Saville, Kirt. Strategies for Using Repetition as a Powerful Teaching Tool. Music Educators Journal, 2011 98: 69
When a student brings a recorded song to me that they want to learn, the first thing I do is load it into Ableton and mark off the different sections with a simple color-coding scheme: blue for verses, green for choruses, orange for instrumental breaks and so on. This enables even non-readers to grasp the overall structure of the song. I then loop a short segment, usually significantly slowed, and have the student repeat it until they’ve attained some proficiency with it. As the student progresses, the loops get longer until they encompass entire sections. If a particular phrase is especially troublesome, I can send the student home with an mp3 of that phrase looped endlessly to practice over.