How to Learn a Song on Guitar: Break It Down Before You Practice It

You've picked a tune you actually want to learn. Now what?

One option is to pull up the recording or tab, start at the beginning, play until something goes wrong, stumble through it, and start over. Do that enough times and you'll probably get really good at playing the beginning.

The rest of the tune? Maybe not so much.

There's a better approach: take the tune apart.

Instead of treating a three, five, or ten-minute piece of music as one giant thing to learn, break it into smaller pieces you can actually work with. Learn those pieces, solve the problems inside them, then put everything back together.

Break the music down only as far as necessary, then build it all the way back up.

First, Decide What You're Actually Trying to Learn

Sometimes you don't want to learn the whole tune. Maybe you heard a Jimmy Page lick you want to steal, a riff you want in your vocabulary, or a chord progression you want to understand.

That's completely legitimate. If the lick is the goal, learn the lick.

But if your goal is to learn the entire tune, don't quietly change the goal after you've learned the cool parts. Guitarists are pretty good at learning the intro, the recognizable riff and half the solo before moving on to something else.

If the goal is the complete tune, finish the tune. Breaking it into smaller pieces is how we're going to make that manageable.

Start by Listening

Before worrying about tabs, fingerings or picking patterns, listen to the tune and figure out what's actually in there.

Can you hear an intro? Where does the verse begin? What changes when the chorus arrives? Is there a bridge, solo or instrumental section? Does the intro return later? Is verse two actually the same as verse one?

You don't need to solve every note. You're building a map.

For a straightforward acoustic tune, that might be:

Intro → Verse → Chorus → Verse → Chorus → Bridge → Chorus → Outro

That's already much easier to think about than one four-minute block of music.

Write the Structure Down

Grab a piece of paper and write the structure down while you listen.

Forget reaching for chord sheets, lead sheets or tab for now. You're just trying to understand the tune.

Don't worry about formal music notation. You're creating a simple roadmap. It could be on a napkin or a Post-it note. It doesn't matter.

Write Intro, then Verse, then Chorus, and keep going as the recording plays. If something repeats, write it again. If you're not sure what to call a section, make up a name that makes sense to you.

You might end up with something like:

Intro (4 bars) → Verse 1 → Chorus → Verse 2 → Chorus → Solo → Bridge → Final Chorus → Outro

Listen again and add details. Maybe the intro riff returns underneath the final chorus. Maybe verse two has a fill that wasn't in verse one. Maybe the solo is played over the verse progression.

Now the tune isn't just something floating around in your head. You can see the whole thing.

That little piece of paper becomes your working map for learning it.

Don't Create Complexity Until You Need It

You don't get extra credit for breaking a tune into 47 pieces. The goal is to make the music manageable, not create the most elaborate hierarchy possible.

A simple acoustic tune might only need:

• Intro
• Verse
• Chorus
• Bridge
• Outro

If you already know how to play the verse, leave it alone.

But a classic rock tune might have an intro riff, rhythm parts, fills between vocal lines, a bridge, solo and outro. A technically demanding Animals as Leaders tune might need to go several levels deeper.

The complexity of the music should determine the complexity of your breakdown. Not the other way around.

Break Sections Into Parts

Once you've mapped the major sections, look inside the ones that need more work.

A solo might become three phrases. A verse might contain a chord progression plus two fills. An intro might contain a riff that needs to be treated as its own piece.

Your map could start looking more like this:

• Intro
  • Intro riff
• Verse
  • Chord progression
  • Fill
• Chorus
  • Rhythm part
• Solo
  • Phrase 1
  • Phrase 2
  • Phrase 3
• Outro

Now "practice the tune" has become something much more useful: I'm working on phrase two of the solo.

That's a real practice target.

Keep Going Until You Find the Actual Problem

Suppose you're working on an eight-measure riff and measures five and six keep falling apart.

Stop practicing all eight measures and put on your scientist hat for a bit. What's actually wrong with five and six?

Maybe there's a position shift you can't make cleanly. Maybe your picking and fretting hands stop lining up. Maybe you don't understand the rhythm. Maybe the fingering you're using just isn't working.

You've gone from:

I can't play this riff.

to:

I'm having trouble with this passage because my picking and fretting hands aren't staying synchronized.

It could even be something as simple as: My pick is sliding around in my hand and I can't keep up with the tempo.

Now you have something you can work on.

This is where the tune starts telling you what to practice. A musical problem can lead you directly to a technical exercise, rhythm work, theory concept or whatever else you actually need.

Tune → Solo → Phrase → Trouble Spot → Specific Problem → Practice

That's very different from randomly deciding you should practice a technique for ten minutes every day because someone told you guitarists are supposed to.

The music gave you a reason.

Don't Always Start at the Beginning

Writing out the structure has another advantage: the whole tune stays visible.

If you start from the beginning every time you practice, the intro gets played constantly while the bridge and outro barely get touched.

You don't have to earn access to the bridge by playing the first three minutes. Go practice the bridge. Start with the outro. Work on the second half of the solo. Spend ten minutes on the section you've been avoiding.

Learning how to end a tune is a skill all by itself. Blues turnarounds, anyone?

The same goes for the less exciting parts. If your goal is to learn the whole tune, the rhythm part underneath verse two counts just as much as the giant riff that made you want to learn it.

There's nothing wrong with collecting riffs and licks. That's useful vocabulary. Just be clear about the goal.

If you're collecting a lick, collect the lick. If you're learning a tune, learn the tune.

Now Build It Back Up

Breaking the tune apart is only half the process. Eventually, all those pieces have to become music again.

Once you've fixed the trouble spot, put it back into the riff. Then play the complete section. Start connecting sections and pay attention to the transitions between them.

The process starts reversing:

Problem → Passage → Part → Section → Complete Tune

This matters because being able to play six isolated sections isn't the same as being able to play a tune. The transition from the verse into the chorus might be its own problem. Entering the solo naturally might feel completely different than starting directly on the first note of the solo.

Play the tune from beginning to end without restarting because you didn't like the intro or checking the tab every 30 seconds. If something falls apart, you've found the next problem.

Go back down, fix it, then build back up again.

Break down. Build up. Test. Repeat.

Eventually, Play Music

At some point, stop practicing the pieces and play the tune.

Can you play it without stopping? Can you stay in time? Can you recover when you make a mistake? Can you play without staring at the tab? Can you play along with the recording?

Could you play it for another person? Could you play it onstage?

Those questions reveal weaknesses that four-measure practice loops never will. Eventually, all those little pieces need to disappear back into the music they came from.

The Whole Process

Learning a tune doesn't have to mean starting at measure one and fighting your way through until the end.

Listen first. Write out the structure. Break the tune into useful pieces. When you hit a problem, keep going deeper until the problem is small enough to work on.

Then reverse the process.

Listen → Map → Break Down → Practice → Reassemble → Play

If learning the complete tune was your original goal, finish it.

And if you do this with several of the tunes you chose in the last article, something useful starts to happen. You'll build a very specific list of techniques, musical problems and skills that need your attention.

Not because somebody on the internet said every guitarist should practice them.

Because your music exposed them.

And now we have the raw material for the next step:

your practice plan.