Learning new songs

We’ve formed an office band

Since I now work for a music school, albeit I’m not directly involved with the music part or the teaching of it, my interest in learning songs, music theory and composing my own has skyrocketed this year.

We’ve also got a conference coming up soon and there will be a battle of the bands contest at the venue. Many of the music teachers or band coaches as we call them will be performing with their own bands. We have also formed three new office bands! I’m playing keyboard in one of them and I’m rather giddy with excitement over it. Others have questioned their own sanity in signing up for this. Not me. I’ll cop out last minute… only kidding as I’m confident that I can learn the one song we’ll be playing and run with it.

I’m lucky that I do have a head start over some people in that I can play amateur keyboard and just about an intermediate at it. If I put the practice in for one or two songs, which might take me a few days to know them off the top of my head.

I’m definitely not pro level, not by any stretch and my repertoire is rubbish but we’ve got a room in the house all set up for this with more than one keyboard instrument in it!

I suspect we may be performing Tears for Fears, “Everybody wants to rule the world”, as all of us suggested it without knowing that we did. It’s a classic. Favourite song of all time, seriously!

We’ve got a poll setup and the other songs on the list are.

- Dreams by Fleetwood Mac

- Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics, would love to learn that one

- Boulevard of broken dreams, Green Day

- Fly Away by Lenny Kravitz

All amazing suggestions but people need to think seriously about complexity, we’ve got a couple of weeks to rehearse before the event on the 31st July.

I’ve been watching a tutorial on YouTube this evening, memorising what I can and practicing the main verse and chorus sections on our piano. The bridges, interludes and solo bits are more complex but I’m going to master them. I want to smash this!

I started to write it up (see above) using my own method of writing down the chords, the notes they’re made of to help me memorise them. The song consists of a lot of chords I already know plus some inversions. It’s pretty much all in D major and there’s only one bit where I think we venture into a different key? Not sure.

The rhythm is fun, as you can describe the signature as being 12/8 due to the verse chords being played in 4/4 but the bass note is more of a triplet resolution.

Anyway it all depends on how we decide to arrange our cover version because the band consists of a bassist, guitarist, drummer, a second keyboard and a singer. All of whom are terrified or worried they’re going to be rubbish.

I’ll help them along I think. We do have Jamie, he’s a professional music coach, so I don’t want to be too cocky!

I’d love to see more posts on songs here on Substack and how we learn them. Share your notes, we’ll see if we can learn from them in some kind of way.

Perhaps this warrants a new series in the future? Or is there one already on learning pieces of music, where the material might be in sheet music style format or more of a scribble like mine!

UPDATE: Sweet dreams is edging forward in the poll. Might be a change of song. I don’t mind because I suggested this particular song.