How To Memorize Chord Charts

hello everybody today I want to go over with you how to memorize the songs that you want to play memorizing songs for me has been a personal struggle and I can tell you through experience that I really this is something I've really wanted to learn how to do there are two situations in particular that warrant memorizing the songs that you want to play the first one for me at least is anytime that I've played on stage in church or something like that and having to rely on the music on a stand right in front of me and it reduces my confidence in being able to play the song because I'm I have these the sheet that I have to stare at and if it's not there if it gets blown off or something like that uh I don't know what to do and the song is not in here it's on this piece of paper over there and so it kind of just removes the confidence for me in playing the song the second and most important reason for me that I've wanted to learn how to memorize is whenever you're in a situation uh maybe at a party or a family gathering or something like that and somebody hands you a guitar and asks you to play um and you don't just carry around sheet music everywhere you go it's so important to be able to have just songs in set in memory that you can just grab a guitar and just play those songs I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me where somebody just happened to have a guitar in their house and like hey you place why don't you play us a song and I literally cannot play them anything because I have nothing set in memory it's all I have to have a piece of paper to look at so for me learning these techniques of memorization has been a personal goal now I've learned some memorization techniques for the language learning that I've been doing for the past three years and I'm going to take what I've learned through language learning and apply it to this memorization as well one of the things that I found key in memorizing for language learning has been taking a word or a thought or something like that and putting a picture to it a visual picture that I can connect with this word or this thought and this image acts like a memory hook and when I when I visualize this image that word comes up immediately so I've taken this concept of visual memory Hooks and I've applied it to a song that I want to memorize and in this case I've picked out a song that's a little complicated it's You've Got a Friend by Carol King and this song has a lot of chords in it and the the transitions go everywhere and so I wanted to pick a song like this that's a little bit more complicated it doesn't just have four chords there's a lot of chords and it kind of goes all over the place and so for me if I can memorize this song I can memorize any song so over the past few days I've applied to this technique to this song You've Got a Friend and I was able to memorize the song and play through it without looking at any chords or lyrics after my third session each session I just practiced for 20 minutes so all total was a 60 Minute practice all together over three days and after that third session I was able to play through the entire song without looking at any chords or lyrics so I want to show you the process that I went through to get there [Music] whenever you draw out the verses and the chorus and Bridge visually it really helps you to see that pattern more clearly so for this song for verse one the very first line we have when you're down and troubled and you need some love and care so for that one of the very first box at the bottom I drew a big arrow pointing down and it's pointing into like some Rough Waters or fire or something underneath that represent the trouble but the main thing is going to be that big arrow pointing down because the word down is right there at the beginning of the line when you're down so seeing that arrow pointing down is going to be a trigger for me to remember that line I also put the words love and care on either side of that arrow and that those words love and care are towards the end of the line and so that's just going to help me to remember the end so it's kind of like bookending with the arrow pointing down that helps me to remember the beginning of the line when you're down and then the words love and care are there to remind me of the end of the line and you need some love and care that's kind of the last two parts of the line and typically the case is going to be that once you can remember the first word or the first two words or something of a line it'll typically you'll typically remember the rest of it you know if you can just get that line started if you can remember a key word or something typically you can remember the rest of it now the next line of the first verse is and nothing oh nothing is going right so for that one I didn't even draw a picture I just put the word nothing and it's kind of hard to draw a picture of nothing so I just put the word there and sometimes it's better just to put a keyword especially if it's like really stressed on that line or something you could just write out that word instead of having to draw a picture the next line of the song is just close your eyes and think of me and soon I will be there so for that one I just drew a picture of closed eyes and the last line is to brighten up even your darkest night so for that one I put a picture of a sun right biggest smack in the middle because that's the first part of that line to brighten up and I want to make sure I see that sun nice and clear and then underneath it I drew a picture of a night scene like a moon and and in darkness so basically the the sun is brightening up the night so I took that same idea and I continued through the chorus and the second verse and the bridge as well and I went through each line of each one of those and I drew a little picture or I drew the words a keyword of that line or a combination of the two sometimes I would draw a word and a little picture with it just to make it even more clear and just the process of drawing these things out just creating this thing was very key in me memorizing the words of this song I did play through it a couple of times while looking at these pictures so I would I would instead of looking at the lyrics written out the whole lyrics I would just look at these little totems of the pictures and play through the song that way and that just helped to solidify these images into my mind so that later you know when I'm singing the song these images will just pop up instead of the words now when it comes to the chords of the song This is a little bit more difficult because we can't just draw pictures to represent