Internalizing Tunes: Internalize the Song

Still sheltering in place? More time to practice! The last step in the Internalizing Tunes tutorial from Chuck Sher is ‘Internalize the Song.’ Below are 5 steps to help you successfully internalize the song after you have worked on learning the melody, learning the harmony and using the melody’s phrases to create your solos.

Step 4: Internalize the Song

1. Spend some time consciously integrating the melody and the chords so that you know how the two fit together at every point in the song. Start by seeing what degree of the chord each melody note is. Play embellished versions of the melody with this in mind.

2. Give yourself different parameters to work within. For example:

try playing through the song using a minimum number of notes while still maintaining a coherent line through the changes.
– try repeating a rhythmic pattern multiple times before switching to a new one as you go through the song. If any given rhythmic figure presents a technical challenge for you, then try leaving the tune for a bit and taking the rhythmic figure up and down the key of the song until it is smooth and relaxed.
try feeling the song in 2 (half notes) as opposed to 4. This will change the kind of lines you play – interesting! Make up more things like this of your own.

3. Spend some time analyzing the structure of the song. For almost all standards, you can break the song up into four-bar sections—so treat each one as an independent unit in which you understand the chord movements and can therefore look at it as a single piece of information (e.g. II-V-I-VI). For many songs, it will be more helpful to look at it in two-bar phrases instead of four-bar ones—do whatever aids you the most in memorizing it. Importantly, the chords at the beginning of each four-bar or two-bar phrase create their own sequence that is like the signature of that tune, so make sure you have that ingrained in your mind.

4. Feel free to cycle any given number of bars over and over until it is ‘yours.’ Anything from two chords up to eight-bar sections of the tune can be cycled with great benefit to your ability to internalize them.

5. By using these different ways of learning a tune, at the end of this process you should be able to intuitively know where you are in the song without thinking too much about it—real freedom!
6.Finally, let it be noted that this process is not so much about self-expression as it is expressing the inherent beauty of the song. As the late Lee Konitz once said, “A good solo doesn’t care who played it.”

Enjoy!