Top Tips For Learning New Music

 So I had a decently productive weekend last weekend, musically speaking. I took my own advice (ha ha!) and put all my "finished" songs into my super special songwriting notebook, and was pretty delighted to see that it's almost full. (Yay!) Then I sat down and worked on two more pieces from the Choan Galvez collection, 50 Miniature Studies for Ukulele. 

By the end of the afternoon, I had those two pieces memorized in my head, even though my fingers won't quite keep up right now. I noticed that when I started learning these, it seemed like each one took me str FOREVER to learn, but now, I've sort of got a process down for learning new music. 

A couple of years ago, a friend and I were talking about memorizing new music, and honestly at the time, it felt really hard for me to memorize anything. She noticed it, too, and we wondered if it was just because of our aging brains (we're both in our late 40s) or if it was just the stress of the times we're living in (we were just over a year into the pandemic and trying to navigate the best way to keep ourselves and our families safe and healthy). 

But since I've been learning music and have called myself a musician since I was like seven, I realized that there are a few things anyone can do to help them learn new music. 

Tip Number One: Listen. It might sound odd, but before you being to play a new piece of music, find a recording of it somewhere and listen to it a few times over. Like, really listen. Listening is a whole lost art, a skill that needs to be developed just like anything else you do on the ukulele. 

If you'll pardon me sounding like a geezer for a few minutes, back when I started playing the piano 30+ years ago, there was no YouTube, and in order ot hear a piece of music you wanted to learn, you had to find a record or a cassette (or a CD) and listen to it over and over. So take advantage of Google and YouTube and find a recording or a video (or even a tutorial!) for the piece you want to learn, and listen to it over and over before you start and as you progress through the piece.   

Tip Number Two: Take It Slow. I'm notorious for not following my own advice (Virgo rising, yeah), and I struggle with this one because of my grasshopper-brain, but when you're learning new music, take. it. slow. Lots of times, you'll find metronome markings on your sheet music or tablature, and those are great for helping you get up to tempo, but for the love of all that is holy, if you're gonna use a metronome start it at half that tempo until your muscle memory kicks in. 

Taking it slow is also really helpful when you're dealing with tricky chord transitions up and down the neck of your uke. In one of the Choan Galvez pieces I'm learning right now, you have to make a jump from the third fret up to the eighth fret in just one beat. So for now, I'm playing the whole piece at a sloooooow tempo so that my fingers can learn where they have to go comfortably and confidently before I speed it up a tick.

Tip Number Three: Use the Tick Mark Method. And speaking of ticks... One of my ukulele teachers, the awesome Andrew Molina, utilizes what he calls the tick mark method. My Virgo rising loves this, because you get a pen and a piece of paper (or your practice journal) and you play your piece (or whatever part is challenging you like that five-fret jump or a difficult chord transition), and you repeat it 10 times. Every time you repeat it, you make a tick mark on your paper or in your journal. 

One of the reasons I love this method so much is that it gives me a beginning and an end for my practice routine. I can play a challenging part 10 times over, and then move on to something else and just let that gel in my mind for a little while.

The other reason I love this method is because it works on muscle memory. This is something I explored a lot when I was a yoga teacher and was doing hundreds of hours of yoga teacher training. When you learn a set of poses like the Sun Salutations, at some point, your muscle memory takes over and your body simply remembers what to do. When muscle memory kicks in, your mind is free from distractions (usually) and you can go deeper into a state of meditation. (I'll have more on yoga for ukulele players next week.)

Same thing applies when using muscle memory to learn new music. At some point, the muscle memory takes over, your fingers and hands do their thing, and you can add all kinds of beautiful dynamics and emotions to your playing. 

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Do you have any tips or techniques for learning new music? I'd love to see them in the comments!