A big part of playing guitar (or any instrument) is being able to play songs. Whilst it’s great to read a song and play it, or to play parts of songs, ultimately you’re going to want to have songs that you can:
a) play from memory, in their entirety and
b) play reasonably well in the future.
I’m going to take you through some processes that will help you learn guitar songs faster and more efficiently.
Learning to play the song
For those who have memorised entire songs in the past, you probably already know what it takes: persistence bordering on obsession.
If you have never learnt a song fully before, it’s definitely worth picking something you really, really want to learn, as motivation will help you out initially (until you get your process for learning and memorising songs down). You can check out this guide to help you put together a list of guitar songs to learn if you want guidance on selecting songs to learn.
Break the song into chunks
Chunking is effective in almost every learning process, but basically it just means breaking the song down into small, manageable pieces to master rather than trying to tackle everything at once.
Typically, this will be learning one section of a song at a time, but it could be a bar, or a lick or a chord change. There’s no limit to how small your chunks can be, and when in doubt, make them too small rather than too big.
Within this process, I’d recommend jumping straight into memorisation from the start. To do this, you can:
Read the chunk in musical notation, tabs, chord charts or whatever you use
Listen to that part of the song in a recording or two if available
Play the part slowly, with zero mistakes, potentially with no rhythm if necessary
Once you can play the part five times in a row with no mistakes, including the correct rhythm, increase the speed.
Again, once you can play the part five times in a row with no mistakes, increase the speed.
Again, once you can play…you get the idea.
Once you feel like you can play the part at a pace where it sounds like the song (doesn’t have to be full pace just yet, just smooth and musical), move on to the next chunk.
For some tricky lead parts, I may only work on four bars in a week. But that’s ok - I know by the end of the week, I’ll have those four bars sounding ok, and more importantly, I’ll be able to move on to more of the song next week, so I’m progressing through the song and will be able to play it in its entirety eventually.
Use Chaining Techniques to connect up chunks
Chaining is basically the process of linking together musical ideas.
If I practice bar 1 for a day, then bar 2 the next day, I also need to practice connecting these two bars together, and the easiest way to do this is by playing the end of bar 1 and the start of bar 2 as a NEW chunk.
From there, you can chain together more and more chunks into a verse, a page of music, a minute of the song or whatever other measure makes most sense for the song and for you.
One particularly effective technique I learnt studying under Clinton Eldridge, classical guitar expert, was reverse chaining a song. This involves learning the LAST bar, FIRST, then slowly adding more and more bars backwards through the song.
This method is particularly effective for classical music for me, as it flips your practice routine from “play the bit I know, then the bit I don’t know as well” to “play the hard bit first, then the easy bit” which is a far more efficient use of practice time.
Take a break, come back and play again
Memory and muscle memory are strengthened through recall. To work on recall, you have to recall the information.
Sound too simple? It isn’t rocket science. But many of us (including myself) often find ourselves spending an hour practicing, then doing no more practice for the day, feeling really accomplished.
What happens the next day? No doubt you’ll have forgotten bits and pieces and have to re-learn them first.
A far better approach to learning songs is to do 4 x 15 minute practice sessions throughout the day if possible, or even within one session.
For example, let’s say I have an hour of practice time and I want to work on memorising and learning a line of music. I could play that line using chunking and chaining for 15 minutes, then try playing through another part of the song for a few minutes, then come back to that line I’m working on for another 15 minutes.
Just that little break in concentration, coupled with the mental challenge of remembering what you were doing before is often enough to trigger enough of a recall challenge to help strengthen the neural pathways and help you remember the part.
What to do once you’ve gotten through the entire song and have it memorised
The next phase is generally the longest one in my experience, but it basically involves doing three things:
Playing the song from start to finish, like a performance and
Working on problem sections that are difficult to play smooth or up to speed
Experimenting with tone, dynamics and feel
A combination of approaches is good, but in general most of us are better at 1 than 2, so make sure you’re still isolating parts of the song that need extra attention or you’ll find your progress will slow considerably. And you can easily work on 3 whilst simultaneously working on 1 or 2, so don’t feel you can’t combine elements.
At this point, it will often make sense to move this song into the “repertoire” list, which I’ll explain below.
Maintaining the skills and memory to play songs (whilst learning new ones)
It’s extremely difficult to learn 3 new songs at once. It’s hard to remember, it’s slow, and it can make your practice time feel like really hard work.
