Listen to the Song

As a general rule, when you're working on a song, it's a good idea to listen to it every once in a while. Why? Here are three good reasons:

1) You may have missed notes or parts that can only be heard with repeated listens.

When I was in my first band, my band mate Ryan was learning the guitar solo to an Oasis song, "Don't Go Away". He listened to the song at home (I think with headphones) many, many times over. When I saw him at our next rehearsal, he excitedly pointed out to me all kinds of guitar parts, as well as other instrumentation (like trumpets) that I had never noticed before in the recording. It was really neat to go and listen to the song after talking with Ryan, and discovering that all of these things were in the song the whole time and I had never noticed!

I took a valuable lesson from this experience: you can never know a song too well. Listening to the song over and over gave Ryan (and me) a deeper understanding of what we wanted from our performance of the song (the fact that we never actually performed the song is unfortunate, but besides the point).

You may discover new parts of a song you're learning, parts that you should be learning.

2) You may have all of the notes, but not the correct sound/feel/dynamics of the song.

It's often easy enough to learn all of the notes to a song. It's another thing altogether to play all of the notes, and to play them well. Even once you're confident you know a piece of music, listen to the original recording again, and see if there are any subtle changes you might need to make to how loudly you are playing, or whether you are using the write tone or guitar amp (or pedals, etc.). An artist is free, of course, to change any of these things if he or she sees fit, but only make such a choice as an artist, not as a lazy student who failed to do their research!

3) To remind yourself why you're learning the song (motivation).

Sometimes we just need to be reminded why it's worth learning AC DC's "Thunderstruck", especially when practice isn't going as well as planned.

Listen to the song and get pumped about the fact that you're learning it. Get pumped about the fact that you're playing music! Awesome music! Inspiring music! Get listening, get excited, and get practicing!

Listen to each and every song you're working on, from time to time (if not more often). It will help keep you on the path to musical greatness.