How to Choose What to Learn Next

The random playlist problem

Learning songs you love is good practice, and nothing here says stop. But a self-picked playlist has three defects that can get worse over time.

It has no difficulty order. The song you want to play next is as likely to be four years ahead of you as one step ahead. Both are wasteful in different ways: the far one becomes a six-month grind that teaches you one piece, and the easy one might not teach you as much.

It repeats itself. People like a fairly narrow range of music, so a self-chosen list tends to circle the same keys, the same tempos, the same handful of progressions. You get very good at one small region of the instrument and never discover the rest exists.

Nothing accumulates. Each song is a separate act of memorisation. There is no thread where song six is easier because of songs one through five, which is precisely the compounding that makes a repertoire worth building.

Established traditions fix all three, and they fix them for free, because thousands of teachers spent a century arguing about the right order and eventually wrote it down.

Jazz standards: harmony and form, compressed

The standards repertoire is the closest thing music has to a shared language. Its usefulness has almost nothing to do with liking jazz. It is that a few dozen tunes systematically cover the structures that popular music has been reusing ever since: ii-V-I movement, the 12-bar blues, 32-bar AABA song form, modal playing, turnarounds, etc.

Form is the underrated part. A great many standards are AABA, which means three quarters of the tune is one section repeated. Understanding that changes learning a piece from memorising thirty-two bars to memorising eight and knowing where they go. That habit transfers directly to any song in any style.

The usual entry tunes, roughly in order of how forgiving they are:

• Blues and modal first: “C-Jam Blues,” “Blue Monk,” “Bag's Groove,” “Mr. P.C.,” “All Blues,” “Watermelon Man.” Simple, repeating forms with room to make mistakes quietly.
• Then the short, clear standards: “Autumn Leaves,” “Blue Bossa,” “Doxy,” “St. Thomas,” “Song for My Father,” “Summertime.” “Autumn Leaves” in particular is close to a ii-V-I textbook that happens to be a beautiful tune.
• Then the songbook material: “Fly Me to the Moon,” “There Is No Greater Love,” “What Is This Thing Called Love,” “Mack the Knife.” More harmonic movement, and the point at which knowing the form starts doing real work for you.

Twenty of these, learned properly rather than skimmed, is a harmonic education. And because the repertoire is shared, it is also the practical answer to playing with strangers: these are the tunes people can call and everyone can join.

The blues: the form worth knowing

If you learn one structure in your life, make it the 12-bar blues. It is three chords over twelve bars, it underlies an enormous amount of rock, soul, country and jazz, and it is simple enough that you can stop thinking about the form and start thinking about the playing.

That is the real gift of it. Because the harmony is repeating and predictable, the blues is where you can practice the things that are hard to practice anywhere else: phrasing, dynamics, space, time feel, saying the same idea three different ways. It is the standard laboratory for improvisation for exactly this reason, and it is also the most reliable way into playing with other people, because everyone knows it.

Common blues forms and tunes to start with:

• Standard 12-bar (I-IV-V): “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Pride and Joy,” “Johnny B. Goode.” The most universal 12-bar structure in modern music.
• Minor 12-bar blues: “The Thrill Is Gone,” “Equinox,” “Black Magic Woman.” Uses minor chords for a darker, more reflective mood over the 12-bar frame.
• 8-bar and 16-bar blues: “Key to the Highway” (8-bar), “Watermelon Man” (16-bar). Shows how the blues logic stretches into shorter or longer phrase lengths.
• Jazz blues: “C-Jam Blues,” “Straight, No Chaser.” Keeps the 12-bar shell while adding passing chords, turnarounds, and ii-V movements.

Graded syllabuses: someone already built the ladder

This is the most useful and least known option, particularly for self-taught players. Several examination boards publish complete graded curricula, and the syllabuses are public.

The main ones are ABRSM and Trinity College London in the classical tradition, Rockschool (RSL Awards) and Trinity Rock & Pop for contemporary players, plus AMEB in Australia and the RCM in North America. Most run Grade 1 through Grade 8, with diplomas beyond that; the RCM ladder runs to 10. The grades are broadly comparable across boards, so the level means something wherever you are.

