How To Learn A Song On Guitar - Breaking Down A Song To Learn It Faster

Learning a song on guitar can be a long drawn out and frustrating experience for a lot of guitar players. I have certainly been there myself in my early days of learning and am thankful that since then, I have learned HOW to learn songs on the guitar in a more structured and strategic way. The result was that I could not only get the songs down that I was wanting to learn, but I was also able to this much faster too.

Logic would say that when learning to play a song on the guitar you start at the beginning and work your way through until you reach the end. This however is NOT the way to learn songs on guitar or any instrument for that matter.

Depending on your level of guitar playing and the difficulty of the song you are learning, there are several approaches you will take to get a song down faster.

Today I will share a couple of them with you. To demonstrate to you exactly how to go about learning a song on your guitar, I will use the following excerpt of music as an example:

The example above is not a complete song, it’s more of a solo based on an E7 chord. What I do to it here however, is what you will do to a whole song, or anything you are learning, to get it down faster and more effectively.

The first thing to do when learning any song, or part there of, on the guitar is to break it down into smaller parts. Think of this like memorizing a page of writing. You wouldn’t try to do this all in one go. Instead, you would break it up and learn it in smaller pieces. Perhaps paragraph by paragraph or even sentence by sentence. This is exactly the same when learning to play songs on your guitar.

Notice the blues bass riff that’s in bars 2, 4, and 6 in the example above. This would be a good place to start. Here it is in isolation:

Working on this part on it’s own will help you get it down much faster on your guitar than simply trying to play it each time it comes up in the song. 

Why?

Simple, if you play a smaller piece of a song in isolation, you will play it many more times than learning to play it in the context of the whole song itself. 

So in just 5 minutes, you could play this riff anywhere up to 50 times, depending where you are at with it. Compare that to the handful of times you might play it while trying to learn the song in one big piece.

Here is the rest of the example above, broken down into smaller pieces so that you can learn it much faster:

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2.

3.

4.

Keep in mind that you can certainly break parts like these down further, into smaller bits, while learning a song if you need to.

Another point to make in learning how to play a song on the guitar is to rotate through each part you have broken down. You shouldn’t sit on one part until you have it down before moving onto another. Keep it fresh and rotate through each part at regular intervals. Again, this will help greatly in getting the songs you love down much faster.

Now here is a vitally important, but so often over looked thing to do when learning songs on the guitar:

You must work on joining together the parts you have broken the song up into. 

This is crucial to you getting the song or piece of music down. If you don’t do this, you will have a lot of pauses and hesitations when playing the song.

The good news is that it is easy and will be a big reason for you learning songs faster.

Here is an example of this below:

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2.

In these examples above, I am isolating the second half of the first bar and the first half of the second bar together. I am then doing the same with second half of the second bar and the first half of the third bar.

If you know both parts well, then working on joining them together doesn’t require a lot of time in most cases. However, let me repeat, it is a very important step in learning songs on guitar.

Take the approaches I have outlined here, and simply apply them to the songs you are learning on your guitar. Not only will you be able to play through songs start to finish, but you will get to this point much faster too.

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