Teaching Your Songs to Others

So you’ve written a great song and you want to play it, no matter how well you know the song, you do need to teach it to other people. It doesn’t matter how good the guitar part is, if it isn’t a solo song, it isn’t going to sound good if the rest of the band doesn’t know what they are supposed to be doing. Keeping the following tips in mind is a good way to smoothly teaching a song to a band without the associated frustrations.

1) Listen to the Other People in the Band
Even if you composed the entire song, you still need to listen to the other members of the band. Unless you are just as knowledgeable of bass, keyboard, vocal, drum, etc performance as the other members of the band, you could very well inadvertently write something not playable by that instrument. A guitarist can quite easily double up the same note in the same octave, but a vocalist and a keyboard player generally can’t without either a second person to do it or very specialized equipment. A bass looks like a guitar, but the tension and thickness of the strings and fret spacing are so much greater that something fairly easy on a guitar may be very strenuous on a bass.

As strange as this sounds, a good drummer is likely going to be the most helpful person with evaluating a song. Drummers get so good at playing the basic skeletal beat that if your song is doing something funky beat wise, they will most likely pick up on it. You don’t necessarily need to change it, but it is good to consider whether you really want strange quirks in the beat or if you want to smooth it out. Not all drummers can actually articulate why the beat is weird, but most will be able to hear it.

2) Write the Music Out in Whatever Notation Each Band Member is Comfortable With
Odds are you are probably proficient with guitar tab and bass tab is quite similar, but not every musician can or has incentive to read that. Now if they can’t read any music notation, it may be worthwhile to teach them that rather than try to teach every song by ear, but learning to write in other music notations can be helpful.

You don’t need to be particularly great at writing standard notation and drum tab, but getting a chart and writing parts in it for people that need that is generally a great help. If you can write out songs in notation people are comfortable with, then they can learn their parts on their own without you around. You may need to clean some stuff up when practicing together, but it is a lot less time consuming if people already know their parts before you start doing that.

3) Learn Music Theory
There are people that say the whole thing about music theory limiting creativity and all that, but, in reality, the whole point of music theory is to give you a vocabulary to describe musical concepts. It isn’t very helpful when talking to people that don’t know theory, but it makes communicating with people that do much easier. You are going to find that a lot of the more professional musicians do have enough of a basic grasp of theory that having the basics down can make life much easier.

If everyone in the band knows basic music theory, saying something like “let’s change the song from minor to Phrygian” is quite straight forward and easy. If they don’t, you would have to re-write everything, except the drums, but people that understand theory just know that means to play the same thing, except to change any instance of the 2 note to the b2 note. A lot of people simply don’t want to take the time to learn theory, and they come up with all sorts of bizarre excuses, but at the end of the day, knowing theory makes communicating with other musicians and teaching songs to other people incredibly easy. With one word, you can communicate things that might take an hour to demonstrate to a point that the other person actually understands.

Keep on rockin'!