Internalizing Tunes

While ‘sheltering-in-place’ this last week, I discovered a very useful process to help with soloing on standard tunes. The following outline need not be applied strictly over and over, but try doing it step-by-step for a song or two and see what seems useful to you.

LEARNING THE MELODY
1. Play the melody multiple times. Play it all over the range of your instrument until you are able to change octaves in the middle of the melody at will.
2. Do the same thing but this time embellish the melody with passing notes and grace notes, and also freely interpret the rhythms so that the melody sounds like you might have just made it up on the spot.
3. Play pieces of the melody and then improvise for a bar or two, back and forth. Use other chord notes and also passing notes between chord notes in the improvised parts.

LEARNING THE HARMONY
1. Play pieces of the arpeggios of the chords of the song using the full range of your instrument. No set number of bars on each chord here—
just play until you are comfortable with each one.
2. Play the chords in time, with the same number of bars/beats for each chord as indicated in the chart. (It is best to use the accurate charts found in Sher Music Co.’s “New Real Book” series.) Try to use chord notes only, as much as you can. For this exercise, play the chord notes with soloistic phrasing, not just running arpeggios. Do this until you have memorized the chord sequence and can play through it without looking at the lead sheet.
3. This time add scalar and chromatic passing notes to connect chord notes. (i.e., think of the chord but play anything you hear.) Do this until the chord sequence has been internalized and you can sense the next chord before it comes up. This will give your lines a feeling of forward motion because you will be heading for the next chord change, even as you are playing on the current one.

USING THE MELODY’S PHRASES TO CREATE YOUR SOLOS
Think of (or sing) the melody’s phrases to yourself while you are soloing, but use any notes, not just the notes of the melody. Thinking in phrases will help you avoid sounding like you are just ‘wiggling your fingers.’ Use either rests or longer-held notes to separate phrases. Here are some suggestions for how to start each phrase.
1. Start on the melody notes at the beginning of each bar, then play whatever you hear after that.
2. Start on the roots of the chords at the beginning of each bar.
3. Start on any chord note at the beginng of each bar.
4. Start each bar on a step-wise (including half-steps) sequence of ‘target’ notes. Work this out in advance if you want or just improvise these as you go.
5. Start each phrase on any note that you hear, but do keep the melody’s phrases in mind as you go through the song.
6. It’s fun to play a string of short phrases that all are variations of each other. By doing this, you might leave the melody’s phrasing for a while but that’s fine as long as you know where you are in the tune.

INTERNALIZE THE SONG
1. Spend some time analysing the structure of the song. For almost all standards, you can break the song up into four-bar sections---so treat each one as an independent unit in which you understand the chord movements and can therefore look at it as a single piece of information (e.g. II-V-I-VI). The chords at the beginning of each four-bar phrase create a sequence that is like the signature of that tune, so make sure you have that engrained in your mind.
2. By using these different ways of learning a tune, at the end of this process you should be able to intuitively know where you are in the song without thinking too much about it. What this ends up doing is giving you a sense that you can feel the whole tune wrapped around you, so to speak, even as you are playing on a particular part of it. At this point, “The Song is You,” to quote Jerome Kern. Have a ball! - Chuck Sher