Woodshedding Games

Learning Songs and Perfecting Performance Quickly

Written by – Steve Pasque
July 17, 2023

While it is awfully helpful in streamlining the process, you don’t need a profound understanding of music theory if you’re only looking to learn a couple of your favorite tunes from start to finish. No need to sweat the heavier stuff, just yet.

A basic understanding of rhythm and chords is enough to get you started. More specifically, I’m talking about time signatures, chord shapes, and chord progressions. From there, we can develop our own woodshedding routines that get our hands rolling through the motions, and eventually following along with our playlists, our bandmates, and our family members’ impeccable sense of relative pitch.

How to Count - Rhythm and the Time Signature

Let’s take a look at Fig. 1 and start with rhythm. If you’ve ever been to a concert, there might’ve been a drummer on stage. That drummer might’ve clicked their sticks together a number of times in a steady flow before the whole band suddenly jumped right in step with them, and everyone continued to hold the flow together in unison—all coming in on the same step, too!

Most commonly, that drummer clicked their sticks together exactly four times at a steady speed before the whole band jumped in, instantaneously setting the song’s tempo (speed/time between each click), and the song’s time signature (fig. 1.1). A time signature is a pair of numbers, one on top and one on bottom, at the beginning of a piece of music. The top number sets the clicks (which we’ll now call beats or downbeats) in groupings of a specified number (four, in this example). Each group, which we call bars/measures, is separated by various types of barlines which neatly organize all the notes among the staff to be designated to four respective beats per measure, which we then count, measure for measure, bar for bar, in sequence:

1, 2, 3, 4 | 1, 2, 3, 4 | 1, 2, 3, 4 | and so on…

It’s helpful to refer to the beats more specifically as downbeats when we recognize the purpose of the bottom number, which represents the designated time value (i.e., a specific unit or measurement of timing) to separate each of the four beats in an equidistant structure. In fig. 1.1 the first measure presents the four downbeats clicked by the drummer using quarter notes, or 1/4 of a single measure.

Thus, we have all the pieces of our time signature: a group of four clicks (4/_) quartered into four equidistant time segments of a whole (_/4) makes 4/4 time (“four-four time,”). This time signature is also referred to as common time, as it is both the one most commonly used as well as a fundamental structure of musical rhythm.

From there, we can make the song more interesting by taking the four downbeats and chopping them up into smaller pieces called subdivisions, which we see in the second and third measures. Look at the part for the drums in particular. While the kick drum (low note) and snare drum (middle note) alternate on the quarter-note downbeats, the hi-hat (high cross-note) is playing a steady flow of eighth notes, or 1/8 of a single measure. These have a visual representation, separate from the quarter note, of a flag or beam attached to their note stems. As an eighth is half of a quarter in terms of fractions—sure enough, we can subdivide and fit two eighth notes equally within the span of one quarter note before time is up. Moreover, as a standard, these flags are “tied together” between eighth notes by using a thicker beam to run across the top of the designated note stems—that is, eighths that are beamed always fall within each of the specified time segments of the main downbeats.

How to Structure - Phrases and Vamping

Once the time signature is set and we’ve all jumped in, we are often faced with long spans of measures to represent the linear course of the song as a whole. It can seem overwhelming when a piece of music gets up to forty, fifty—even a hundred measures (and sometimes far more). As it would happen, the organization of our songs doesn’t stop after a simple timing of beats. There is almost always a contextual structure of the notes rolling through the measures. These structures are commonly referred to as phrases, riffs, licks, progressions, changes, verses, hooks, choruses, bridges, motifs, reprises, and many many more! Some can run as short as only a few beats; others might last as many as half the measures of an entire song. A term that further encapsulates these structures under a single call to action is a vamp (fig. 1.4). To vamp is a repeating musical figure, section, or accompaniment used in modern music. Their melodic sparsity and straightforward structure call for a quick understanding and capability to lay down a steady groove that everyone can jump on and easily follow.

