It is always exciting to see a new ukulele book come out, especially when it is on a slightly different subject - in this case 'how to remember songs'. Marc Gallagher’s new book is called ‘Avril to Ziggy’ and it is all about how to memorise songs on the ukulele.
In case you are not aware of Marc, he is a professional musician who plays many instruments, but his main instrument is the ukulele. He is a regular at many of the ukulele festivals and a very talented player. Marc prides himself on having a repertoire of over 850 songs committed to memory and this book aims to share some of the secrets to memorising songs. As an idea for a book, I really like it, as memorising songs is often something that evades many people.
The book does not deal with how to play the ukulele at all - this is solely about how to memorise songs. It makes the assumption that if you are reading this book, you can already play ukulele. Marc starts with the basics by explaining that we often know more of a song that we realise - due to the fact that most songs repeat quite a lot of the chords. Marc’s first tip is when writing songs out, if the title is sung over and over, you do not need to write it out on your chord sheet. Marc then goes on to explain how it is best practice to try and speak the words of a chorus without looking at any sheets. Repeat this over and over. Once this is done you can start to incorporate rhythm into the words being spoken. Great advise !
Much of the book deals with ‘condensing’ chord sheets to make them much more accessible. After all, I must agree with Marc, there is nothing worse than a ten page chord sheet for a song ! Marc condenses his song-sheets to ‘essential lyrics only’ - which he then makes into a simple ‘crib’ sheet. Again this is great advise.
Marc takes the above method of condensing a worksheet to ‘essential lyrics’ and then further to a ‘crib sheet’ and walks us through several well known songs using this approach.
Marc further simplifies the approach by discussing the Circle of Fifths and how it can be used to memorize songs. He explains how most songs are using the 1, 4, 5 method. I particularly enjoyed his description of the 1 chord being ‘Home’, the 5th chord ‘Away’ and the 4th chord ‘somewhere in between’.
Marc also discussed this further by showing how different types of songs use different progressions.
Overall I think Marc has done a great job in tackling a really tough subject. People learn in different ways and there is no one fix for learning songs. However, Marc usefully breaks down how songs are constructed, and the best way to go about memorizing them. He gives some great tips on condensing worksheets and also on performance matters. It is a well written book that flows well. It is full of some really useful tips for memorizing songs and also does a great job of explaining how song structures work. I can only imagine how hard it was to go about writing this so I take my hat off to Marc for putting it into a coherent form.
You can contact Marc at www.marcgallaghermusic.com
He also has some great songs on his website that are well worth checking out.
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