The gigs where I get no set list are interesting- after playing for a long time, I just know a lot of songs, or have heard a popular song enough that I know the form and the changes already, and if I can hear the changes in my head, playing them is not a problem. The really interesting bit though is if its a song I've never heard at all. Then, its a game of asking a few questions (what's the key, what's the feel), maybe someone will say it starts on scale degree IV, so you know there's going to be an intro and into the first verse, and you know thats scale degree I probably. Then, you just have to kind of guess your way through the first verse, but you're memorizing the verse at the same time, and usually the second one there's no guessing. And so on. There's also a great deal of watching peoples hands and bodies because there are tells when something is about to happen, and you just get a sense of what they mean.
So there's obviously rote knowledge of music, but there's also this subtext of guessing and watching and listening and mimicry that are a huge part of what is actually going on. The older I get, the more I enjoy thinking about that aspect of making live music.
What matters a lot is genre conventions. This particular singer mostly plays rock, blues, country and reggae. I know the basic mechanics of those four genres, and can often guess where the song is going, even if I've never heard it. Even if I hit a wrong note, it's usually in the chord that's being played (e.g. the 5), and sounds reasonable.
I do the same thing when I get a setlist and just listen to the songs multiple times in the days previous so that I can hear the songs in my head. If often say, "If I can sing the melody, I can play it."
Per the topic at hand, what's also interesting is that I can think that I don't remember a song, but often even years later, if someone starts playing it, I know immediately where to go. Once I find the key, which rarely takes me more than a note or two, I'm good.
But I've also got friends that play traditional Irish music. I can't sit in with them (I've tried) since the chord changes fall at places I don't expect them, and are often different chords than I'd guess. Having a feel for the style of music makes a ginormous difference.
I get a fair amount of that kind of work too, on bass. Mostly jazz, where the repertoire of "standards" is finite. I also go to fiddle jams, where the fiddlers themselves often have no idea what the harmony should be, or how to express that information.
Of course a trick that a layperson might not notice, is that the notes are nowhere close to random.
But I love the challenge of that kind of work if it's with good players.
I guess all that memorization is like the conditioning and training that an athlete might do to prepare for an event, and then at the event you're mostly responding conditions.
And it went OK! In addition to the mental model that you describe, I've also learned that most tunes are more forgiving of changes than one might guess by all of the chord symbols notated so precisely.
I've revived my fake books for another use: To practice treble clef sight reading, which I neglected when I was younger. Also, I think learning melodies helps a lot in terms of mentally organizing and navigating the standards.
There are players who are a lot better than me, and are still attached to the books.
And then you're suddenly hit with all this complexity
A guy named Hilly Kristal ran the famous nightclub CBGB's for something like 30 years. My band was lucky to play there a few times in the '80s.
It was said about Hilly that he remembered every single band that ever played at the club. Years later I ran into him on the street and he immediately recognized me. Not only that, he asked how every member of the band was doing by name. We were never famous or anything, he just had this love of music and musicians and a steel trap mind for these details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scW0Dqims9c
I'm guessing they play a little fast and loose with history, but its a good watch.
Knowing one or two people in your life who could do such things is actually the opposite of being ordinary.
I think you are coming from a place of distrust for cults of personalities, and while I agree, we should not idolise them, we should not go the other extreme, that of the jaded teenager who "has already seen it all" and is therefore incapable of wonder.
That's not how we progress as a species, as a civilization.
Similarly, Mozart copied down Allegri's Miserere after hearing it just once in 1770. That's a sufficiently amazing achievement that it's still talked about, a quarter of a millennium later!
And now that I think about it, trying to do this on a regular basis sounds like a pretty good way to boost one’s ability to hold a whole drawing in one’s head and “trace” it onto the paper, rather than doing a rough. I would not be surprised if this ability started as a game he played with himself when he was sitting in the back of his least favorite high school classes, doodling away.
(I am an artist; I can’t do this particular trick but I have definitely had moments when I was totally into a drawing and it felt like I was tracing it onto the paper from my mental image of it, with the hand of a dead artist I’d been studying guiding mine. I was also pretty high at the time; there’s some strains of weed that artists favor because it can give us a boost to this sort of ability.)
My suspicion is that this artist had the opposite -- the ability to maintain a detailed image in his mind's eye as he traced it.
Check out Kim Jung Gi. He's basically doing that in real time, with impossible speed, accuracy and level of detail. He's making a living via performing live shows of his skills.
Not any longer, sadly..
