Remembering Lyrics....

McSwaggerty

I have been invited to do a few gigs with a fairly successful band..... The first being at the end of the month. Thing is, l have lyrics of about 20 songs to learn and remember.
There's no way l can use a tablet or read from a page as it looks so unprofessional and terrible.
Any of you guys been in a similar situation?... How would you tackle this... ?? 

Wazmeister

Record the somgs, play em in the car as you drive

BenSirAmos

Once you know them more or less, print out just the ends of the lines - in effect, just the rhymes as a prompt. This will stop you just reading the lines and engages the brain. 

Lewy

Most songs are written in such a way that there is a logical progression to the lyrics - assuming we're not talking about Radiohead/REM gibberish lyrics - so rather than trying first to just parrot fashion learn the words, try and find the story that underpins the development of the lyrics and often it will help you remember them. If the story isn't obvious, create one yourself that makes sense of the way one verse leads to the next. This also helps when actually performing the song with some emotional content rather than just trotting it out.

EricTheWeary

Lewy said:

Most songs are written in such a way that there is a logical progression to the lyrics - assuming we're not talking about Radiohead/REM gibberish lyrics - so rather than trying first to just parrot fashion learn the words, try and find the story that underpins the development of the lyrics and often it will help you remember them. If the story isn't obvious, create one yourself that makes sense of the way one verse leads to the next. This also helps when actually performing the song with some emotional content rather than just trotting it out.

Yes, lyrics with a logical progression are, in my experience, easier to remember than apparently random stuff. 
But it's lots of repetition, lying in the bath seeing if you can get from one end of the song to another. Although I've never had to learn 20 songs at once, that would be a very long bath. 

Winny_Pooh

I find it helps to remember the first words of each verse and the rest follow on. You can write them down in sequence on a large A4 page at your feet if you ever get lost, like so.
The meadowlark...
There's a rusty...
We felt...
Emily....

Musicwolf

Some are much easier than others.  If I'm learning a lot of guitar parts for a new band I'll make a list (usually a spreadsheet) and mark each track out of 5 for progress.  0 = I've not even listened to it, 1 = I've at least listened to it and worked out the basic chords etc.  Go through the list and you'll probably see that you can tick off quite a few boxes straight away so that a) things don't look quite so daunting and b) you can see where you need to focus your efforts.

vasselmeyer

Virtually every single major act uses a teleprompter these days. Why wouldn't you? A decent tablet holder is quite unobtrusive.

Mark1960

There is no quick fix just hard work and repetition time in my view. Once you know them fairly well, try writing the song down, as this will identify clearly where you are at, and what you don't know.

fretmeister

Endless repetition in all manner of circumstances.

Sing along with the CDs of course. But also recite them as poems or prose.

Then actually copy them in writing too.

Use as many ways of getting them in your head as you can.

And make a playlist on your music player and don't listen to anything else in the meantime. It's boring but as you say, you haven't got long.

Grangousier

Another technique is to print out the just the first letters of each word - so the first line of Day in the Life would be "I R T N T O B" - that way you have a prompt but you still need to pull the information from memory, so you're exercising that. 

BintyTwanger77

Anthony Hopkins' technique for learning lines is persistence: he goes through his script 100s of times, reciting them over and over again, and even if there is the slightest error or pause to think he goes back to the beginning and won't be comfortable until he can recite the lines flawlessly several times in a row. It's a technique used to achieve what's called "unconscious competence", i.e. repeat until it's second nature. If you don't want to go for persistence, actors have very different techniques for learning lines, and for song lyrics it should be the same: there are many other triggers for remembering words, e.g. mnemonics, using the lyrics like you're telling a story and writing that story out in a way that you might remember it, using the rhyme as a trigger, and so on. It's really personal and entirely depends how your mind stores information.

uncledick

Listen a few times before writing them out by hand.  It uses a different bit of your brain apparently.