The best way to learn a tune from sheet music

[Tom]

As Dingo says, we talk about this a lot. So my 2 cents based in my journey:

1. Definetly you must know what you want it to sound like first. If you don't have a firm grasp of the song in your head listen repeatedly in youtube, etc. until you do.

2. If necessary learn the 2 hands separately. This will depend on your level of proficiency. Same with chord structure. Understand and internalize the chord structure before starting to learn the melody.

3. Learn a phrase at a time, slowly building to the whole tune.

4. Play with the metronome as soon as possible. Endless repetition with the metronome is golden.

5. Commit to memory by trying to play the whole song with the metronome.

6. As mentioned, don't practice wrong! Slow it down till you can play your desired phrase properly with the metronome.

7. Admit it if the song is too difficult. Don't waste your time, it's no sin to let it lie for a month, a year, whatever. How long have you been trying yo learn Take 5 anyway?

8. Know your repertoire. List the tunes you can play (sufficiently well) by memory. Slowly add more, one at a time. Don't overextended.

9. This is the most important part. You have to play music, not notes. Once you can play it (from memory or sheet, based on your situation, not a judgment call) you MUST personalize it. Put yourself in as tempo, dynamics, improve, harmony, facial features, hat, attractive clothing, background, song form, voicing, bass runs, etc.)


Good luck!!!!!

 

[saundersbp]

2. If necessary learn the 2 hands separately.

At my level of proficiency (only a couple of years playing) this is a must! The generous pros that have been kind enough to give me a few hints and tips along the way also seem to learn new music like this. Never found the metronome thing that useful but I guess we all have a different innate sense of a steady pulse.

 

[Valski]

As Dingo says, we talk about this a lot. So my 2 cents based in my journey:

1. Definetly you must know what you want it to sound like first. If you don't have a firm grasp of the song in your head listen repeatedly in youtube, etc. until you do.

2. If necessary learn the 2 hands separately. This will depend on your level of proficiency. Same with chord structure. Understand and internalize the chord structure before starting to learn the melody.

3. Learn a phrase at a time, slowly building to the whole tune.

4. Play with the metronome as soon as possible. Endless repetition with the metronome is golden.

5. Commit to memory by trying to play the whole song with the metronome.

6. As mentioned, don't practice wrong! Slow it down till you can play your desired phrase properly with the metronome.

7. Admit it if the song is too difficult. Don't waste your time, it's no sin to let it lie for a month, a year, whatever. How long have you been trying yo learn Take 5 anyway?

8. Know your repertoire. List the tunes you can play (sufficiently well) by memory. Slowly add more, one at a time. Don't overextended.

9. This is the most important part. You have to play music, not notes. Once you can play it (from memory or sheet, based on your situation, not a judgment call) you MUST personalize it. Put yourself in as tempo, dynamics, improve, harmony, facial features, hat, attractive clothing, background, song form, voicing, bass runs, etc.)


Good luck!!!!!

Some great tips here although I might want to wade into a few points.

Knowing the song or melody is most important. How you attack the learning is an individual matter, but let's say that it's a waltz and you're comfortable with that genre you can attack both hands at the same time .

I sometimes use my Bk7m backing module instead of a metronome because it's handier but I agree that you have to slow down the practice.

As to committing to memory, I think that it's important to know each song by memory it also can lead to bad habits because once your repertoire achieves a certain size, it's easy to forget some parts to their detriment. Plus I want to learn newer pieces from time to time and my memory seems to be filling up so sheet music is imperative.

I've been playing for something like 58 years now and there is no way that I can replicate each song as it is written in my sheet music. I can indeed play for several hours from memory but if it's a paid gig, I owe it to my audience to make fewer mistakes.

 

[Corinto]

Of course you can do whatever you want with any learning process but there are intelligent ways that people share that need to learn sheet music quickly, securely and permanently across all musical instruments ...

Strong statement, ... maybe my english is not good enough and maybe I don't understand this correctly, ... but in my opinion one must take the learning process that best fits with his playing, and I don't feel this to be more or less "intelligent" just because someone says so ... ymmv ...

 

[saundersbp]

Strong statement

I can do stronger! Your English is good!

By intelligence I mean understanding the task in hand - in this topic its reading music - and also the intelligence to understand yourself, your own strong and weak points.

For example I came out of the womb with a decent ear and learnt musical instruments by listening rather than reading as a child. It was only later on that I grappled with sheet music so this meant my reading was weaker than other people, and reading the dots was the thing I really had to work on. For me its important to find intelligent ways to learn sheet music as quickly as possible because time is always limited, there is so much lovely music to learn, and then once I know how it goes I can return to the comfort zone of relying on my ear.

 

[JeffJetton]

Couldn't agree more with spending time with the end if not there's a danger that the closer you get to the end the less assured you become. You could argue that the end is the most important bit as it's what everything else leads up to.

Along those same lines, I've found it's also useful to practice the repeats. That is, instead of getting to the end of a repeating section and stopping, go ahead and take the repeat (or DS, etc.), go back up to where it leads, play a couple or bars or so, and then stop. You can do the same thing when starting a section... take a "running jump" from a few measures of the tail end of the previous section to get into it.

It's an easy trap to fall into to get the sections of a song down cold, but then struggle in performance (dropping the rhythm, flubbing notes, etc.) when you have to link those sections up.

 

[Javthedog]

Another reason for always practicing hands separately is speed of performance and efficiency of practice time.
Ideally what you need to do is be able to play both hands independently and then once confident push the speed of each separate hand faster than the music would ever actually go. If things go wrong at this faster speed with hands separate then it means you've got a fingering problem and you can go back to the problem bit, slow it down and sort it out. If you don't do this then you end up practicing mistakes over and over again or repeating daft fingering in the forlorn hope that 'muscle memory' will ultimately make it work - it doesn't!

You can probably see the problem now with diving in with both hands together - there is simply too much going on to isolate suspect fingering as you've too many things to think about with left and right coordination.

People get stuck, frustrated and give up on musical instruments mainly because they don't know how to practice. A good teachers job is not really to teach you the instrument (thats your job!) but to teach you how to practice effectively. It avoids so much frustration and wasted time since you are not spending hours trying to get something right for a moment (and then see the hard work disintegrate when you have time off) but instead are practicing to the point where it can't go wrong. Its like building sand castles otherwise - the sea will always wash them away - so you instead you build solid foundations so you are always improving and never losing ground.

They say proper practice makes perfect - whereas slavish repetition of bad technique hoping muscle memory might save you one day is a very common but ultimately ever decreasing circle.

I'm reminded of this - An amateur practises until he can do a thing right, a professional until he can't do it wrong.