[Cloodie]

Not sure if I'm the only person who has this problem but I've got a poor memory for remembering tunes and a lot of time I've got to sit with a sheet with the chords etc in front of me so that I can play it properly. Now that I'm learning to play fingerstyle I'm finding this much more of a problem. No matter how long I have to play a tune to learn it (and believe me this can be a long time), if I then move onto a new piece I forget very quickly how to play the previous one. This is very frustrating as I then have to go back and try to re-learn it (time consuming) again.

Is there any tips or tricks which would help me out here or is it just a case of trying to play your entire repertoire every day?

[drakus_maximus]

Dont try to go on to the whole song practice on one measure until you get it down and then go on.

[narad1986]

when it comes to long complexed fingerstyle tunes , I tend to just learn them off ,memorise it ...bit by bit .... it just sticks in your head .. automatically.

[-Bandit-]

Yea, I agree with the rest, I am new to guitar playing, but when i played violen the best way was to do measure by measure, then put it together when i got it all down.. hope this all helps.

Cheers
Bandit

[JustaCowboy90]

Yes, learn tunes part by part, and I improvise alot when finger picking, I think thats better because to keeps the music fresh...

[why...IdontKnow]

you should stop smoking weed
like ive had
finally remember where i left my guitar

[Cloodie]

I think part of my problem is that when I'm learning a tune a lot of the times it's my fingers that remember certain parts of the song rather than my head (am I making sense here? lol). When I then go on to a new tune it's pretty much gone.

Is there any way I could possibly bolt an 80gig hard drive directly into my brain?

[dadfad]

This is sort of how I do it. I don't learn a particular tune exactly. Now that doesn't seem to make sense, but what I do is try to instead learn the style of a particular artist first... common things he used, "signiture" licks, runs, etc common to most of his tunes. And then I just apply them when I do a specific tune by that artist. It's improvised, but in the style of the person who did it, which is the same way he would have approached it himself. You can bet that the next time he played that same tune it wasn't identical to the time he recorded it and you listened to that recording. I'll take for example a couple of artists who had several very specific things they frequently used on a great many of their recordings, like say Skip James or Blind Boy Fuller. I could play a tune like "Louie Louie" instrumentally and throw in a few of those things and a person who's familiar with the artist would say "Is that Blind Boy Fuller?" I'd just do the same thing when playing an actual Fuller tune like "Mamie" or "Weeping Willow Blues." Of course the more in-depth you get into a particular artist or artists, the more "authentically" you can play their tunes. Just remember that the artist himself rarely (if ever) played the same tune identically two times in a row. Learn how he approached his stuff, and then apply it to his tunes.