Hi, this is Katie Thiroux here with discover double bass and you're about to
watch a preview of my course "From Beginner to Bandstand"
for this lesson we're gonna talk about learning and memorizing tunes and I
don't just mean for a little bit I mean for ever and we're gonna take a look at
a song called "Scrapple from the Apple" and do a really simple technique of
going measure by measure and then connecting each measure as we go along
and I'll explain and demonstrate that for you and we started our whole course
in the key of F so just for me I like to kind of stay in that key so scrap it
from the Apple is also in the key of F so for this exercise you're gonna need
ten pieces of something something small like coins or paper clips or M&Ms
something just to help you keep track of this of this exercise so I've chosen
scrapple from the Apple and I'm just going to play the melody for you at a
comfortable tempo where I kind of want to end up
so that's the first eight bars to Scrapple from the Apple and I picked
this as a as an exercise for you because it's a 32 bar form which is a A-A-B-A which
those A's repeat so you really only need to learn eight bars of this song so it
makes it super easy to start learning this technique so we before we go to
learn the melody you've either written it down by transcribing it or gone to a
reliable source of someone who knows the song or a reliable book with the song in
it because I do like to look at it while I'm playing just so I have a visual of
going measure by measure like we're going to do so we're gonna start with
measure one and we're gonna play it slowly ten times perfectly at sixty
beats per minute and each time we've done it right we're gonna slide one of
our pieces of ten over to the side of our music stand or wherever we're
practicing so I get to move I'm using coins today I'm gonna do it I did it
right once I did it right again I made a mistake but that's okay in this exercise
we want to play it ten times perfectly so I've done it twice perfectly but I
messed up on the third time so I'm gonna start all the way back at number one so
I'm gonna slide my ten pieces back over and start with the beginning until I can
play it ten times all the way through even if I've gotten to the ninth time
and I make a mistake I go all the way back to the beginning because this
exercise is really training our hands in our mind to have this melody really
ingrained in us after I've done the first measure logically I do the second
measure just like I did the first measure for one
did it right so after I've done that perfectly ten times in a row I go back
to measure one and I connect it to measure two and do that ten times all
together did it right and it goes on and on like that and then we start with
measure three I messed up on the first one so don't even get to put a coin over
for over and once I've done ten right in a row perfectly I do the same thing I go
back to measure one so I'm going to do this just one more time just so you can
hear the process and how it works and how each measure connects so I'm going
to start up now I've done measures one alone measure two alone then added
measure one and two then I did measures three alone and now I can add measures
one through three
so I've done that all. Pretend like I did that ten times perfectly in a row and
then you go on to do the rest of the melody and our goal is to once you've
done all of that go back to the first measure and inch up, start to inch up the
metronome so I'm gonna inch it up two up ten clicks up we were started at
sixty and now we're gonna go to 70 so I'm gonna do the same exact thing at 70
beats per minute and you're gonna see how different that starts to feel
automatically just playing it a little bit faster and if I make a mistake I go
back to the beginning so I do it a few times edited a few times really well and
then I made a mistake so I gotta go back to the beginning so this is an exercise
that you will keep doing over and over again when you want to learn and
memorize songs and each time you do it you just inch up the metronome so my
final goal for this song is 120 beats per minute
and I might do want to do that in two weeks or a month it's however however
much time it takes for you so my final goal is to play it here to play it at
this tempo so we're gonna pretend that I already did all that work each measure
at a time ten times a piece and this is the final tempo I'd like it up
and again to get there I'm playing each measure one measure at a time it sounds
tedious but I promise you'll remember this song forever or any song you go to
learn thanks for watching the video and I hope you enjoyed it if you want to
learn more about my course at discoverdoublebass.com click the link
below