Netflix had a movie called Yesterday, where the premise was that most of the world forgot the music of the Beatles except for this struggling musician. Once he realizes this, he starts passing off their music as his own.
I started my musical journey in 2014. I’m far from an expert. I played the ukulele and then picked up acoustic guitar in 2020 and electric in 2021. I learned a few Beatles songs, like Yesterday and Hey Jude but after this movie, I decided I would learn… all the Beatles songs. This was on Sept 28 2021.
So I found a fakebook with 174 Beatles songs arranged alphabetically and 4 little notebooks. The way I learn songs, is I would look these songs up on the internet (ultimate-guitar.com), find an easy chord arrangement that I could play, then transcribe it on my little notebook, so that I could play it away from the computer.
My goal was to learn 2 songs a day and finish in 3 months. That worked for the first 7 days. Beatles songs are only 2–3 minutes long. Sometimes 2 verses and a chorus. Unfortunately other time pressures and Beatles fatigue kicked in and I’m way behind. But I will persevere. And so I intend to write and comment on each Beatles song I learn — just to make the process longer and more tedious. Maybe this is the justification for being delayed.
I had also, in the beginning, made an audio recording of me playing the song for the first time. Well, after I had practiced enough to make it thru the song without stopping. This is so that I could come back at the end of journey and listen to myself and gauge if I had actually made any improvement. As well, after learning the 2 songs for the day, I would go back thru the songbook and practice each song.
As of today, 2 months later (Nov 28) I have 35 songs recorded, 47 songs transcribed. So maybe it takes me 8 months instead of 3. But I would have gone from knowing very little about the Beatles to knowing very little about the Beatles and their 174 song discography. Now I know enough that they have more than 174 songs, and honestly some of the songs in this 174 list aren’t that great. That’s where writing about each song might help.
It might take me 30 minutes to learn a song. I look up the song on youtube. Listen to it a couple times. Transcribe the lyrics. Attach the chords based on the fakebook. It takes longer if there are new chords to learn. Then I play it. If I’m in the mood, I’ll fire up Garageband and play it once for Garageband save the file and move on. So 30 minutes, without Garageband. 45 minutes with a recording. Do this 174 times and now… write about what the song means to me. See you tomorrow.