The first several minutes of reading are an anecdote about memory that has absolutely nothing to do with music.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=paul+mccartney+with+fans&tbm...
frankly your first post did nothing to indicate you knew that was what the underlying argument of the piece was about, secondly unless you dispute the text you wrote is somehow falsified I'm not sure how my response could be described as arguing a straw man? You wrote something, I quoted it, I pointed out that the first few minutes of reading described a feat of memory you did not address.
If anything I'd say you were arguing a straw man by only focusing on the musical arguments for McCartney's memory made in the article; the article makes several arguments for things McCartney has remembered being out of the ordinary that were not musical, you dismissed his having a phenomenal memory by essentially saying all trained musicians remember music. Which has hardly any bearing on the arguments in the article.
I agree that the article's examples are not well supported, or from my viewpoint based on more supposition than someone should make when trying to establish something as freakish. But whether they were well supported or not you just didn't address them at all!
The title of the piece is "Paul McCartney's freakish memory." I don't believe anyone was confused about the author's argument.
> unless you dispute the text you wrote is somehow falsified I'm not sure how my response could be described as arguing a straw man. You wrote something, I quoted it, I pointed out that the first few minutes of reading described a feat of memory you did not address.
You are correct that I did not address it, so it is a straw man because it wasn't my argument. You attacked an argument that was not mine.
> If anything I'd say you were arguing a straw man by only focusing on the musical arguments for McCartney's memory made in the article
I only argued against the essence of the piece, that McCartney's memory is not anything more than exhibiting ordinary abilities of someone who is literate (in the loser sense) in music in the same way it is ordinary that someone that is literate (in the narrow sense) can read. I ignored the irrelevant anecdote about his memory because it was only relayed to support the argument that Paul McCartney is a good musician because he has good memory, and because that portion was not well-supported nor even clear that is what occurred, that he remembered the woman and recognized those must have been her children. It was a ridiculous notion on its face and more easily explained by coincidence using Occam's Razor. The same is true of McCartney's composition of She's Leaving Home, that it is more easily explained by the author seeing connections after the fact rather than McCartney consciously contriving the piece for those outrageously specific reasons.
> But whether they were well supported or not you just didn't address them at all!
It is not required to address every single point in order to defeat the author's fundamental argument.
Before the gig started he listened to the first song and learned its bass line. During the first song (while he was performing it) he was listening to the second song on his headphones and learning its bass line!
It's utterly mind blowing what the human mind is capable of.
Had a similar ability with music, upon hearing a melody or a chord, would rapid-fire off what the notes were. Detuned a string a few cents, could immediately tell is was out of tune. As a guitar player this was a bit annoying as she would always be telling me something was off when it was slightly out of tune, it was like a nails on chalkboard kind of experience for her.
There's nothing more grating than hearing people playing slightly out or doing half-bends on guitar. I've played with people who have played for decades and still can't hear that they're out, and it's terrible.
I could probably do better than blind determining what is 432 vs. 440 because there are enough common reference examples out there that I have sense of feel for the difference, and I could tune an A4 cold +- 5 cents. But a third of that? A vanishingly small number of musicians would be able to do that with any reliability without a reference point.
She didn't know how on-point a pitch was because she was listening. It was innate and immediate. It was literally described as the intensity of a color that corresponded to a key.
We're kinda off in the weeds from the point I was making, which was refuting the notion that music could have any analog to reciting a phone book. There is a bit of a connection between memory and processing music in a way, at least for those with this condition, that probably is more subconscious for those without.
This is Jazz
Sure, but even though we consider Jazz anything that sounds jazzy, i.e. using Major 7ths or flat 5s, because Jazz and Classical are so individually encompassing, literally every other genre of music is also Jazz and Classical, any sound that can be made with an instrument fits in Jazz and Classical, i.e. it can be interpreted using the modes and forms of Jazz or Classical without changing how it sounds. It just isn't very useful to approach or interpret, say, a folk song from the perspective of Jazz, nor the sound a guitar makes when smashed to pieces, but technically, everything is either Jazz or Classical or both.
Of course there are many good musicians who can play a tune immediately after hearing in (if you want to see this in action, check out Rick Beato or Justin Hawkins on Youtube), but having heard it once decades ago, not knowing what the song is or who it's from, trying to find out and failing, and yet perfectly reproducing it including all the verses, decades later, that's absolutely an example of a really impressive memory.