the chords but what we can do is look for patterns and I found it incredibly useful to write out my notes basically to just kind of draw out the chords for each verse the chorus and the bridge and to look for patterns visually and that will just just drawing this out and taking these notes was incredibly helpful for me to memorize the the pattern basically of these chord transitions so one of the patterns I realized while taking these notes was that anytime I play an F sharp minor chord I'm always going to go to a B7 and then from B7 to E minor that is a transition that always happens so anytime I find myself playing an F sharp minor I know that I'm gonna go to a B7 and then an E minor so just knowing that that pattern is there all I need to do is remember that that when I need to go to an F sharp minor and after that automatically will go to the B7 into the E minor another pattern I picked up on is that all the verses the chorus and the bridge all end on a D7 so just realizing that pattern is one less thing I have to think about when I'm playing the song I realized while I was practicing that I was really struggling with the B minor 7 chord because it shows up it doesn't we don't play it a lot for this song but it does show up once on every verse and once in the BR in the chorus but I would always get confused as to where it showed up so by writing this all down I was able to see that that B minor seven shows up on the last line of the verses and the last line of the chorus so just by knowing that is it helped me to remember that oh when I'm getting towards the end of the verse or I'm getting towards the end of the chorus I know that's where that B minor is going to come another pattern I realized is when we got to the bridge we have a f to a c transition and then the second line we have that gets flipped and we have a c to an F transition so taking notes on these little patterns that show up within the transitions of the chords was key for me memorizing these transitions for this song and then it was just a matter of playing it over and over again to get familiar with these patterns and that was my focus for day two for my 20 minute practice on day two as well as day three so day two and day three I spent all of my time focusing on just playing through the song playing through those patterns and getting the feel of it and for both of those days I did not look at the lyrics I would just look at my pictures that I made and I would look at my chord patterns that I kind of Drew notes on as well and this was like the process of taking off the training wheels instead of looking at every word I'm looking at my pictures instead of looking at every chord I'm looking at the patterns okay so this is day three of uh the practice and uh so today marks the third day of practicing for 20 minutes so that's 60 minutes total so now I'm gonna go ahead and try to play through the song as best I can with as little mistakes as possible without looking at any core charts or the lyrics or anything like that just from memory okay so let's see how I can do [Music] all right closed captioning not available [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] I don't know when it begins to blow keep your hands together now and call my neighborhood [Music] nothing nine years old [Music] [Music] I'll come on in to see you again hey know that you've got a friend when people will be so cool I hurt you yeah hurt you but you make your soul but don't you let them and you know [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] so in conclusion I was very impressed with how well this technique actually worked it only took me three days practicing 20 minutes a day again just as a review the first day I mainly focused on drawing out those memory hooks with those images and finding the patterns in the in the chord progressions I did do a little bit of practice actually with the guitar and playing the song Maybe I played through it once or twice but the main goal of that practice session was just to draw out those memory Hooks and to spend time studying the content of the song and though at first it may seem like a waste of time because I'm not even having my guitar in my hand I'm spending maybe 15 minutes just kind of drawing little pictures and things like that it seems like a waste of time because I'm not even practicing but that is a critical part of the memorization process it's like the process of sharpening your ax before chopping down the tree and then the next two 20-minute sessions were just focused on playing the song with my guitar are in hand and not looking at the whole chord sheet with all of the lyrics and all of the chords on top of the words and all of that it's a slow process of removing training wheels and and trying to use my brain to remember the chords and remember the lyrics with my memory Hooks and I would spend 20 minutes practicing looking at my memory Hooks and then after those 20 minutes went over I would put everything aside and just play through the song trying to remember it from memory as much as possible and after the third 20-minute session I was able to successfully play through the entire song by memory now one thing that I think is critical on this memorization is that you do separate your sessions over a period of days I don't think it's going to work as efficiently to practice for one hour straight over one day and get the same results as you would if you would separate your practice into three different chunks of 20 minutes a piece over three different days because that's based repetition is going to be important to the memorization process so yes it does work and I'm looking forward to getting some songs memorized for me so that I can have a little library of songs to play if anybody ever asks me to play at a party again and I challenge you to pick out five of your favorite songs and over the next month spend some time practicing this memorization technique see if you can get five songs memorized in your mind that you can just pick up a Guitar anywhere and just play without needing to pull out chord charts or anything like that and I promise you the next time somebody hands you a guitar and asks you to play you'll be glad you did [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Simplified Guitar

Views: 11,614

Keywords: jonathan reaux, simplified guitar, acoustic guitar, chord charts, music sheets, how to memorize, memorization techniques, memory hooks, memorizing chord charts, how to memorize chord charts, how to memorize music, how to memorize songs, guitar tutorial, how to play guitar

Id: i0Vt57cBeuw

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 21 2022