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Vocal Point
Learning a Song
Aug-01-2000
©2000 iBluegrass.com. All rights reserved.
Whether you are a beginner, an experienced professional or just curious about this business of singing, may I extend a warm 'shake and howdy' to you and welcome you to this month's 'Vocal Point of View.'
In the last several issues I have been systematically focusing on techniques that help to locate and release muscular tensions which tend to limit range and constrict our voices in numerous ways. (See past article archives). There's a little further to go on the 'tension busting' subject, but we're going to take a break this month and talk about one of those often significant 'between the cracks' type topics--- 'how to learn a song.' How do you learn a song? Have you thought about it or talked to friends about it much? Here are some ideas I hope you'll find useful.
First of all, learn the melody---learn the notes---and do this before you go about learning the words. Do this by picking the notes out on an instrument, if you can, or by listening to a recording. Learn every note of the melody and hear it clearly in your head. We often 'fluff over' certain notes which can cause pitch, tone quality or harmony problems, to name a few. Use the sound 'naw' as you begin to learn and sing the notes.
Here's an important point. As you're singing and learning the notes using the 'naw' sound get into the habit of thinking about 'placement' (a broad subject ear-marked for a future article) . What a note sounds like and its tone, is greatly effected by how it is positioned, or placed, by muscles of the mouth, tongue, soft palate and jaw. As you sing each note, especially high notes, be on the look-out for any tension or tightening of these muscles. Become aware of it and then look for ways to release it. If you don't do this first there's a tendency to build in all kinds of limiting tensions, especially that 'reaching' and constricting on high notes.
Now the lyrics. Read through the lyrics carefully verse by verse. Learn the story. Feel the sentiment, the emotion or perspective the songwriter is trying to get across. Do this until those feelings, or your own version of them become alive in you. Then look at one verse at a time. Look at each phrase in that verse and notice how the words trigger mental images. If an image doesn't come to mind immediately make up your own. Make these images very large, clear and detailed. Link them together phrase by phrase within a verse. Then it's easy to link the verses together because the story has a natural sequence (usually). Another approach, and one that I use when possible, is to associate the lyrics to personal experience, or an experience in your personal repertoire that's enough in the ballpark to borrow from. The mental pictures then become personal scenes where the immediacy of the emotion is built in and powerful. In the end you will have something similar to a mini motion picture running across the screen of your minds' eye as you interpret a song, each scene triggering the related emotions.
There are some wonderful advantages to this. If you teach yourself to stay with the movie, that's where your thoughts will be. You'll be in the moment and out of your own way, so to speak. Where your thoughts will not be is on a track that causes self-consciousness and distraction, and this is particularly important when you're playing for or around other folks. Secondly, and I find myself smiling as I tell you this, if it happens that you forget the lyrics you will still have the back-up mental images---which tend to cause alternative words, or even phrases to offer themselves up to you like a mechanized ticket machine. They may not rhyme, but surprisingly they often do. A made-up word that rhymes has been known to create a feeling of great private victory.
A couple more thoughts for those who have trouble remembering words. Try typing them out in great big letters. This is a visual aid that helps commit words to memory. Lastly, tune into the feeling of the words on your lips as you pronounce them. This creates a helpful physical memory.
I'd like to close by passing on a remark that's worth repeating, even though it's second hand and I'm left to paraphrasing. I believe it was Robin Williams of the infinitely talented team of Robin and Linda Williams who said something like---'there's a time when you feel bad about forgetting words and tend to worry about it. Then comes a time when you relax, ignore or make a joke about it. Then finally there's the time when by the middle of the next verse you forget that you forgot the words.'
I'd love to hear more from you on learning and memorizing a song. Meanwhile, I hope some of these ideas have been helpful, and I'll see you next month!
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