Memorising techniques... tendancy to sight-read and think i know it.

[evenstar749]

Hi folks,

So i'm new to the forum *waves* and born again to piano... lol. Stopped playing for 20 years and am now back and SUPER motivated to learn learn learn learn. I am about grade 5. (well was when I stopped.) I want to get to grade 8 and beyond if possible.

I've never thought about "playing" other than doing what I was told at school. I just sat and played, turned up to lessons and never thought about "how" to learn or making things easy as well as well grounded and secure. Never wanted to push either. Now I do.

My main issue other than not being born one of those super virtuoso kids.. *grin* (I wish its the hard slog path here...) is MEMORIZING passages.

When things are IN my head they stay put. pieces I played 20 years ago needed and hour of "remembering" to get them back to where they were 20 years ago. but getting them there is hard. Great tracks of Shakespeare happily sit near word perfect IF I learn them properly 15 years ago.

Question : what advice do you have for learning pieces? what are you tips and tricks?

I find I am below average in speed at learning things. Across the board. everything takes time. AGES. Painting, sewing, Nursing procedures, (lol) Even ballet, took me ages to learn the steps right. I need some fairly hefty ways to get it to stay. (despite my time off piano I have kept my hand in with classical music). Anyone else like this.

I think what I do is get it to about 90% and sight-read every few notes creating a very bumpy and unlearned tone. but I THINK I know it and am playing it rubbish. Rather than the actual problem of not knowing the notes. Then every time I go back the piece is worse than it was before.

my method... 
1. scan the piece to look at the form. (repeated sections, basic scale sections, easier bits, yucky looking bits...blah blahh

2. play each hand most the way through roughly looking for the feel of the piece.

3. Normally start at the beginning (yup - true) and learn a short section in each hand then when I think I know them put them together and practice. this takes me AGES

4. This last couple of weeks I have then been going back to hands separate when I make mistakes and it has highlighted that I just have not got the piece 100% in memory. This has been super useful and I have not really done this before (as I said I was not a dedicated younger student)

I then play it really slow, then really fast, then I try up and octave, then back together again.

Then I just rinse and repeat for all bits.

PROBLEMS.
tendancy to play the bits I know rather than bits I don't. Guilty as charged here and I am resolved to stop this.

stopping when it is only 90% and having to re-learn bits the next session, wheras IF it was in there the first time it is stuck forever. So i'm wasting time essentially by practicing inefficiently.

anyway love to hear from people who are slow at memorizing and what you do to help here. Also love to hear from you crazy people that can LOOK at a piece of music and remember it...

Thanks for a great forum folks. :-)

Sarah

[kuska]

I just replied to a bit similar thread so my answer won't be very different but I've just returned after 12 years and I used to be like grade 8-9. When at first I tried to play Silent Night (Ferrari variations)  in November, I couldn't make any sense out of it. I recorded a few excerpts some time later and put it here. But for real I sat at the piano a month ago when I was having 3 weeks of holidays. And I think I did a great job. It still needs refreshing my skills but at least I can just make sense out of the pieces I play and when I recently took Silent Night again I just laughed cause there are just broken chords like F major broken into octave and then arppeggio.

So my point is, you need to break through that initial problem with pieces you used to play well in the past. I also struggle with some dissociative symptoms which makes it even harder for me. In stress situation I can like go blank and can't read notes. Or my left hand starts having its own life and doesn't want to listen

Try using PianoMarvel. It's done a great job for me as well. Just by not letting me to dissociate.

[evenstar749]

hi again,

I also suffer from hands doing what they like when they like it... but mine is just stupid playing :-)

just seen you said you were about grade 8 and I asked what grade you were in the other thread... apologies...

Thanks for the tip and good luck

[indianajo]

My piano teacher insisted I play slowly enough that I made absolutely no mistakes.  So new pieces were often practiced one hand alone for a considerable period, quite slowly. 
If you practice only correct movements, it helps promote memorization of the correct movements. This is quite independent of the blobs on the page or the chord structure or whatever other people use to memorize.
So I find that by the time I have the hands playing together and am speeding the piece up, I am not looking at the page very much.  I have memorized the piece rather painlessly.
Really the only reason I need a score after a certain point is in sorting out the sections that are similar, but actually are different. Which comes first, which variation am I doing now?  For that I need a score, or some memory trick like others mention about chord progression or whatever. 
BTW, I don't know what "grade" I am, and really don't care.  I view "grades" as something associated with those grade 1 through 5 method books with the boring pieces in them, and I left grade 5 John Thompson piano course behind about my third year of piano lessons.  All this alphabet structure the academics invented to keep themselves busy occured long after I quit taking lessons. 
Best of luck on your progression. 

[kuska]

BTW, I don't know what "grade" I am, and really don't care.  I view "grades" as something associated with those grade 1 through 5 method books with the boring pieces in them

As the topic has gone up: grades were invented to help to earn money for examinations. This world is all about it. For me it means how many years one played in a music school. I wasn't taught that way. We just went year by year till the end of primary, then secondary music school, all in total 12 years. This is just my understanding of what's going on with piano teaching right now. I'm not even sure if I'm right 

[evenstar749]

I was also taught to play carefully to start with so the muscle memory doesn't learn mistakes.

I read a note wrong in the Mozart K545 and I had a devil of a time to retrain it back out last week. It took ages and ages and I still get it wrong occasionally ...lol

although I do like to "go nuts" with a piece from time to time... fugdge and butcher the bits I don't know just to get an idea of where it can go. Sometimes I surprise myself with how it sounds. Then I can go back and hands separate the bits that were not so good and re-learn those bits.

[bjenkins24]

If you're going to memorize a piece of music, go ahead and sight read through it once and then be done with that. Start memorizing from the beginning in VERY small chunks. As small as you need to to be able to look at it only once and have it memorized. If that's two notes, it's two notes. If it's two measures it's two measures.

Then repeat repeat repeat. Don't over practice individual sections because sleeping on it is important too. Honestly I wrote up a long article all about this subject, you should read it over, it's really exactly what will help you:

https://yourmusiclessons.com/blog/how-to-memorize-music-5-times-faster/