But learning one new song, refining a song you already know and playing through 5 songs you have pretty much mastered? That’s easy and heaps more fun!
This is an extension of the guitar practice rule of 3, but in essence you want to have:
Something super easy (songs you have already mastered)
Something moderately challenging (improving a song you know, but can’t really play well yet)
Something new and challenging (a new song you’re learning).
I find it helps to group these songs into a repertoire, or setlist, and practice them that way, as that’s the way regularly performing bands are structured (you don’t focus on 1000 songs at once - you keep a setlist of songs and swap out a few songs here and there).
So an example one-hour practice routine may look like:
10 minutes warmup on a song you know but can’t play well (Song A)
5 minutes refining a challenging part of that same song (Song A)
15 minutes on a new song (or a new part of your new song, Song B)
15 minutes playing through 3 or 4 songs that are relatively easy now (Song C, D, E and F)
15 minutes back on your new song (or that same new part of your new song, Song B)
If I didn’t have time for one hour every day, I would make sure I was doing Song A (the new song) every session and bounce between the other songs however I can.
Similarly, if you’re working on keeping a repertoire of more than 4-5 songs fresh, you can mix up which songs you play each day from the easy category, as they likely won’t need daily practice as urgently as the newer material (I find doing a full 45 minute set once or twice per week is more than enough to keep up the memory and the chops).
Re-learning old songs
It’s not possible to keep every song you learn fresh and performance-ready forever. In fact, if you try to do it, you’ll likely find you’ll struggle to learn new material as you just won’t have the practice time or the mental focus to manage it.
But that’s ok, as re-learning songs is very different to learning songs.
In general, the parts that were really hard and took lots of effort to learn will actually now be the easier parts to remember, and the parts that were easier to play may now be harder to remember.
The reason is pretty simple - you had to make much stronger neural connections to play the challenging parts. They took more effort, so your brain is conditioned to keep that knowledge. The inverse is also true.
If you want to re-learn a song, what I would recommend is:
Try playing the song start to finish, but if you forget a bit, skip it quickly and move on to the next part you can remember
Take note of all the bits you forgot, and revisit them until they feel familiar again
Try playing the song start to finish again
Repeat until the song feels ok again.
It might take a bit of time before you feel comfortable playing it to the same standard again, but don’t worry - it won’t be as long as when you first learned the piece, especially if you put in the hard work and learned the song properly in the first place.
Final Note - Develop and Refine Your Own Process
Working out the most efficient song learning method for yourself means finding out:
How much you can memorise or learn at once
What motivates (and demotivates) you in your practice
Tips, tricks and hacks like chaining, reverse-chaining, chunking etc that work for you
Everyone is different and if you abandon ego it will help a lot. By this I mean - if you have a bad memory, acknowledge it and work on smaller parts at a time. If you have trouble with accuracy, go slower and do more correct repetitions before increasing the speed.
Different songs and styles require different approaches too. I find I can play most metal songs pretty quickly from memory, as that’s what I’m used to, but I really have to work hard to memorise classical pieces as I find it too easy to just read the page instead of commit the notes to memory.
To finish, I want to share a few more little ideas that you can try for yourself in your practice:
Visualisation involves visualising yourself playing each part, in your head. If you think about the actual movements (you can even mime them if you’d like) it will help you learn the song faster, even when you’re nowhere near you guitar (this 100% works and if you doubt it, try doing it once per day and see for yourself).
Listening involves literally listening to the song (or covers of the song). Incredibly helpful for memorisation, rhythm, phrasing…everything really. We often stop doing this when we start learning a song as it’s a bit demoralising to hear it played so well, but again, set aside ego and actively listen to speed up your progress.
Challenge yourself with things like playing a part double time, swing feel, half time, eyes closed, standing, sitting, on a different guitar - anything to make it somehow different. This not only helps you to try things in a new way but will also help keep things fresh and make motivation easier to find.
Play along with the recording, even when you’re not ready. Slow it down, drop in for one bar then rewind and repeat it, maybe just play every second bar - it’s like playing with a metronome but more fun and musical.
Improvise the song when you get a bit lost. Great for getting a song closer to performance standard faster, as it’ll help you understand the fundamentals of the song without getting bogged down in the details. Just use this with caution - you’ll still want to play most parts correctly too, so don’t improvise everything unless you are more interested in playing a song your own way rather than learning the original.
Feel free to share any other things that work for you, as we can always improve our practice methods!