Before you perform a song, you have to learn how to play it.
This may sound obvious, but, with the exception of some very professional musicians, most bands and solo artists can’t just sit down and play a song perfectly at the first run-through. It’s like writers not publishing their first drafts; they re-work and craft their copy until they deem it ready. There’s a process in getting a song down.
Assuming you’ve decided the song is appropriate for your band (and you’ve chosen the version you like), the first steps are usually to look for a cheat sheet online that contains the lyrics and chords, and to decide what key you’re going to do the song in.
Google the song title plus the words “chords” or “lyrics,” and you’ll come up with sites like Ultimate Guitar, Chordie, Genius, and the like. Around 90 percent of the internet cheat sheets I’ve seen have errors – they were made by individuals and are not “officially” issued – so someone in the band will have to go over them and make corrections. For musicians who know how to read sheet music, it will have to be obtained and this often requires having a paid subscription to a sheet music service like Musicnotes or MuseScore, or buying a physical copy.
Sometimes a cheat sheet or sheet music won’t be available, and then you have to use the old school method of listening to the song and transcribing it from the recording. In the Jurassic pre-internet days, this is how we all did it, dropping the needle or rewinding the tape on certain parts again and again until we figured it out. You need to have patience and a good ear, as sometimes the chords and lyrics will be hard to hear. Back in the day, some of our interpretations of lyrics were comical. “There’s a bathroom on the right!” “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy!”
Typically, a band will try to play a song in the key it’s in. With many guitar-driven songs, the riffs and chords naturally fall in guitar-friendly keys like E, C, G, and A, since they were written on guitar. In jazz, you’ll see horn-friendly keys like Bb, Eb, F and Ab. But often, the singer is not comfortable with the original key. It will be out of their range, with the melody being either too high or too low, and the key will have to be transposed; that is, changed. For cheat sheets, there are sites like Chordchanger that will transpose the song for you. This saves a lot of time.
A familiar scene among bands everywhere. Courtesy of Shopify AI.
Here’s how the band and the duo that I’m in do it.
Once we have the chords and lyrics, the next step is to just play through the song as best as we can – playing the basic chords and maybe some of the key riffs, just to get an idea of the structure of the song. It’s easier if the individual band members have done their homework and gone over the song before the entire band tries it. We don’t worry about getting all the parts perfect or the harmonies right, especially if they’re complicated – we’re just literally trying to get through the song to see how it goes, verse, chorus, instrumental break, etc., and to establish a tempo. The first few times we probably won’t get it even close to being right. But we’ll establish the song structure.
The next few times we play it we’ll be getting comfortable with the song rather than being glued to the cheat sheet, and we’ll begin to remember chords, key parts, and words. There will be a lot of stops and starts. “How many times does that phrase repeat?” “I think those chords are wrong here.” The goal is for everyone to eventually play it through without any stops, even if the arrangement isn’t there and the vocal harmonies are nonexistent.
Then comes the refinement, working out the vocal harmonies, getting everyone’s individual parts down, making sure none of the instruments are stepping on any of the others. It can involve trial and error, trying out different things, getting the rhythms locked in, working out the tricky parts, and ultimately getting a tight arrangement. We’ll figure out what instruments and sounds work best. “Brandy” by Looking Glass wants to have a Wurlitzer electric keyboard sound on the intro, for example, not a Hammond organ patch. “Your Cheating Heart” has to swing.
Sometimes bands will have separate rehearsals just for vocals. It can be hard to hear the vocal parts when the rest of the band is playing.
The arrangement of the song – who plays which parts – will possibly evolve over time. If you’re a tribute band you’ll want to get as close to the original parts and sounds as possible. If a band wants to do, say, a bluegrass arrangement of a Led Zeppelin tune, they have a lot of freedom to put their own spin on it. If you’re in a big band or other type of band that uses charts (sheet music with individual parts for each instrument), you will probably have to go over difficult sections, or the bandleader will want to fine-tune the balance between sections (brass, woodwinds, rhythm section and so on).
You can either try to nail the arrangement, like the incredible Leonid and Friends:
…Or put your own spin on it.
Then comes playing the song over and over again until we have it memorized and can get the groove and feel down.
It’s extremely helpful to listen to recordings of yourself. They don’t lie. And they’ll confirm when you have a song nailed.
Certainly, different bands have different working methods. If you’re in a big band you’ll be expected to come in and read the charts unblinkingly. (But you will have the luxury of having the charts in front of you.) A Broadway pit band is going to have much more stringent demands than a bunch of guys getting together over a few beers and hashing out the chords to “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” I’ve seen bands at all levels, from razor-tight tribute bands, and jazz quartets where the players can jam to a telepathic level with musicians they’ve never shared a stage with before, to horrendous local bands who can’t get through a song from start to finish, and singers who should be fined for calling themselves that.
Many artists work on writing songs at rehearsals or in the recording studio, especially those at a professional level or with record label contracts It’s a valid way of doing it that has yielded countless great songs, if you have the time, the budget, or both. And by the time all the musicians work out the arrangement, it may be very different from, and far better than, anything you might have thought of when you initially wrote the song.
After you feel you have a song nailed in rehearsal, then comes the next and final step: playing it live.
This is where a song goes to the next level. You might think you have it down, but you’re almost certainly going to be putting more of yourself into your playing and singing when you’re in front of an audience. The energy and the passion you feel will be more intense. It adds an edge that you just don’t get when rehearsing in a basement.
It also puts pressure on the band to deliver, and entertain, and wow people. There’s nothing like seeing a crowd getting into your song to inspire you to play all-out. I recently saw my friend Toby Tobias, an excellent Long Island-based singer/songwriter, play a library gig. It was well-attended, as Toby has a great local reputation and is extremely talented, and a lot of musicians were in the audience. At one point Toby said, “I hope you are all having as much fun listening as I am up here playing!”
We sure were!
And that’s what it’s all about.
Header image courtesy of Pexels.com/Pavel Danilyuk.
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