Help me develop a practice routine for memorizing.

[bernadette60614]

I have a good enough memory for everyday life (and I also am a fanatic about lists), but memorization is the weakest of my skills as a piano student.

Rather than floundering around, I thought I'd ask all of you to help me develop a practice routine for memorization.

Thanks so much, everyone..

[1piano4joe]

Hi bernadette60614,

I will tell you what works for me.

For memorization, I work on only a few pieces. Usually, around 5-7 pieces so I don't get bored. These are only 1 or 2 pages long.

I "try" to practice two shorter sessions of 45 minutes to 90 minutes. I don't watch the clock. I set realistic goals. Occasionally, falling surprisingly, a little short of the goal but often unexpectedly exceeding it. It's very satisfying practicing a shorter time, achieving my goal and less taxing on me both physically and mentally.

One session is toward the morning and another when I feel like it in the evening. The whole session is devoted to 1 piece. I have found there is a "sweet spot". When things start to go down hill, I know I have practiced that piece enough for the session and must stop which is okay since I have often exceeded the goal long before that.

The piece in the evening is a different piece entirely and again the whole session is devoted to this one piece only.

The next day, I may or may not work either of these pieces depending on my mood. That's very important to me. If you try "practicing" just one piece for an hour, you may find that you don't want to practice it the next day or sometimes your so excited that you look forward to it.

So, sometimes I don't play a piece for a day or two. There are some days when I just don't practice at all which is okay because of post practice improvement. Strangely, at first it seems like I forgot the piece but it's an illusion. In a few minutes, it all comes back 20 bpm faster than the previous day and memorized! How? Why? I don't know, it just does.

Well, that's what works for me, Joe.

[visitor]

two ways i have found i memorize
1. passively,  if the piece is practiced intenstely and often and long enough, then over time it just sorta starts geling.  trying to play from memory often can help.

2. active memorization - pick a small 2-4 measure section. practice that. only that. over and over, , hands separate, hands together, sing/hum it. that's all you do for it that day and stick to it until you  nail it, if you struggle try just 1 measure (sometimes single mm is harder than a phrase or a couple measures though fragments/context).
the next next, review previous, if still not there, go back and don't move on to the next until memorized. once you have two sections, link them, play both by memory, keep linking each day until learned.
visually review the score away from piano often know what it looks like in your mind, where your hands go.
listen listen listen to records, get the song stuck in your head, know what it is supposed to sound like before you play, this is using your ear to guide your playing, this is how you will want to perform since once mastered you make on the fly adjustments based on the sound, the piano, the hall/venue and adjust accordingly.

[where_july]

Hello Bernadette,

1. There is a very big and detailed explanation of the memorization techniques in Dr.Chang's "Piano practice". You will get a round understanding of how to resolve the issue. BTW I stronlgy recommend to download the book and study it thoroughly entirely. You would avoid stucking with lots of issues. It is free.

2. Links to the outstanding Bernhard heritage - must study if you did not yet.

https://lowhanming.blogspot.ru/2006/10/bernhards-posts-on-pianostreet.html?m=1

3. See attached relevant selected posts on memorization from Bernhad I archived while reading his posts.

The attchment is in fact a zip file just with pdf extension so that I could attach it here. To open it you have to save it to your disc and change the extension to ".zip".

Regards,
V.

[recnepspencer]

According to my piano teacher, I have a genius memory - the best she's ever seen. In my memorization process there are only a few things I do. First, I listen go a recording to know what the song sounds like. Next, I pick small sections and play them. Play a measure, then play if by memory. If that's too much, then go even smaller. My he brain has only a certain capacity for memorization, so when you do these small sections, it maximizes efficiency of memorization. When you memorize each section, play the one following, but not the one previous, because this decreases your memorization capacity trying to this of what you have just learned as well. After you learn a few sections, play through them a couple times to make sure they blend smoothly, then go to the next small sections. The final thing I do in memorization is look for patterns. The most simple example would be a c scale within the music. Remembering a c scale going 2 octaves is much easier than memorizing notes. Although this is quite obvious, with experience, you will be able to recognize increasingly complex patterns. Patterns are a key thing in helping increase your memorization capacity, so be sure to look for them. This is where it cycles back to knowing how the song sounds. Knowing how it sounds helps you find patterns, which helps memorization.

[trollbuster]

According to my piano teacher, I have a genius memory - the best she's ever seen.

and that's what qualifies you to give advice--that makes you an expert... please.  look out we have another GENIUS.  bet you are still on the first invention

 sure you play Liszt yeah I believe you.

[adodd81802]

Hi bernadette60614,

People memorize differently and often use a combination of methods to reinforce the memory.

I think the combination is key because it's the reason why you can memorize a piece that could be 150 bars long and consist of 2000 notes for example. Trying to do that with a book and some words I think is much more difficult because we don't have the combination. This is a combination of seeing our fingers, hearing the notes, remembering the dynamics, and prompts with the previous bar and following bar.

