisation techniques as well as material. These days people have sheet music/mp3s and don't have to learn to remember much beyond what's on their current playlist. Is this one of those skills you have to master before you're 10 to do it properly, like bilingualism?
re: 7
I don't know, in general, but, anecdotally, I do know that some of my friends who have big working tune memories didn't start playing until they were in their late teens.
it's 'Rythym' changes
If you change the spelling, does it count as two different progressions? You could increase your number in a hurry that way.
You could increase your number in a hurry that way.
Who could ask for anything more?
12: How can that be off topic here?
12: See that is when you need your precise East Coast pronunciation. "'Harry', not 'hairy' you plebe!" But being in Fort Wayne, not so much.
I don't really see why you couldn't learn 10,000 songs. I mean, I'm pretty sure there haven't been any serious controlled laboratory studies of long-term memory capacity (for obvious reasons), but there have to be some intense coding efficiencies available for the drum parts of songs.
There must be some outer reach of memory for this sort of information, right?
That's what I thought when I started learning Chinese characters, but it turns out that after a while you just get good at remembering crap.
There are systems for song memorization. I went as far as to buy the LEGO system stuff, to try and get over my lazy reliance on sheet music which is/was hindering my attempt to get better at playing jazz.
http://jazzwise.com/conrad-cork-a-new-guide-to-harmony-with-legoar-bricks-2008-edition.html
He basically breaks down chord progressions into chunks, which he tries to get you to learn by ear, and doesn't add in the theoretical descriptions [this is a ii-V-I, etc] until much later. The idea is that you can learn a tune in about 30 seconds, because all you need to remember is that it's these 4 'blocks' in Eb, or whatever.
I didn't get very far with it, though, due to teh sloth.
He basically breaks down chord progressions into chunks, which he tries to get you to learn by ear, and doesn't add in the theoretical descriptions [this is a ii-V-I, etc] until much later. The idea is that you can learn a tune in about 30 seconds, because all you need to remember is that it's these 4 'blocks' in Eb, or whatever.
Homer worked on much the same principle. That is, he did with the words, nobody recorded the chords.
17: not exactly, or not necessarily.
Is this the Lady Gaga cover band that you are in?
I think a lot of musicians have informal systems of that type, and people who learn a lot of tunes get good at it. The 'LEGO' system is one way that someone's attempted to systematize it, although I can't testify to how useful it really is.
I find when I'm sight reading, for example, that I'm really very good at doing it with certain types of material because I've played that sort of thing lots of times before, and the basic patterns and shapes are predictable even if the piece is unfamiliar, but the minute the piece is in a genre I don't usually play, even if it's mechanically pretty simple, I can get stumped. I guess people with good tune memories have memorized enough things that memorizing new things is more like that, pattern recognition and a library of already memorized stuff.
Slightly OT: Now that I have Thumb Jam, I am a musical genius.
I seem to recall something some news article (or Malcom Gladwell piece) that it takes 10,000 hours to get to be an expert at something. So, if you can learn a song an hour, you're set.
More specifically, that was 10,000 news articles about a Malcolm Gladwell piece.
I hate to be a jerk, but if you're pretty proficient with your instrument, is knowing how to play a song that different from just generally knowing the song from the radio? I can't play any of the instruments in the song Radar Love, but I know the song from the radio well enough that I'm pretty sure I could play it within one or two tries, if I did.
re: 26
It's completely different. And this:
I know the song from the radio well enough that I'm pretty sure I could play it within one or two tries, if I did.
is comically wrong. It's sort of a towering edifice of wrong. Even very proficient musicians may take a LOT of practice to learn particular songs.
You don't really believe 26, do you?
The difference between playing something that would be recognizable to someone else who knew the song, and playing it right, might be what's going on here?
Also, being able to hum a tune and being able to actually play it are vastly different things, even for people who can play the instrument. It can be really hard to work how and what is being played even with a great deal of time, and lots of practice. The 'hear it a few times and play it back correctly' skill is associated with savants, not your ordinary pub musician, however good their basic chops.
I don't know the first thing about jazz.
But it must be good if you guys (the BEST) like it!
I didn't get very far with it, though, due to teh sloth.
That sloth gets around. He's kept me from getting back in shape, doing something about that mysterious noise my truck makes when I brake, and learning to bake bread.
The 'hear it a few times and play it back correctly' skill is associated with savants, not your ordinary pub musician, however good their basic chops.
