Learning songs that don't fit on one page

Theory
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Yeah but that’s where my original question comes in: what do you do once your fingers can already play the song, but you don’t have the entire song structure memorized? You can’t muscle memorize 5 pages of song structure. That’s either in your head or on the sheet music in front of you.

Take my original example with The House of the Rising Sun. The song is basically the below 6/8 rhythms being played in random order over 3 phrases. They are simple, they are not a technical challenge, and they are completely interchangeable. The only challenge is trying to remember which one comes next. And that’s where I stopped learning the song, because it was no longer fun. (And hopefully that’s where the page turner pedal is going to come to my rescue.)

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Just tried it.

If you’re playing along it doesn’t work very well, because Noteflight takes control of the scroll action with its’ autoscroll feature and locks it to the view. Meaning, if you press “down” it goes down but bumps up to where it’s currently playing. If you’re just consulting (ie. the player is stopped) it works flawlessly

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That’s perfect, thanks a lot for checking. I never use the play button anyway, so that should be good enough. I’m going to order one today.

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It’s a pretty useful tool! I use it for a lot of other things other than music

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I always ask myself with stuff like this am I playing other peoples’ stuff “exact” or “in the spirit”

My personal best example of “exact” versus “in the spirit” is Highway Love Song by STP and Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple.

Again, with my opinions, you mileage may vary…

With STP, I find the need to get that as close to exact as possible. The bass role with their music is very well defined, and my personal feeling is that it needs to be spot-on. Same with ‘iconic’ stuff, like Ramble On (for the most part), or where the bass is the core of the song like Neon Moon or Hysteria. And those take the longest to develop that “muscle memory”

If you think about Smoke On The Water (the first guitar lick everybody seems to learn wrong, including myself :slight_smile: ), for the most part, the bass is filling the space in places where it would otherwise be relatively boring in the verse vocal section. There’s 5 or 6 core riffs, distributed in a way that, if you learn them individually, you can pick and choose where they go. I don’t personally find the need to “muscle memory” them into where they belong in the song, but rather to “muscle memory” the riffs themselves and then pick and choose where I want to put them. I think you’re operating in the spirit of this music and still doing justice to the tune.

I know there’s probably disagreement out there, and I know I’m not playing the song exactly the same as the album, but I’ve been to enough concerts where you can see bits that are done differently live by the original performers and there’s no loss of fidelity to the spirit of the music.

But it’s not something you’d hear at a Muse show or a Tool show…they really can’t go off-script because of the structure of the music. Where you hear the different stuff is really the bluesy 1-4-5 stuff that permeates everything. So you’re riffing around the melodies…and I believe you grab the core riffs and put them where you like them. So I take my time and learn the little bits (again, Smoke On The Water is a great example) and put them where I feel them.

And I think this all boils down to taste - again, if you want to be “exact” or “in the spirit”

On the stage, I’ve found that I could play the same riff on Smoke On The Water over and over, and I was the only one who cared about it.

Just my personal thoughts on this (wrapping this up) -

In my head I keep a ‘macro’ structure of a song - verse, chorus, bridge, etc. Those are pretty good markers for me. Then the ‘micro’ structure for each of the ‘macro’ parts fills-in that narrative…so I’m not really learning all 5 pages, but the ‘macro’ parts. The ‘macro’ parts are generally the same…but the ‘micro’ parts in the ‘macro’ parts is where you can pick and choose where you stuff those riffs.

Sometimes I think I’ve gone off the deep end when I write things and have entirely veered off the path of the original question…

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You didn’t veer off, that’s exactly what my question was about. :slight_smile:

And yes you raise a good point. Reminds me of what @Gio told me in another thread (see here) - he basically said that you don’t always have to follow the sheet music to the letter. (It was a different question, but kind of the same conclusion.)

I guess I need to build a bit more confidence before I start playing what I think is right instead of what the sheet music is telling me to play…

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A very fancy and expensive device known as… the space bar on my laptop. :stuck_out_tongue:

I know some folks do something like that for reading on iPads, but I don’t have any experience. I just miss a few notes to hit a button to change pages! (never needed to read big iPad charts on a gig)

Or print it out on a music stand. You can fit 3 pages, or 5+ with stand extenders. I’m all about Manhasset music stands.

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I’m putting that Manhasset music stand on my shopping list. Great idea!

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Yeah, you are right, a little off topic. I was just sort of agreeing with what @numberman2000 was saying.
For me, it is all memorization, I don’t use the sheets often after learning the song. But everybody works differently, so what I do is not for everybody in every case.

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This is how I view and play Paranoid by Black Sabbath.
The bass for the most is following along, or keeping the riff going during the solo. you can play the bass roll in the riff, or the straight riff as you choose.
I personally play the bass roll on all of them except during the guitar solo, there I play the riff straight like the guitar would, without the roll

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Not at all. That was a good read. Thanks.

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Good Idea there…!

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Thanks @jswank59 - works for me… Guess that’s all that matters - oh, and it was pretty inexpensive because I had all of the materials on hand already.

Keep on Thumpin’!
Lanny

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My music stand will display two pages at a time, each page can hold 8 lines of music notation. This means between the two pages, I have 64 bars in front of me before I have to turn a page.
The problem that I find is so many of the printed scores also have a line for tablature, which cuts that in half.
What I’ve been doing lately (If I really want to learn a song) is using an app called Cresendo and manually re-scoring the music (sans the tab). This accomplishes a couple of things:
(a) Gets rid of the tab, so I’m back to 32 bars per sheet
(b) By the time I’m done re-scoring the piece, I’ve got a pretty good handle on what I need to play.

Needless to say, this method doesn’t help those who still play from tab. Sorry

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So my page turner pedal arrived on Monday, and after 4 days of use I have to say it’s kind of a game changer for me. Today I was finally able to play along to Otherside from start to finish without having memorized the entire thing, and without having printed out the sheet music.

It definitely takes some getting used to however, and brings its own challenges. Initially it was quite distracting, and tapping the pedal threw off my rhythm sometimes (my workaround for the time being is that I only flip pages on beat 1). But I can already see the benefits: I spend much less time staring at my fretting fingers, more time reading the sheet music (and getting better at it hopefully), and obviously the main benefit is that I don’t have to forcefully memorize entire songs.

Good stuff, I can only recommend it.

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Great stuff. If I get to playing to sheet like that in the future, I will probably get one myself.

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Forgot to mention that mine has really loud microswitches under the pedals and does a very audible click, so if you record yourself using a microphone then this is not the one for you. I think there are quiet pedals out there, so if this would be an issue for you then do some research before you buy.

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I love the idea that “we can adapt.” Innovation in the time of need… Love it…!

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“Necessity is the mother of invention”, as the saying goes…

Normally, I can memorize the intro, first verse, and first chorus; and the rest of the song just repeats. The song I’m working on now is different. The chord changes are all over the place: every verse and every chorus are different. The bassline I wrote from the chord chart is 5 pages long, and there’s no way I can turn the pages while I rehearse.
So, I made this extension to my music stand out of a cardboard box that was about to go into the recycle bin. I have to memorize the entire song so I can shoot the video for my cover (also if I ever get to play it live).

IMG_20210219_065139
IMG_20210219_0651394000×3000 3.01 MB

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At least rhythmically, it looks very “uniform” with a repeating pattern… I am confident you can learn this by heart :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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