Learning songs with your ears not your hands

I was on the train to work the other day (I have a two hour commute), and thinking about songs I need to polish up for some stand - in gigs with Fraudio.  Fraudio are one of the UK busiest function bands and things have to sound good and sound like the song.

There are a couple of songs where the parts I need to learn are mostly end of line fills. Now I could just noodle in pentatonic minor, but some of them are quite distinctive so I want to replicate them.

So how do I do this on a train with no guitar to learn it all quicker.  Well I decided to use my inner ear to get to know the song really well and start to understand the fills. Here's what I did.

1. As I was listening to the song I stopped it at every fill and wrote the structure of where they all are. (See bottom of post).

2. Then I made a note of the shape of the fill by singing out a phrase in words that matched it rhythmically. I found I could remember where these were without my notes after a few repetitions.  It also helped me to recognise where the fill was repeated with a minor variation elsewhere in the song. The phrases I used were mostly nonsense and where it didn't work I simply made a note of what I thought was happening.

3. When I got home I found learning the licks was really easy and I could get close to some just from memory. Much quicker than my normal guitar approach.

Below is what my notes looked like.

Intro |C |F f1 |C |F f2 | (f1 = durdle door, f2 = you'oo know you really want to)

Verse 1 Pick chords

Bridge 1
....revolution from my bed (f3 durdle door, really want to )
.... head (f4 da-da durdle dup)
....bloom (f5 da durdle dah)
.....heart (f6 bendy thing)

Chorus 1 Big fill at end of chorus 1:40

Verse 2
..night or day 1:50 (f8 treble strings)
...life in the hands (bends)

Bridge 2
...bed (f3 octave)
...head (f9 bend durdle dum)
....bloom ( f10 slidey)
...heart out (f11 box 1 to box 2)

Chorus 2

SOLO

Chorus 3
Fills start on last line

Chorus 4 Look at line 2!!!!!

Dropout

Durdle durdle dah da dah durdle durdle durdle etc in box 1 and 2

End.