But that's not what I'm claiming. I'm claiming a song you know incredibly well, auditorily. Radio songs. I could sit down and write out the base line and guitar lines to Radar Love, and if I knew how to write drum stuff, I'm pretty sure I could write that out too. And if I knew a song well enough to sit down and transcribe it, and the fingering isn't particularly tricky, it doesn't seem like a stretch to quickly learn how to play it (without stopping to write it down.)
re: 35
It still doesn't follow. It really doesn't. Do you play guitar or bass? Have you tried to transcribe a tune? And I don't mean something mickey mouse like a nice clear single note line that's mixed in a way that makes it nice and simple to make out and which you can hum, I mean chords, intros, solos, the whole shebang? Because it's pretty bloody hard. Obviously it _can_ be easy -- if the tunes a 12-bar shuffle in A, or something then learning it takes about as long as working out it's a 12-bar shuffle in A, i.e. 10 seconds. But if it's not, then it really isn't that easy.
I'm sure it can be super hard. There are incredibly difficult songs. But there are also a lot of simple songs. Most of the cover bands I've ever heard seem to stick to the easier songs. Also, you don't need to bother to flesh out the chords exactly like the original. You just need the basic line, and general knowledge of how to flesh out a tune.
I've transcribed tunes. I don't know how to play guitar or bass. At one point I was very proficient on the piano. I'm pretty sure I could have done this when I was spending a lot of time playing and improvising.
On the easy side of it, I recall reading something Bruce Springsteen wrote on his band playing backup for Chuck Berry way back in the day (I guess Berry would often just have the promoter find some local group)--Berry showed up just minutes before the performance and said something like, "I assume you guys know the Chuck Berry [riff/beat/chords/style--some appropriate term]" and off they went.
38: I knew a guy who could hear something on the radio a few times and play it on a piano. Maybe he was secretly practicing each song for hours, but it sure looked like he just developed a general skill for that type of thing. I'm not really a very good judge of musical ability, so maybe he sucked.
39: And I suppose he could also count on them specifically knowing the key songs.
re: 37
Sorry, but that isn't really true for a lot of cover bands. You are going to have to pretty play a lot of the parts pretty close to the way it was originally played or it won't sound right. Covering a rock tune isn't like playing a standard. And, funnily enough, guitar isn't at all like piano. There's many different places to play a single note, and what you hear and what you play don't translate in the same 1-to-1 way that it does with (some) other instruments.
On the other hand, there's also things about the guitar that make it easy to play in other ways, and of course, lots of tunes are formulaic and easy to pick up quickly. So, sometimes it isn't really any harder than just knowing the song [to hear] an having the requisite playing technique. But, as a person who has played covers on guitar, with bands, I'm not entirely talking out of my arse when I say it really isn't as easy as just knowing the tune by ear and then miraculously translating that into playing it. When Johnny-cover-band-dude is playing 'Jump' he didn't just pick it up from listening to the tune and then somehow being able to play it.
And when you transcribed tunes I bet you sat at the instrument and worked it out, a bit at a time, no? You didn't just sit down at the paino and play it from memory having never played it before?
Sorry, but that isn't really true for a lot of cover bands. You are going to have to pretty play a lot of the parts pretty close to the way it was originally played or it won't sound right.
It just sounds different, and cover bands sound different all the freaking time.
And, funnily enough, guitar isn't at all like piano.
That is so funny! Don't be a twerp.
And when you transcribed tunes I bet you sat at the instrument and worked it out, a bit at a time, no? You didn't just sit down at the paino and play it from memory having never played it before?
Neither. Transcribed it away from the keyboard, then sat down to try to play it and make corrections.
Off to teach. I'm just saying that there are tons and tons of fantastically talented musicians, and if I can do what I can do, it's not a stretch that they can do what I'm supposing they can do.
the Harry Baals Government Center was "probably not" going to happen.
Maybe they could hold a referendum: "YES on Harry Baals!"
(Not long ago I learned that there is (or was) a historian of sexuality at Bir/kb/eck College named Harry Cocks. Name is destiny, I suppose.)
Berry showed up just minutes before the performance and said something like, "I assume you guys know the Chuck Berry [riff/beat/chords/style--some appropriate term]"
"gestalt"
That's not even to mention Hugh G. Dick, late of UCLA's Department of English.
I knew a guy who could hear something on the radio a few times and play it on a piano.
My ex could do that.
You didn't just sit down at the paino and play it from memory having never played it before?
That too. Sometimes the first run-through would have a stumble or two, but largely, he could work it out.
re: 44
The number of rock musicians who can do that are so far out of the norm they might as well not exist. Most people playing in popular music bands can't do what you think they can, in 44 and 47.
