Most Difficult Music You Ever Learned

That's awesome! My dream is to be in a jam band that can cover a few of the hard / awesome Zappa epics like Pygmie Twilight and Florentine Pogen. Also a few off the first three Phish albums like You Enjoy Myself and Reba. Hard to find those musicians. You also convinced me it might be hard to find that musician within myself to keep up! I can read but I can't sight read at that speed. Worth it to memorize a few good ones.
The only Zappa tune I ever covered was "Broken Hearts are for 4$$h@les". The only challenge of any kind were the harmonies. Well, that and getting through it without laughing.
 
Probably prog stuff.

I felt a real sense of accomplishment when I could mostly get through Tom Sawyer or YYZ. Starship Trooper. King Crimson- any of them, but I remember Red being not strictly hard, but on a different level than some of the stuff I was doing before that.

However I also felt the same way about I want you back - Jackson 5/Wilton Felder. Ramble on? Kinda similar. The Jamerson inspired stuff was a step up from the punk/rock riff based and root based stuff.

Never really learned Jaco stuff- it's hard, but no one to play it with.
 
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It’s gonna sound stupid, but George Harrison’s Give Me Love has been a thorn in my side since I first heard it. And that was decades ago.

I can play through it by the numbers. But there’s something about that song that I simply can’t get any feel for. It’s as if there’s an underlying thread in it that I basically can’t hear. Which by my own standards means I still can’t really play it.

Frustrating. :atoz:

That’s a thing, isn’t it! I can play Tell Me Something Good by the numbers. But I desperately want to feel the groove.
 
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So Anyway, the most difficult time I had learning some music was when I played in a church band.
I don't read music and it was hard for me to rehearse with the CDs they provided. It was painful for me to listen to some of the over-the-top vocals while I figured out the bass line. Once we got to live rehearsal, I was OK.
And I did it for free. :roflmao:
 
In high school, the concert choir took on Robert Ray's "The Gospel Mass", and even travelled to St. Louis to sing it in Robert's church. The bass parts were his left hand on piano, so many eighth-note octave chromatic runs. I had to completely change my right hand technique for those. If you've never heard it, check it out:
 
Depends on your definition of difficult. Here's two takes on it.
Take #1 - it's difficult because it's complex. From early to late 70's I played in the first fusion band in Dallas - Aurora - and then another band Cruise Control that also did a lot of fusion. We did Return to Forever, Stanley Clarke, Dixie Dreggs, Zappa, Herbie Hancock, Mahavishnu Orchestra, George Duke etc. etc. That was technically difficult.
Take #2 - it's difficult because it's hard to obtain. Here's what it was like trying to learn songs when you lived in a small town in the mid 60's. When my high school rock trio wanted to learn a song, we had to first get one of our parents (usually my mom) to drive us 50 miles to the nearest town big enough to have a record store. If the record store didn't have it, you had to order it and come back a week later. Then we would all huddle around my little mono record player and play the song over and over trying to pick out our parts, having to manually pick up the tone arm and move it back a quarter-inch to hear the bridge again over and over or whatever. Then when we all had our parts pretty well down, we'd listen to the song a few times with each of us writing down what we thought the lyrics were, then compare notes and combine the best, then listen to it again a dozen more times to refine that. Compare that to today having the song immediately available to you free on YouTube, several YouTube videos with players showing you how to play the song, or easily accessible tabs online, and then the lyrics being available online as well. You may say it's so much better now, but I say this is partly what has watered down popular music. Not to have old man syndrome, but in my formative yers it took so much dedication, you REALLY had to want it to go through the outright hassle it took to get the music and learn it. Now it's handed to you on a silver platter so "everyone can be in band"! Yeah, that's worked out really well. Anyway, that was difficult.
 
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Here's the hardest thing I never learned. Our keyboard player wrote a song that required me to hold an arpeggio for 12 bars, then move the entire shape down a full step for one bar, then back to the original position for 12 bars. Was never able to play it. My fret hand would cramp up about the 16th or 17th bar and I'd flub a note. Every time.
 
I also remember being blown away by Michael Manring's Thonk so I bought the transcription book. Once I realized he was shifting tunings on the fly with a specially designed bass, several times during most songs, I just closed the book and put it back on the shelf.

Had the same problem learning some Joni Mitchell. Didn't she have something like a billion different tunings?
 
Sometimes pop music, especially old pop music can be more difficult than you think. I had to learn Mac the Knife on upright. Now it isn't super hard to come up with cool bass lines and walking parts for it, however it changes keys like 7 times or something. I think it's a half step modulation every verse after the first. It would easier on BG to just move shapes around. Not as easy on upright - especially when you're trying to vary the line each time. Turns out to be a good exercise though for a lot reasons.