A frustration I have is that I can't memorize uke music. I need song sheets to play for anything. I keep batches of them on music stands both upstairs and downstairs, so I can sit and start playing at any time. I add new ones whenever I find a song I want to learn to play.
This limitation keeps me from taking a uke somewhere for jamming or sitting at a park or passing time in a hotel room. I'm tied to those song sheets. How can I be a more casual player?
Hi Ginny, and everyone!
What a great idea for a thread! Glad to be here - Ginny thanks for thinking of making this thread.
To your question above...
When I want to learn a song I simply listen to it with uke in hand, over and over and over, and get completely immersed in the song, and along the way, try to figure out the scale, and thus the key, by ear.
Then with listening and playing, get a feel for the root note, 5th and the overall chord progression. As part of the study of the music I will then improvise along with the recording, really getting lost in the song, sometimes I end up in the relative minor key/scale of the actual song.
After that time spent above, and ONLY after, I will then look at the sheet music or chords, which typically come pretty easy since I've already become intimate with the melody and structure from hearing it. I am not yet able to pick out all the chords by ear, so for that I do need some kind of reference.
For me, music is as much
listening as it is
playing, and I've always felt stifled by 'classical' sheet music and much prefer the Fake-book type of reference, which allows you to interpret the 'song' for yourself. 'The Daily Ukulele' books are similar to the fake-books, but with more structure and I find them a great reference too. (link in my signature below)
Study in this way allows me to make connections in my mind between different songs, and even different genres of music without needing the music sheet to play them. At this point though, I've learned and forgot so much music as it all kind of blends together, so I will still occasionally look at the music sheet to refresh something I had learned previously, but since it's been implanted so deeply without a visual and instead an auditory reference, I only need the music sheet at the beginning, and can look at it if I forget how a section goes or otherwise need to refresh my memory.
Nowadays, I can play for a little more than an hour of songs all from memory, without needing any sheet music.
Some may say the initial 'figuring out by listening' is a waste of time, but I beg to differ, since for me, that is the true joy of discovering the music, since music is experienced by
both the player and listener by HEARING it. I truly enjoy this method, and for me there's never time wasted, but occasionally it can be frustrating if the song is in an unfamiliar key or has modal changes, like from harmonic minor to melodic minor, or from a pentatonic scale to a lydian scale...
When I was a wee lad, and had piano lessons for 3yrs, my teacher spent lots of time on ear training and teaching me how to recognize intervals and to hear the difference between major, minor and seventh chords, as well as to try and learn to recognize different keys by ear. That was over 35 yrs ago, but I have always tried to keep the study going on my own since then.
It is too easy for many folks to forget to LISTEN, but as a player, as a musician, I find that listening is a skill that is
as important, if not
more important than one's playing proficiency or technique,
especially if you play with other musicians.
Ginny, maybe you can adapt some of these methods to help you memorize the music and to internalize it so you do not need the music sheet as much?
Hope this helps