I've not done an exhaustive survey, but I know dozens and dozens of people who play in bands, and the number who could do anything remotely like transcribe a tune from memory is basically zero. Lots could probably work out a simple melody, but once you get into chordal parts, solos, and so on, very few could do it without investing work.
I'm not being a twerp, btw. But I am happy to be. You are assuming your experience of playing the piano is like people who play in cover bands experience of playing other instruments, and I'm saying it isn't. I'm right.
Didn't Drymala claim to be able to do something similar, as a party trick? Anything classical that he could hum, he could fake fairly convincingly on the piano?
You'll notice every single example given here is of someone playing the piano.
The piano might indeed be more self-explanatory an instrument. Also, both Drymala and my ex are working composers...
There's lots of stories of classical musicians, even jobbing ones rather than elite players, being able to do that sort of thing. When I sat my classical guitar exams one of the tests just was to play back a piece from memory, that I'd never heard before, after hearing it [twice?, I think]. I'm completely sure you are all right that lots of people of your acquaintance can do that with more complex pieces on the piano.
But, and it's a big but, that just doesn't hold true for the bulk of people who play in bands, even people who sound pretty damn great when they play. It can be surprisingly hard, even when you've a good ear, to work out what the hell people are playing when their parts are in a mix, and even harder to then do that from memory, without sitting with your instrument and working it out. There are probably some great guitar/bass players who can do that, but I've never met one, and I know people who are professional transcribers.*
* a friend is one of those guys who transcribes records for guitar magazines.
44 Neither. Transcribed it away from the keyboard, then sat down to try to play it and make corrections.
Heebie, I think you underestimate how talented you are.
Just now catching up:
If you change the spelling
Crap. Fixed.
if you're pretty proficient with your instrument, is knowing how to play a song that different from just generally knowing the song from the radio?
I'm with ttaM on this. I sat down to learn a bunch of Strokes songs back in October, thinking it would be a breeze. Once I wrote out the parts, I realized both they and the song structures were deceptively complicated and not at all what I'd have played instinctively if presented with the guitar/bass/vocal part.
The same thing happened to me recently on learning a Ke$ha song, of all things. The fills were just weird for me, and I had to sit and force myself to do it according to the original.
To heebie's point, I suppose you could just wing it and come off sounding okay. I've never played in a group that did that, but I've certainly seen bands that seem to be doing it.
Heebie, I think you underestimate how talented you are.
I don't think it's this, although of course I love to think highly of myself.
I suspect some of it is this: My piano teacher growing up was into teaching theory, and I enjoyed it, so I put some effort into it, from age 5 or whatever until 18. This is a starkly different background to someone super talented but self-taught, who picked up their instrument largely on their own.
That, and probably hearing mostly cover bands who just wing it, and sound more half-assed than Stanley's bands do.
I'm not saying these aren't talented musicians. I'm just contesting the memory load, and saying the memory isn't all that different from learning songs the way most of us know radio songs.
The piano might indeed be more self-explanatory an instrument. Also, both Drymala and my ex are working composers...
I am so not a working composer. But I do really enjoy writing songs.
The piano might indeed be more self-explanatory an instrument.
The piano is a better instrument. An acoustic guitar by itself just kind of sucks.
Drum solos are good, if they are loud enough and you aren't trying to sleep.
An acoustic guitar by itself just kind of sucks.
Like, whatever, man.
re: 61
Depends on the music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szY7jmWHXJc&feature=related
[just picked at random from my bookmarks, but it's a nice (slightly gimmicky piece) ]
64: I don't have speakers on my computer at work.
An acoustic guitar by itself just kind of sucks.
So much for Segovia, Fahey, Kottke, Brownie McGhee
Or a working local printer. Fucking HP piece of shit.
So much for Segovia, Fahey, Kottke, Brownie McGhee
Too bourgeois. Most of them couldn't even yodel.
67: There's a process I test at work that requires that I print off something over in another building, which means a pleasant walk through the woods. I often wonder if I could get away with "accidentally" making that my default print location, because it's a nice walk. Ah, modernity.
re: 65
I'm quite obsessive about 19th and 20th century solo guitar compositions, but it's hard to find good links to a lot of pieces on youtube. They either have poor audio quality [mobile phone vids] or are poor performers.
Naxos have some of their sessions on youtube, though.
e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7EJbEws9yM
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPzKsuI5au0
69: Back when I first started, the only place to print from the mainframe was a building across campus. The paper was like 17 inches wide and had green and stripes across the width.