That being said some people swear by reading music away from the piano even if it's a bar to start and seeing if they can go to the piano without referring to the music and play it through. I personally struggle to "visualize" myself playing a piece and so for me reading away from the piano is not enough, although something I would like to work on.

Aside from that, I have no trouble with memorizing and almost always play from memory rather than the score (a balance I also need to work on)

If reading the music is not helpful for you on it's own here's some logical steps you could take.

take a bar of music , probably one a little lower than your level for this purpose and not too many notes.

Read through it AT the piano and play 1 full fluent repetition (do not count the practice time and repetitions required before you can play it fluently), As soon as you've got that one fluent repetition, take the music away and see if you can repeat it straight away.

If you can't, repeat step 1 until you can play the bar without looking at the music.

As soon as you have done this stop, go away for an hour or 2, or go back to your routine for other music, just don't concern yourself with remembering.

After the time has passed, come back to the piano and try and play that bar. Do you remember it, did you stumble, did you need to refer back to the music?

If you remembered it fluently you now have step 1 roughly figured which is to read and play from the music X amount of times before you can take the music away and recall from memory the notes you played at a later time. (note this may increase depending on the number of notes, but I don't seem to find that)

If you stumbled or forgot some notes, repeat step 2, that is to repeat the passage X amount of times without the score until you can come back and play it fluently.

The progression from there is then obvious, up the amount of bars, up the amount of notes in the bar and up the amount of time before coming back to the piece

and on the counter your aim will be the lower the amount of repetitions WITH the music, and lower the amount of repetitions without the music.

If you really struggle, do the opposite,

Practice with the music say 10 times, and practice without the music say 10 times and then come back in a few hours, if you remember it easily, cut the amount of times you try next time down to 9 until you only have to repeat say 6 times or so before you can remember it the next day.

Also remember that you will have to consistently reinforce this, not only your ability to memorize but also your memorization of pieces, I could run through this whole process, and not touch it for a week and be fine, but give it say 2 weeks, I could have forgotten absolutely everything and have to re-learn it because I didn't reinforce it enough to settle in.

[dcstudio]

I memorize the chord progression too.  If I am out there playing and suddenly I forget everything else... I can say the chord progression in my head and I will find my way back.

[xdjuicebox]

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on this, but I'll tell you what works for me

When I want to learn something, I listen to a recording of it at least once every day. (as many different renditions as possible!) If it's a shorter piece, sometimes I'll listen to it like 20 times! (though don't wear out the piece! However, I find classical music is so good that it doesn't really get worn out for me)

Then I outline it, like "oh this section is this section," and I divide it up into sections. Then I do harmonic analysis (though my theory could use some work), and then I list as many compositional devices that I can identify or whatever, and then I practice it section by section, or measure by measure, sometimes beat by beat depending on how complicated it is.

[kalospiano]

Hi Bernadette,

I'm just a beginner but I can memorize quite well using the following method. It's similar to what other users have listed already. With it I can memorize one page of music equivalent in length and complexity to, let's say, one single movement of a Sonatina from Clementi or a Burgmuller Etude Op. 100 in one-two days. Depending on individual memory skills, of course, one might be able to do a bit more or a bit less than that.

1) isolate one single section (depending on how easy/hard the piece is, the section might be half a measure, one measure, two measures. It needs to be something short enough that you can play it just a couple of times and then repeat it many more times without looking at the score). Let's call it section A.

2) play the section hands separate, very very slowly at first, then progressively accelerate until you're confident enough to play it repeatedly quite fast without looking at the score.

3) repeat step 2 with hands together.

4) go to the next section (let's call it B), repeat setps 2 and 3.

5) you should now be able to play A and B without any pause between the two and without looking at the score. Do look at the score if needed, but first try to go by memory. repeat steps 2 and 3 on A and B together.

6) go to the next section (let's call it C). Repeat steps 2 and 3.

7) now you should be able to play B and C together without pauses. Repeat steps 2 and 3.

continue going like this with all following sections. When you reach the end of a row, repeat the whole row without pauses multiple times (check the score if you need to, but try first to do without).

9) When you reach the end of the page/part that you want to learn, repeat the whole thing multiple times, HS and HT, first slowly then progressively faster (check the score if you need to, but try first to do without).

10) try experimenting playing the piece by heart starting from various random points (not only from the beginning of each section you isolated).

NB: very important, before getting from step 1 to 10, try to identify chords, arpeggios, scales, intervals used in each section. This really helps memorization.

This works especially well with spaced repetition. What I do, for instance, is applying these 10 points in the early morning, then going with my usual piano routine, then replay steps 9 and 10 after the end of my piano routine. Later, in the evening, I will again both start and finish my evening piano session with steps 10 and 11.

Generally on the morning of the second day I will be already able to play the whole piece by heart. Possibly there will be very few doubts in some points for which I will briefly check the music score, but by the third day most of the time I won't need the score at all anymore for that learned page.

Hope this helped at least a bit.

Good luck!