I should add but can no longer edit my reply, that these two are distinctly contrasting and somehow complementary. Notable about McCartney is that with all the success, accomplishment and tragedy in is life, he is still able to be happy. He stands as a positive example of how to be, focusing on the bright side of things, an optimist. In contrast, Lennon wasn't satisfied with anything and always had something negative to say about everything. He never seemed happy unless he was causing conflict. He was a pessimist. They seem to be two sides of the same coin of humanity, a yang and a yin that make a complete and comprehensive picture.
Both sides are important if not essential. If Lennon was instead McCartney's yes-man, McCartney's music would have suffered. Lennon's criticism made McCartney's songs better than they would have been otherwise, and McCartney's positive support allowed Lennon's music to be developed rather than abandoned.
For an argument, this is question-begging, but I'm not going to argue that The Beatles were ordinary, because provably they changed music, and this is both a criticism of them and a compliment. However, for all we know, if they hadn't been so prolific in performing and marketing themselves from their earlier career, we might have missed them entirely. The more a band plays, the more familiar their music becomes, the more popular they become, the more a band plays, the more familiar their music becomes, the more popular they become, the more they play, etc.
Though it should be noted that whomever is judging these kinds of achievements of covering a song from memory isn't exactly critically comparing the original side by side with the reproduction. "It sounded exactly the same," is likely embellishment by someone without a trained ear. Picking up a song is such a common notion that it has its own idiom, namely "picking up a song."
I'm probably "not even an amateur", whatever that means, and with popular music I can usually play a song (the chords) after hearing it once. Pop music is oftentimes 4-5 chords picked from a well known set of ~7 progressions, without any scale change. I'm not able to hear-play more complex harmonics s.a Jazz, or things like Queen which are not totally trivial.
Granted, but Queen didn't just show up at the studio unprepared. Given the same preparation Queen gave, it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that you could pick up any of their songs, making it look easy to someone that didn't observe your preparation.
https://www.espn.co.uk/mlb/story/_/id/6996357/seventy-years-...
If it is the same phenomena then we may expect that Paul as an experienced musician should have an excellent recall for real music and an ordinary one (no better than anyone) for cacophony (random sounds).
Genius level would however be the following: There is a rumour about a mass that the Catholic church held secret (I believe it was an Allegri mass). One day Mozart went to the service and when he got back he wrote it down.
This is a loaded observation, basically arguing "because all his songs sold well, he must be a significant outlier in songwriting." Similarly, Apple is considered one the best cell phone manufacturers of all time, or McDonald's is considered one of the best burger manufacturers of all time. Popularity does not equate to whether something is any good. And not all of McCartney's songs are the best songs of all time. Some of his notably terrible songs are still popular because he, himself, is famous (because he was a Beatle). One example is the Wing's song Jet, which is popular enough to still get radio play, yet when critically analyzed falls quite short of, say, Hey, Jude.
But my argument is not that Paul McCartney can't write good songs, only that it is ordinary that a musician can recall to perform music they have heard before in the same way most that read something impactful to them can more or less recall it verbatim.
And "someone's knocking at the door, someone's ringing a bell, do me a favour, go to the door, open it and let them in"...
It's like he was trying to lyricise everyday activities. Very odd.
I say this as a penniless musician in contrast to the very successful Mr McCartney (who plays bass lines like he's playing the tuba, very clever)
Fine, it's a valid opinion to dislike either for those reasons, but for many people it was, and is, art that's exciting in part because of its perfect non-perfection.
This is different to visual art - most people can play spot the difference no problem, but with audio most people are deaf to the details, and the lyrics!
Eg. My Sharona - most people don't realise it includes the lyric "I always get it up for the younger kind"....
I knew a guy that understood what this other guy was saying in a foreign language! That is crazy.
I knew someone that could just look at the curve on a bridge and immediately write down the equation for the curve, right there in front of everybody!
* *
I have no doubt Paul McCartney can just listen to a song once and immediately play it. Did the author even realize that McCartney is a musician?
I hate to be negative, bring on the downvotes, but this is nothing less than being fascination with the ordinary. I also have zero doubt there are dozens and dozens of HN readers that also are musicians and can do the same. Not everyone who begins to study and play music can do it, but they will be able to eventually 1) recognize notes just by hearing them and 2) recognize chord changes just by hearing them. Some people have perfect pitch, and that makes it all the easier, but perfect pitch is not necessary, and it isn't an amazing trick any more than understanding someone speaking French.
David Byrne is freakishly smart. Tom Scholz of Boston has an MME from MIT. Both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel have genius level IQs. Geniuses simply are not that novel. What sets Paul McCartney apart is not whether he has a good memory or can pick up a tune, but rather that he was a Beatle.