I had a high school job like that. You couldn't actually enter the room with the printer -- printer elves tore off your printout and put it in a cubbyhole marked with the initial of the user who printed it.
72: Yep. This was on the campus of a large university. The shelves with the printouts covered more ground than the racks at a small convenience store.
48: the link said that Harry Baal building was the title or whatever that was leading in a web poll. Shocking!
covered more ground than the racks at a small convenience store
It's not polite to ogle, Mobers.
My keyboard has buttons! WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!
I'm surprised by the persistence of the heebie/Ttam dispute, since LB's 30 seems to explain it pretty well. Ttam says that learning to play a song correctly takes work; heebie says scratching out something that's close enough for a listener to tell what you're going for doesn't. These seem like compatible views.
BTW, ttaM, thanks for your guitar mix. I love me some classical guitar. (That other stuff's ok, too.)
I'm surprised by the persistence of the heebie/Ttam dispute
It's because Ttam's like the wrongest twerp that ever twerped the wrongian.
Does anyone have a good recommendation for a Spanish-English dictionary? I'm seriously in need of one for orthography's sake.
I'm learning a Raffi song on the kazoo. Mom says I'm very good.
I'm giving out hugs for free! Come and get 'em!
re: 77
Well, puttin' on my Wyatt Twerp hat ...
Heebie's wrong, I think, about how close a lot of tunes need to be to sound right -- although it depends on the tune, of course -- and also wrong about how good the average non-classical musician is at transcribing from memory. It's worth noting that the people who have played in bands, Stanley and myself, agree.
If you are bashing out Mustang Sally, that's fine, but friends who play in covers bands can be doing anything from Michael Jackson to Queens of the Stone Age via Gloria Gaynor and The Smiths. Try playing 'Jump' in a covers band and playing the guitar solo differently from EVH. People WILL notice. That applies to a much wider range of material than you'd think -- not just stuff with well known 'difficult bits'. Also because you aren't playing on your own, you don't have to just get it roughly right, you have to get it roughly right in ways that meld with all the other roughly right ways that the other people are playing. Getting the structure of songs right is often quite tricky, even when the notes are obvious. In rock bands you can't rely (at all) on other people's ability to just go with the flow in the way that jazz players might do, they may be expecting you to play exactly that chord and those set of notes at exactly that point. When I used to play covers in bands we could be a bit rough and ready because the bands I was in were all 'originals' bands who did a few covers as part of a set, rather than semi-pro or pro covers bands. But friends who play in covers bands who charge real money are a damn sight less slapdash.
And, FWIW, there are very specific things about the guitar that make that more difficult than it might be with some other instruments -- you can tune it lots of ways, often parts are layered, there may be effects being used that create the impression of notes played that don't actually match what your hands would need to do to make the right sounds, etc.
It's great that Heebie has the ability to transcribe from memory, and it'd be bloody useful to have it -- I'm definitely jealous -- but, as a matter of fact most musicians playing popular music forms don't have it, and that's not how they qua fact go about learning tunes.
If you are bashing out Mustang Sally
It's cracking me up that you picked this example. The canonical drunk-people request is, of course, "FREEBIRD!" But in my experience, "Mustang Sally" holds a close second place.
PLAY TALES OF BRAVE ULYSSES!!! WOOOOOO!!
re: 85
Heh, Freebird is one of my 'and now I am going to kill someone' tunes, topped only in the L.S. oeuvre by 'Tuesday's Gone [withuh weeh-yuhn]'.
I didn't get very far with it, though, due to teh sloth.
That sloth gets around.
Here, let me get another opinion.
It's hard to ask this question without sounding like a dick, given that apparently a bunch of folks here have worked hard in cover bands, but: for the life of me, I have a hard time understanding when a cover band is preferable to just having a DJ. Could someone fill me in, here?
I can't speak from the point of a player, as bands I was in were never paid to play covers and we only played covers so not every song was new to the audience, but I've seen a friend's cover band totally tear a place up. An ordinary pub in mid-week and people were going wild. Bands have a volume and an energy that DJs don't, often. There is something cool about hearing familiar songs done well by real people.
I have a hard time understanding when a cover band is preferable to just having a DJ
I've often wondered the same thing, and at my own hypothetical wedding or party I think I'd go with iPod mix programmed in advance, plugged into a PA. Or maybe allow friends to sign up for timeslots to iPod DJ (but that runs the risk of ending up in "Chicken Dance" land if someone got cute). My own experience, having played in a cover band at a number of parties, suggests that there's a certain kind of person that really, really likes to have hired their own band for the night*. Usually that person just really truly enjoys watching live music.
