Lauren Bateman walks through how to learn a song on guitar: break it into sections, master the chord changes, isolate picking or strumming patterns, practice transitions between sections, and tackle the hardest parts first instead of always starting from the top.
Hey, guitar enthusiast Lauren Bateman here, in this lesson video, I'm going to be answering the question about how do you go about practicing and working through songs so that you kind of get the most out of each song? So let's get into the lesson video.
Before we jump into the video, just want to give a shout out of appreciation to some of the students who've made donations through my website and support my YouTube channel here for Raymond Carter Sayer, Al Sayre, and Raymond Humphries. Thank you guys so much for your donations. I truly appreciate it. It lets me know that you guys appreciate all the work I put in on the YouTube channel here. Thank you so much. Let's get into the lesson. So obviously the fun part of guitar is learning songs, and particularly learning songs in their entirety. And you can see from my channel alone there is kind of like a spectrum of levels. So you can start at the beginner level. You can have kind of like the late beginner to intermed, and then the advanced level. And how do you go working through songs, you know, at each level or accommodating for different things. The first thing I tell students when we're learning a song, whether it has just strumming, whether it's a combination of picking, whatever. If there's a solo, we first look at each section of the song individually. So start with your intro. Look at the intro, what's going on there? Look at the verse, take that, learn what's going on there. Take the chorus, all the different sections, and then try and put them together. So let's take a song like Green Day's Time of youf Life. So Time of youf Life, there's this kind of intro that has picking. The first verse has picking as well as the first chorus. And then we switch over to strumming. So what you might want to do for this is learn the picking pattern for each chord individually. Hey, guys, I hope you're enjoying this lesson. Don't forget to give me a thumbs up. This way. YouTube knows to show this video to more users just like you. So let's get back into the video and then try and just string those together. So we're kind of breaking it up into its most basic parts. And then we're going to put it together like a jigsaw puzzle. So the most basic part would be one. What are my chords? Need to learn my chords first. Okay, you've got the chords. Fantastic. Now we need to practice the changes between those chords. So if we're going from a G chord to an E minor, you're going to make sure that your chord change for that is down path. So number one, chords. Number two, what are the chord changes? Okay, work through those. Number three, what techniques am I using? Am I using strumming? Am I using picking? All right, if we're using picking, like this Green Day song, take each section, take each chord, learn the picking pattern, and then string it together. The next thing we said when we get to kind of the second verse is that there's a strumming pattern. So we're going between picking and strumming. And if that's something you've never done before, you might need to practice that transition of working from a picking pattern to a strumming pattern. Sometimes the verse of a song will have a different strumming pattern than the chorus of a song. So you might want to work on transitioning between that verse and chorus. So playing the last chord of the verse along with the first chord of the chorus and stringing those together until it becomes flawless. Because for a lot of people, especially when we have transition points between a verse and chorus and different things are going on, a lot of times students stumble because they can do the verse and they get that strumming pattern and they can do the chorus and they got that strumming pattern. But when they have to go from one right into the next, their brain isn't fast enough to process that yet. So I always tell students, let's take the last chord of the verse, the first chord of the chorus, and let's work on practicing those. And the same the other way around. Let's take the last chord of the chorus and. And the first chord to get back into the course, and let's work on smoothing those out. There's always going to be a part in a song that's going to kind of be like a little brain fart for you or the part that you're going to have a hiccup on. Focus on those hiccup points. Always take things out of context and then put them back in context. So say, for example, hey, guys, real quick. I hope you're enjoying the information in this video. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you, if you haven't already, so that you'll see when I release more videos just like this one. Let's get back into the lesson. You cannot for the life of you get the picking pattern for the G chord. Practice the G chord by itself. Then you would take the chord before the G. So you're kind of like building out, you're starting with the problem, and you're building out from there. That's the best way to approach learning a song. Say you have a solo. Okay, how would you go about learning a solo? The biggest thing is to memorize as much of the solo as possible, especially if it's a very fast solo. Take something like Stairway to Heaven. A lot of that has to be muscle memory at some point because that song is so fast and the licks are going by so quickly that you can't be thinking about what you're playing. Now, when you're doing strumming, you don't really necessarily have to have it 100%. You can read the music with solos, yes, you can read the music, but it's so much better to have that stuff memorized. So take it one phrase at a time and the same thing. Start with one phrase. The second phrase or the third lick or the fourth lick. Learn one, then learn two. Put those two together. Great. Learn three. Learn four. Put those two together. All right, now you're going to try and run from 1 to 4 all the way through. So don't ever. When you're practicing, get out of the habit of trying to run from a song top to bottom, because we always start at the top. So the beginning of the song is always better than the end of the song because that's the part we practice the most. So get in the habit of practicing sections, starting with the parts that give you the most trouble and working from there. And get out of the habit of trying to always play things like I said, top to bottom. Maybe you're going to start in the middle of the solo because that's the hardest part for you, the part you haven't memorized yet. So those are some of my tips and tricks for working through a song. The best thing is to just take your time, break it up into sections, and really focus on the parts that are giving you a tough time, and then go from there. I hope you guys enjoyed this guitar lesson video and found it insightful and gave you a few ideas about how to work through some of the songs you might be learning. YouTube's gonna pop up a couple more videos over here. Go check those out. I hope to see you guys in another lesson video and leave me a comment below. Love hearing from my students. I'll see you guys in another lesson video.
