Today's Google Search: "learn a song podcast"
Song Exploder
This podcast gets artists in to break down the creative production process of their work, using isolated sound clips to illustrate what they're talking about to bring the analysis to life. I really enjoy this idea because it means that the composer is able to express exactly what they intended when they made the music The episodes seem to be about 12-15 minutes long, and the creator Hrishikesh Hirway has featured all sorts of artists: film composers, songwriters, etc.
I listened to:
Ramin Djawadi/Game of Thrones, including a composer's amusement with cover versions
Denzel Curry/RICKY, on his hiphop track - this one included how he played with the samples he used which was really nice, and the footnotes include links to all the songs he sampled from.
In conclusion: not helpful for what I wanted, but still glad I found it.
Manythings
Manythings.org appears to be an old website of resources for ESL learners by a guy called Charles Kelly. He has a number of learn-a-song tutorials in different formats using Flash.
1) Straight up call and response. He chunks the song into phrases, with a recorded "crowd" during the section where you repeat. I think this is nice since it gives you someone to sing along to as you learn. However, in that example he doesn't go on to make these chunks any longer so you go from line by line straight to singing the whole song. I strongly suspect this is to do with the fact that ESL learners will likely be struggling with the lyrics and need many rounds of the small chunks to master that aspect, by which time they won't have any issues putting the whole thing together straight away. This example does chunk it into verses, maybe because the lines are so short?
2) Additional option to revise by line. This version is less helpful for Traffic Tunes since it relies on you being able to click on the lyrics to revise a line, but this is a step above the last lot since it gives you that option at all!
3) Slidey controls! I really really like this one because it allows the user to control the number of times each line is repeated, AND the amount of silence left between each playing, which means you can eventually wean yourself off the chorus and just do single-plays with long silences! Even cooler would be a way to change the tempo of delivery, and you can basically go about your day driving/doing chores with this going in the background.
