🧠 how to learn hard songs

Hey music maker!

Back in 2023, I tried to learn the bassline from Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On." I was a total beginner on bass and honestly had no business trying.

This past year I've been playing bass almost every day. So I'm going back to that same bassline to see how much faster I can learn it now.

In today's issue:

Key: E major

When you reduce the song to numbers, the chords turn out to be pretty simple. The hard part is the bassline James Jamerson plays on top of them.

Most of this song lives on a few moves.

Here they are translated in Nashville numbers:

Move 1: 1ma7 - 6mi7

This is the main groove of the song. The 1 major 7 and the 6 minor 7 share three of the same notes, so the change feels soft, which makes it perfect for a romantic jam. In E, a guitar player can hold an E chord while the bass moves from E down to C# to get this vibe.

Move 2: 2mi7 - 5(7sus4) - 5(13)

Moves 2 and 3 are two ways back home. Move 2 is the old 2-5-1 with the 1 chopped off, plus a sus chord that stalls and a 13 right before it lands.

Move 3: 2mi7 - 4/5

Move 3 took me the longest to hear. It's a 4 chord over a 5 in the bass. I spent years thinking that sound was some gospel secret, and it's a slash chord.

There are 269 more progressions like this in the Harmony Vault, all in Nashville numbers and searchable by chord.

Get the Harmony Vault →

James Jamerson played bass on "What's Going On," and that bassline basically never sits still. It's full of syncopated 16th notes and little runs that feel improvised through most of the song.

For a beginner in 2023, it was a lot to take on.

This time I'm using three ideas.

There's a line I saved from Daniel Coyle's The Little Book of Talent that sums up the first one:

"See the whole thing. Break it down to its simplest elements."

1. See the whole song, then chop it up.

Before I touched the bass, I wrote every chord in the song as a number based on its spot in the key.

That's the Nashville number system. It's great for fast transposition, and it squeezes a whole song onto one page. Seeing every section at once made the song feel a lot smaller.

Creating a chart with this system is one of the best things that you can do when you're trying to learn a song.

I also found the bass line transcribed as sheet music, so I'm not learning the song by ear, which would slow me down since this bass line has a lot of rhythmic complexity.

Now once I had that, I cut the sheet music into tiny pieces. Half a bar, sometimes a third of one. I practice those pieces with the rhythm, in random order, so I'm not repeating the same bit over and over.

This is a chunking strategy. Your brain learns small pieces faster, then links them together.

The weird part is how it feels. In motor skill studies, people who drill one piece over and over think they're learning more. The ones who mix it up actually remember more later.

So if random practice feels clunky, that's kind of normal. It felt clunky for me too.

I also gave myself one rule.

I'm not allowed to start from the top.

When I start from bar one every time, the intro gets fifty reps and the hard part in the middle gets maybe two.

2. Play just the roots, at full speed.

Next I go through the whole song playing only the root of each chord, right on tempo. Then I add the fifth.

So if a chord lasts one measure, I would play the root on beat one, and the fifth on beat three. Bass players call this a two feel.

It sounds super basic. But that's the point. And it's a foundational bass skill to have. Effective bass lines are built from it.

With this approach, I learn where every chord change lands and how the sections connect before the hard notes ever show up.

3. Listen until your head knows it.

I listen to the song over and over. Like, a slightly embarrassing amount.

Once I can hear most of the bassline in my head, practice starts to feel different. With the song in my mind, my fingers are just hunting for notes my brain already knows.

Coyle calls this kind of close listening engraving.

So how's it going? I'm still in the middle of it, so I'll report back once I can play it top to bottom.

Stalled attempts get filed as failures pretty fast. Mine did. I stalled out in 2023 and moved on.

But the challenge did teach me a lot about bass.

It gave me a north star. My connection to the song deepened, and my hands kept a rough map of the neck. That actually made simpler bass lines a bit easier to learn.

So that turned out to count for something.