How To Remember Songs In 4 Easy Steps
By Mike P Hayes
About Me
Have you ever tried to play a song for a friend and suddenly your mind goes blank? Have you ever spent 3 months learning a song and can’t seem to even remember the first two bars? Call it performance anxiety, stage fright, or whatever. One thing is for sure and that is it will certainly curb your future motivation and enthusiasm for playing the guitar.
This sort of experience can create a form of performance paralysis that if not remedied can bring even the most passionate player’s career to a screeching halt… interestingly enough this can happen to anyone particularly in today’s fast paced 24 hour society where it is estimated the average person sees 5000 ads per day (2011 estimation) and the average professional gets more than 100 e-mails every day (2011 estimation).
But what if I told you there is an easy ABC type way to overcome this situation forever… well, the good news is there is and I’m going to outline the easy 4 step process for you now.
How To Remember Songs:
Why?: The first step is to clarify why you want to learn a particular song.
Ask yourself this question before you set out to learn the song … exactly why do I want to learn this song… is if to impress your girlfriend/boyfriend or to play at your next gig or to increase your solo guitar repertoire etc.,
Once you have defined WHY you want to learn something you already have taken a giant step towards achieving your goal.
Here’s why…
If you are learning something that someone else has recommend… let’s say your guitar teacher suggested you learn a Led Zeppelin song however you may not really be interested in Led Zeppelin in fact, you have trouble relating to this style of music whereas secretly you may have a burning desire to learn a new acoustic version of a Taylor Swift song especially since this song is your new girlfriends’ favorite!
Do you get the idea?… it’s pretty obvious that you won’t remember much about the Led Zeppelin song no matter how much you try to learn it to please your guitar teacher whereas if you did a good job of the Taylor Swift song you would remember it forever.
“I’ve been imitated so well I’ve heard people copy my mistakes.” … Jimi Hendrix
Short term / verses long term memory: Be aware that there are two types of memory short term and long term.
Short term is the type of memory most people are familiar with it’s the type of memory most student’s use when sitting for exams, they study hard, learn the answers to pass the exam and two weeks after the exam they can hardly remember 20% of the material studies (some can’t even remember the subject they were studying).
Short term memory is the type of memory where all the little snippets of information, advertising and general yaddah, yaddah of everyday life goes and like the infamous “delete” button in the email inbox our brain has the habit (for self protection) of deleting all irrelevant information.
Long term memory: is the type of memory we use for things that have great personal importance things that have made significant ‘impact’ on us… this is where information such as… your name, your favorite food, your best friend, your first love, the time you ran up the back of a bus etc… see the distinction? These things have made ‘impact’ on your memory.
Referring back to my earlier example of short term memory where the student takes the exam then proceeds to forget most of the information there would have significantly different result if: the student was (a) personally interested in the subject, (b) was taught by a an inspiring instructor who could bring the subject to life.
Baby steps: the trick to long term memory training is to learn information in ‘baby steps’… no more than 4 to 6 notes at a time, paying close attention to the quality of your playing, making sure that you could not possibly want to hear these notes played any better.
Short Time frames: long term memory training requires us to work in very small time frames 2 – 5 minutes, the maximum time spent on new material should be 10 minutes… always be aware of information overload, if you exceed these short time frames you are sabotaging your long term memory.
Set a timer on your computer or watch for 2 – 5 minutes when the timer rings put the guitar down, at first this will feel unnatural but with practice you will see results… you will be able to remember the information long term and under pressure because you will OWN the information, you will have made a conscious effort to retain the information.
And now I’d like to invite you to get free access to my “How To Remember 1,000 Songs” eCourse. You can download the course for free at: http://www.guitarcoaching.com
From Mike Hayes – The Guitar Coaching Guy & the Express Guitar System
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