Practice Tips - How Do I Know I’ve Properly Learned a Song?

It often happens that a student is trying to learn a song, comes to a lesson and then realises that as soon as they don’t have the recording, they get lost pretty quickly.

So, how do you know you really know a song? Below are some ways to help you check in on your learning, as well as some tips to help you learn a song with more confidence.

1. Singing along with the melody without vocals

Assuming you can already sing reasonably confidently when you sing along to the full track with vocals, can you still sing the song in full with the correct lyrics when the melody is being played but there is no singer?

This is a really great way to check that you know the lyrics and to be able to hear your singing more clearly. There are lots of ways to go about this. If you play piano, you could use sheet music to play the melody for yourself. Or you could get your singing teacher to make a recording that’s just the melody on piano. There are also many different resources on the internet that can do this for you.

I personally love the Musicnotes app. You can play back a MIDI-style recording of any sheet music you have purchased, and you can even change the key.

2. Singing along to the backing track without vocals

This might seem obvious, but time and time again I see students only singing along with a full recording of a song, and it can genuinely feel like you know the melody. But once you take away that melodic support, you’ll be surprised by how much more difficult it is to hold the tune.

YouTube is incredibly helpful for this — you can find backing tracks for almost anything. I find typing the song name and “piano backing track” or “karaoke version” is the most useful way to do this.

Also, the Musicnotes app lets you deselect vocals, so you can just get the accompanying part to practise along to.

3. Use sheet music, even if you’re not a very confident sight-reader

Some people think that sight-reading music is all or nothing — you can either do it or you can’t. But sheet music can be really helpful even if you only understand the basics.

Even if you don’t know exactly which note corresponds to which pitch, you can tell whether there are lots of notes together (which would mean lots of fast words) or just one note with lots of space around it (a slow, long note). You can also see whether the notes move up the page (i.e. the melody gets higher), down the page (getting lower), or stay roughly the same (no big leaps in the melody).

Even for less confident sight-singers, this can provide excellent cues for your memory, whilst helping you become more confident singing without the auditory support of the melody.

4. Record yourself doing the steps above and listen back

It can be really hard to check how well you’ve memorised something while you’re still looking at the music or lyrics. A great way to check your memorisation is to sing (without any lyrics or sheet music), record yourself and then listen back to check what you sang incorrectly or which bits seem not quite right.

Most modern smartphones have an in-built recording app (Voice Memos on iPhone, or Voice Recorder or Recorder on many Android phones).

So there are just a couple of tips to help you out as you learn a song. Follow along for part two, where I’ll discuss what steps I would take next to get to really know a jazz song.

And if you’re curious and want to book in a lesson, click HERE.