Author: Mark JW Graham

I was chatting with a few other teachers and some students recently about how to learn a song quickly and how I go about learning songs, as well as what the most effective method is.

Learning a song is a remarkably complex process. There’s the lyrics, the melody, the rhythm, the harmony, perhaps some ornamentation or some hidden complexities, and there’s the challenge of successfully putting all the components together, still sounding like you whilst still doing justice to the original piece (artistry). And that’s just if you’re wanting to SING the song… if you’re wanting to accompany yourself that can create a WHOLE raft of other issues.

For a moment, let’s park our discussion of the artistic. Let’s also not worry about whether we are trying to accompany ourselves on an instrument.

I’m talking about learning a song quickly (the technical) AND, at the same time), progressing towards the best tone you can deliver (the aesthetic). Interestingly, you CAN do both, if you know what you’re doing.

Here’s my process for assimilating a song.

INITIAL PRIMER

1) Find a version I like – The first step is obviously important to make sure you WANT to sing the song.

2) Listen to it 3 or 4 times without singing along with it or playing along with it.
The second time is important to do it uninterrupted. Give your brain the best chance to internalise the song and also not associate the song with the stress of getting bits wrong (this IS going to happen when learning songs so we don’t want to create that stress unnecessarily).

3) Listen to it 3 or 4 times whilst humming or singing gently along.
This is the next step, but make sure not to stop and start again, or try singing the bit you just heard but got wrong over anything bit. Let the song wash over you whilst you tentatively follow along.

4) Listen to it 3 or 4 times trying to sing gently along, but pause and rewind to figure out difficult bits.
Try to keep the flow going as much as possible, but make sure to stop and retrace your steps if you mess something up. The quality of tone and range is not important at this stage, but it IS a chance to check your work.

Now we’ve done that, it’s time for the next steps…

MAKE IT EASY TO SOUND GOOD AND SOUND LIKE YOU

Many great teachers have said to me “I’d rather have half the range, double the quality”. Many singers agree intellectually with this, but emotionally their ego gets in the way. But the truth is, this is sage advice – and we’ve got to go DOWN if we want to go UP.

4) LOWER THE KEY and practice the song til you can do the whole thing – I generally take it down to where the top notes are SUPER pedestrian. If you’re unaccustomed to this approach, whatever key you might initially take a song down to, you could probably take it down a key or two more. For female voices or lighter male voices this can often stick the lowest notes too low overall, but you can apply this process in reverse for just those portions of the song, or even change the melody to be workable even in that lowest key.

Once you’ve got this sounding good and like you (which is ludicrously easy to guarantee because of how much this should be sitting in your chest voice, the place where you speak), we can start to change the key.

NOTE: This is working with the assumption that you have some level of functional mix going on. If you try following the next instructions without a functional mix, you will just end up straining or struggling with your voice.

That caveat aside, the next step is:

5) Take the key up ONE semitone, and repeat the process – Yup, just one singular solitary semitone, and make sure it sounds EXACTLY the same as the key before. Any strain, volume increases/drops, vowel changes etc all need ironing out at the next key. Other than the intellectual knowledge that it’s a higher key, the sound of your voice when singing in this key should be indistinguishable from the one before it.

6) REPEAT – Take it up another semitone, and repeat the process. You must make sure that each time you change key it exactly matches the one before. Even the slightest deviation from the sound that was delivered previously will yield an undesirable runaway process in how good the voice sounds as we ascend. Be incredibly picky about whether it’s the same or not, your voice will sound all the better for it and you’ll develop a LOT quicker overall as a singer.

The first key or two shouldn’t take too long nor be too difficult to do in the first instance. But once you get maybe 2 keys or so higher than your original comfortable key, you’ll start to find the hard work begins. You’ll find it reeeally hard to keep the volume the same, you’ll find vowels start to slip, either getting wider or getting much narrower than you’d like. You’ll find it more energy-intensive to sustain and you’ll need more rest breaks. Assuming you’ve got a functional mix and are adjusting correcting, this is normal and to be expected.

WHY DOES THIS WORK?

What this does is the tone-matching we talked about in my earlier article. We are putting our voice solidly in our modal register (our chest voice) where we are recognisably ‘us’, and then making DAMN sure we don’t lose that as we ascend. Singers all too often and far too willingly sacrifice quality and ease of production JUST to say they’ve hit the note… what’s frustrating for me as a voice teacher is not the sound they got (hey, sometimes it DOES sound cool!) but the sound they DIDN’T get.

Eh? The sound they DIDN’T get?

Once you’ve heard a true powerful voice that’s been built bit by bit in the manner described above, you cannot UNHEAR it. It changes you. It’s an ENORMOUS sound, like getting hit in the head by a freight train, all because of the way the voice has been built… and yet it’s not killing the singer to sing in that way, nor has it compromised ease or consistency to achieve that sound. So when I hear a singer that even sounds good before this approach, it makes me sad to think I could’ve heard something even MORE impressive.

IMPORTANT RULE OF WHEN TO STOP

7) When you can’t keep the same tonality as the key before, you stop.

This tells you where you are technically with your voice and with the song. You should not care too deeply about where the original singer put the song. We all have different voices in different stages of development and with different attributes and attitudes.

THE REAL PAYOFFS

What I love about this process is it reveals the BEST of your voice throughout – why? Because it starts in your TRUE voice, your speaking voice, and goes from there. This process has an in-built safety to prevent you compromising on that.

What is ALSO brilliant about this process is that you will have made sure you sound good in EVERY key you visited (other than the last). Which means that you are comfortable singing in every key you visited.

This in turn means you are psychologically singing much closer to the concept of mix – the idea of the sound of your true voice everywhere, with no reach, strain, stress, or deviation in the correct vowels.

MY PERSONAL OPINION AND FINDINGS

In my experience, voices expand exponentially when they follow this approach. They learn songs ludicrously quickly, and their voices start to sound impossibly enormous in terms of their tone (even without being loud). Once you hear this, you can’t unhear it, but best of all, it helps you to learn songs quickly AND sound great on them at each stage.

That’s it for now folks. Any questions, just let me know!