*Not in an "I own you"sort of way but rather in a "woo, now I get to hang out with the band" way.
Further to 93, I suppose I tried to answer why a band gets hired, not whether it's actually better in any sense.
This friend's band used to get regular repeat gigs across a national chain of pubs, and they weren't cheap, so I presume the pub managers and bookers for the chain thought the money was well spent:
Yeah, I guess you can't really argue with success. Just not my thing, I suppose. I find live music too loud and hard-to-appreciate unless I'm really into the band and the songs, and sensing a similar collective feeling among the others in the audience. (Like at a Hold Steady concert.) I also like concerts with dancing and drinking. I guess my view is that if the focus is on the music, I need an (imagined) sense-of-connection with the band & other fans, and if the focus is on dancing, I want the music to be optimal in a bloodless perfection sort of way.
All of which is probably just my idiosyncratic tastes.
My friend's band used to fill the dancefloor, but there was definitely a cheesy element to it. People drunk and appreciating dumb, loud, familiar music together. There wasn't much cool about it.
There wasn't much cool about it.
Nope. Not at all. Those gigs are a real slog and not fun to play after the umpteenth time. What is fun is getting paid and then taking the money and paying for studio time for your own music, which will nonetheless end up in the pile of never-made-its of music history. Which, hey, it's a self-funded hobby and occasionally somebody flies you to Miami randomly.
Also, a bunch of friends get together and we all play covers, once a year. The running theme being no rehearsal, and you are often playing in a band with people you've never met. We do it in a public venue, and people really seem to get into it, even thought the covers can often be pretty obscure. I think people just like live music. And certain things just push buttons: unison guitar solos, mad drumming, harmony vocals, etc.
I can't say I'd fancy doing it myself as a job, and I'm just not good enough anyway, but some people do seem to find it pretty fun. You have to play songs you hate, but it's money, for performing.
I'm just catching up on this thread and thought that the discussion about learning songs on the piano is a good excuse to post this, one of my favorite Joan Didion passages.
When I think about the Sixties now I think about an afternoon not of the Sixties at all, an afternoon early in my sophomore year at Berkeley, a bright autumn Saturday in 1953. I was lying on a leather couch in a fraternity house (there had been a lunch for the alumni, my date had gone to the game, I do not now recall why I had stayed behind), lying there alone reading a book by Lionel Trilling and listening to a middle-aged man pick out on a piano in need of tuning the melodic line to "Blue Room." All that afternoon he sat at the piano and all that afternoon he played "Blue Room" and he never got it right. I can hear and see it still, the wrong note in "We will thrive on / Keep alive on," the sunlight falling through the big windows, the man picking up his drink and beginning again and telling me, without ever saying a word, something I had not known before about bad marriages and wasted time and looking backward. That such an afternoon would now seem implausible in every detail -- the idea of having had a "date" for a football lunch now seems to be so exotic as to be almost czarist -- suggests the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies.
100 -- Huh. That's one of my favorite passages/essays, too.
100, 101: Google books and Amazon search inside are doing their job of not letting me reread the last 2 pages of that piece. And the book is somewhere in a box in this house (hardcover--bought new by me). Everybody has gotten their fucking money; I want to see what paid for. Frustration.
This thread had me thinking on my drive home tonight about being asked to play a friend's forthcoming wedding. On the one hand, it's nice to be able to "offer this performance as our gift to you" or whatever. On the other hand, it's stressful! Weddings are pretty stressful to work (and, really, we're working), because inevitably some event planner or the bride's or groom's parent or parents are freaking the fuck out about something.
I'd rather just give you a Cuisinart and focus on having a fun time at your party, friend. But okay. We'll play.
104: no, that's a terrible deal, unless it's like, one song as part of the ceremony. most often happens to photographers.
whoa. how did I get into this thread? weird.
I was told we were discussing Joan Didion.
106: It's interesting that you did, because I was complaining about that friend's wedding. I just played at another friend's wedding (the cob-logging winemaker), and it was much more pleasant. First off, they got married beforehand, so it was just a party. Then when it came time for music, the band got up and played the six or seven cover songs we prepared with different people singing: the bride and groom on one, the groom's father, etc. Then we opened up the stage and anyone could come and play. It was like a talent show at a wedding, which probably could have gone really badly but didn't.
