Learning Songs Fast and Remembering Those Songs

Learning songs fast is one of two questions that students pose to their teachers when they are new to music. The other question that is related to that is how well will I remember what I've learned.

These are two of the hardest there are to answer. The idea of how fast can I learn to play and remember what I learn are hard to answer with a direct straight answer that these students want to hear.

Learning Fast

Let's get some prospective. How quickly you can play depends on a lot of things, such as time put into practicing, time spent studying theory, and the amount of focused effort on any one element of music.

But learning fast is also dependent on what you retain in principals. It's part of the memorization process but is not in note for note, but in mathematical principals that can be applied to the music theory to help you create patterns and pictures.


How Much Do We Remember

One of the biggest factors in remembering what you learn is the review process. For learning any subject, it has been proven that your recall percentage of material learned  goes down if you do not review it often.

To retain and recall information once you learn it you really need to review it often. A good program would be to review the information the day after you first learned the subject. You could tell the story of what you learned. Come back in a couple of days and visit the information again reviewing and associating the information.

As a practical matter it would go something like this. Learn it today. Review it tomorrow, then again in a couple of days, then maybe 5 days later. Then a week later. The review doesn't take long, but skip it and you will lose it quickly.

How It Works In The Initial Beginning Stages

For scales and other music elements, you will be working on them consistently for some period of time. They then automatically become part of what you learn and remember through use and practice.

Memorization of songs is another challenge. The process of playing songs will depend on how well you can work with the pieces of the song. Learning theory as the foundational information is a part of that effort of memorizing. It gives you an alternate way of viewing and creating a picture in your mind of the song pieces.

This can be done through chord progression combinations, recognition of inversions, scales, intervals, and phrases.

Some of the Keys to Song Retention

There are complete courses on memorization, but fundamentally it works down to being able to create easily recognized patterns and pictures that your mind can interpret into a story line. This is really the key to memorization of songs.

The patterns are going to come from your fundamental understanding of music theory and the combinations of scales, keys, chords, and combining them with rhythm.

The chapters of your story are the various progressions of chords through out the song. The characters are the phrasing of notes to make a statement. The rhythm provides the flow to put it all together.

We've only touched the surface of what it takes to learn a song fast and remember what you learned. But you need to start somewhere, begin by taking one idea of learning and trying it for a week.