Hi everybody,
I’m a mostly self-taught musician who mainly plays acoustic guitar. I’ve recently been learning certain versions of jazz standards for fun, girl from ipanema, autumn leaves, and I’ve been trying to pick up a few others, but I feel like I’m hitting a brick wall. I’m having trouble upgrading from mimicry to a more holistic understanding of the pieces. For example, if I were to play with someone else in another key, I’d have to fumble around a bit to transpose it mentally. I guess that may be caused by me learning only specific versions. Some questions:
- Does anyone have tips for learning standards?
- How can I locate the “purest” form of a standard, if that even makes sense? I feel like learning certain interpretations with their own flair isn’t ideal.
Get something called the “Real Book”. It’s what everybody reads standards out of. You might have to pick up a little knowledge about reading music charts tho
The other poster suggested getting the Real Book, which is a good idea, but I’d go one step beyond that and get the iRealPro app. It has chord charts for basically every jazz standard and will transpose them for you in case you would ever need to play them with someone else in another key. It’s kind of cheating, but it gets you there.
As far as tips on actually learning the tunes, try to pick up a bit of jazz theory – there are plenty of good videos out there that will explain it in terms you can understand. The vast majority of jazz tunes are built from ii-V-I chord progressions in sequence. Once you learn to recognize those chords and their variations as sort of a single unit, you can have a much easier time memorizing a tune by just thinking something along the lines of: start out in C, then a ii-V-I to F, ii-V-I back to C.
Jazz is obviously a very deep subject and basically a language all on its own, but this might get you started.
The best way to learn is to figure stuff out by ear.
The other two suggestions are good: get a couple of real books (there are several) and iReal.
But don’t forget to use your ears! Figuring chord changes and melodies by ear is a fundamental skill for jazz musicians.