Two things make this worth your attention even if you never sit an exam:

• The sequencing is professional and specific. Each grade names its repertoire, its scales, and what standard of sight reading and aural skill you should have. It is a curriculum with the guesswork already removed, which is exactly what a self-taught player is missing.
• It covers the axes you would otherwise skip. A grade is not just pieces. It is pieces plus technical work plus sight reading plus aural tests, which is a deliberately balanced diet. Left to ourselves almost all of us practice pieces and neglect the other three and it's ok too, depending on what you want to learn. You don't have to learn everything.

It is also not the classical-only world people assume. Grades exist for classical, electric and acoustic guitar, piano, drums, violin, viola, cello, woodwind, brass, singing and music theory, and the contemporary boards are built around rock, pop, blues, funk and metal repertoire.

Both ways of using it are good. Sitting the exam gives you a real deadline, unbiased feedback and a level you can name, and the preparation tends to be more thorough because someone else is going to hear it. Just reading the syllabus gives you the sequencing for free, on your own schedule, with no fee and no travel. The material is the same either way, so pick the one that matches how you actually work. You can also buy books from them.

The syllabus pages are the place to start: ABRSM syllabuses, Trinity College London music qualifications and Rockschool. Each publishes the repertoire, technical work and supporting tests for every grade, and reading them costs nothing.

Conservatoires, without the tuition

The same logic applies one level up. Juilliard, Curtis, Berklee, the Royal Academy, the Musicians Institute and their equivalents have all spent decades planning and deciding what a player should learn and in what order, and a surprising amount of that thinking is public. Going is one good option; reading what they teach is another, and you can start the second one today.

What is usually available: published curricula and course descriptions, which tell you what a first-year student is expected to cover; the required audition repertoire lists, which are a graded reading list by another name; masterclasses and lectures posted to YouTube; and the books and courses their faculty write, which is often the same material with the campus removed. Berklee's harmony and ear training sequence is an example, and jazz players have been working through the Jamey Aebersold and Mark Levine books for decades on exactly this basis.

Enrolling buys real things that reading cannot: teachers who hear what you cannot, classmates to play with, an ensemble, deadlines, and the people you meet there, who often matter more than the coursework. It also costs years and a lot of money, and it asks you to move your life around it. Neither answer is the serious one and the other the shortcut. If you go, go for the teaching and the people. If you do not, the sequencing is still sitting there in public, and working through it can help you build your fundamentals. You can also buy their books or online courses too.

Using a tradition without joining it

1. Pick the tradition closest to the music you actually love. This is not a moral choice. If you want to play metal, Rockschool has a graded metal syllabus and it will serve you better than jazz standards will. Interest is the fuel; the structure only decides the route.
2. Find your real level, not your flattering one. Download a syllabus a couple of grades below where you assume you are and sight read a piece. Most self-taught players discover they are strong on repertoire and weak on reading and aural, which is useful information.
3. Work through the complete level, not just the songs. It's tempting to only practice the pieces and skip the scales or ear training. But those technical and listening exercises are usually the exact parts that unlock your biggest progress.
4. Learn each piece the long way. Split it into sections, work them slowly, then deliberately practice the seams between sections, which is where performances actually break. Then ask what key it is in and why the chords move as they do, so the piece leaves behind something more durable than a finger sequence.
5. Keep a running list of what you can play start to finish, from memory. This list is your repertoire, and it is almost always shorter than people expect. Watching it grow is a far better measure of a year than hours practiced.

Mixing this with the songs you want to play

None of this is an argument for abandoning the music that made you pick up the instrument. It’s about diversifying your practice diet. A split most people find sustainable is roughly two thirds structured material and one third whatever you want, on the grounds that the structured work builds the ability and the loved songs supply the reason to keep going. Delete the second part and you get a technically improving player who has stopped enjoying it, which is the most common way practice ends.

The one rule worth holding either way: when you finish a piece, ask what it taught you. If the answer is only “that piece,” go back and pull it apart. A tradition is efficient because each piece is chosen to teach something specific, but that only pays off if you go and collect it.

The summary

A playlist gives you songs. A tradition gives you a sequence, and a sequence is what turns five years of practice into five years of progress rather than the same year five times. Jazz standards teach harmony and form, the blues teaches expression, and a graded syllabus teaches the things you would otherwise skip. Above all, music comes from your ears and your heart: follow what moves you, because you don't need to know everything to play great music!

Which one to pick depends on what you are aiming at, which is the prior question: what kind of musician do you want to be. And once you have chosen, the mechanics of getting a piece into your hands are in learning a song by ear and why slow practice works.