Vamps can most often be identified by sitting within the range of two repeat barlines—an end repeat (fig. 1.2), which you’ll likely interact with first at the end of a phrase before going back and playing it again, and a start repeat (fig. 1.3), which will be the return point; the earliest point of the section to be repeated. In some cases, an entire song can be boiled down to one or two short individual distinct phrases vamped from start to finish. That’s not too hard to remember! Let it serve as a relief—one song doesn’t have to feel like a big project, but rather a brief pattern we can cruise through in a repeated sequence. This structure can serve as a reference for a common practice routine commonly known to musicians as woodshedding, or “shedding” for short.

How to Master - Woodshedding

The idea of woodshedding is to take a song we’re learning and master it by ‘shutting ourselves in the woodshed’ to drill the phrases over and over to the point of fluidity. Sooner or later, deliberate repetition evolves beyond sight-reading to the point of motor memory; we no longer have to look at dots on a sheet as the motions come naturally and our hands walk through the changes. “Learn the changes, then forget them,” as Charlie Parker would say.

Let’s have a look at the Intro for “Dust in the Wind,” by Kansas. The Intro is a reprise (i.e., a phrase that will be called up again, later on in the song,) that consists of eight measures before we reach the Verse. These eight measures contain a melody that, by no mere coincidence, falls into a chord progression—a unique sequential order of chords to play through (possibly vamp) and change between as you move forward from measure to measure.

Chords, for that matter, are structures not of time, but of pitch, grouped together in particular harmonies of two or more individual notes. These chords are identified with a standard naming convention based on where their particular sets of pitches fall relative to each other within a musical scale, but on a base level, we can more simply associate their names with the shapes our hands and fingers need to produce on the fretboard or keyboard to properly produce them.

According to the charts, the Intro’s chord progression is as follows:

As a whole, the Intro will prove daunting if we try to take a stab at all eight measures on the first attempt. With that in mind, we ought to break the Intro down into smaller, more manageable sections. We might go at it two measures at a time, or even just one. From there, we drill the minimized section until we’re ready for the next—and here is my favorite way to do it…

For this example, break the Intro down into single-measure sections—that makes eight sections. Start with the first and only the first (C, Cmaj7), and start drilling. The objective is to successfully play the section three times consecutively and with no mistakes.

C, Cmaj7 || C, Cmaj7 || C, Cmaj7 ||

If you hit a missed note in ANY of your three attempts—even the last note of the last attempt—you have to start all over, at the beginning of your first attempt (Tip: you’ll want to take it slow at first, lest you’d prefer to drill the first section all day). Once you’ve accomplished this, add section 2 (Cadd9, C) and repeat the process. Keep in mind that you’re not simply moving on to section 2, but adding it to your overall woodshedding progression. That said, you must now play, three times without mistakes…

C, Cmaj7 | Cadd9, C || C, Cmaj7 | Cadd9, C || C, Cmaj7 | Cadd9, C ||

Rinse, repeat, add section 3 (Asus2, Asus4).

C, Cmaj7 | Cadd9, C | Asus2, Asus4 || C, Cmaj7 | Cadd9, C | Asus2, Asus4 || C, Cmaj7 | Cadd9, C | Asus2, Asus4 ||

Rinse, repeat, add section 4. Then sections 5, 6, and so on. The idea is to get your hands rolling through the patterns and motions while also locking down the motor memory. Don’t be surprised when you’re working on your second attempt of section 8, make a mistake, and suddenly find yourself skating through the first seven sections with ease just to get back to the spot you’re working on. The reason you can do this is because you started at the top every time. You could only successfully play section 2, three times overall if you did the same with section 1, six times. You could only make it past section 3, three times overall if you did so through section 2, six times—and section 1, nine times!

Keep adding sections, run it from the top with each attempt, and you may find yourself running through a full tune in as brief a time as a hard day’s work. Just be sure to take breaks, stretch periodically, and ice those hands when you're done!

Practice hard!!
—Steve