Internalizing Tunes: Learning the Melody

While we are all sheltering-in-place during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chuck Sher, from www.shermusic.com, has provided us with a free tutorial on woodshedding. He has discovered a very useful process to help with soloing on standard tunes. Give it a try and see what seems useful to you!

Step 1: LEARNING THE MELODY

1. Play the melody multiple times. Play it all over the range of your instrument until you are able to change octaves in the middle of the melody at will.

2. Do the same thing but this time embellish the melody with passing notes and grace notes, and also freely interpret the rhythms so that the melody sounds like you might have just made it up on the spot.

3. Play pieces of the melody and then improvise for a bar or two, back and forth. Use other chord notes and passing notes between chord notes in the improvised parts.