Memorizing a Piece: Building Muscle Memory
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- Опубликовано: 10 июл 2024
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Happy practicing!
-Allysia
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I have just finished my first year of piano lesson. My teacher gave me the best advice for a proven and infallible method to memorise any piece: play very very slow! 20% of the final tempo and keep sight reading the score while playing. Play small sections, link the sections, play slow. Do not go faster until you can play each note without any hesitation. That's it! Your brain will do the rest. I'm now able to play any piece (at my level obviously), with or without the score in front of me. I can even write the score of the pieces I know.
I agree with everything, except one fundamental thing: "keep sight reading the score". You're not sight reading it anymore when you played it one or two times. What you are doing is becoming dependent of the sheet music.
Therefore, how do you train your memorization skill? A correct way is to sight read a segment/phrase, then play it on your mind then physically, and only looking back at the sheet when you forgot the segment (consolidation phase): this process should only be done in the memorization phase, never when practicing or worst, performing.
To become a good memorizer you have to develop personal algorithms to associate large amount of data into larger ideas, this is how declarative memory works: it's an associative process. This means understand the music, recognize the pattern, the repetitions, the scales, the degree/chords.
As a young piano student, I was taught 'backward memorization' where you begin to play and recall the last 8 bars, and then the same in regression. This is because most students remember the first 8 to 16 bars and for some reason, not the end. Backward playing helped me to recall the music much longer in a shorter time.
The reasons are most students doesn't how to practice a piece efficiently because it's rarely taught. And when it's taught, they don't know why it works, they just do, and occasionally do it wrong until bad habits appear, or worst, conflictual rules between a previous and new teacher.
Exactly in this case, this appears when the student doesn't practice in shorts segments: because he fails at finding solution to encountered difficulties, he tries harder instead of differently, so he simply replays the piece "until it is in the hands" : by doing so, he relies on muscle memory which means when his hands lose the track, he fails the performance, so he is tempted to start over. Consequently the beginning eventually became reliable enough with muscle memory, but not the rest of the piece.
This process raises a major issue: if you fail mechanically or are not focused 100% of the time during the performance, you will have a blackout. Because you didn't memorize the piece, your hands _kinda_ did ! You're totally unable to write down the piece on a sheet or to play it in your mind (by that I mean feeling and seeing the fingers on the keys), or to start in the middle of different phrases.
I've recognized that most outstanding musicians seem to have the music memorized!
(Chuckling) 1st year keyboard (self taught) 69 yr old military veteran here. Totally enjoyed your ability to get this done while balancing your duties as a mother of a toddler (great editing by the way). I will look forward to the day your advice trickles down through my brain cells as I'm fumbling with my left hand rhythm while balancing the melody in my right. I've played and committed Fur Elise and Over The Rainbow (both easy piano) to memory with both hands, so far. I'm working on The Secret Garden and Sound of Silence (not easy piano). Wish me luck : D Thanks for your hard work. Hope your future in music is a great one.
Very helpful. Thanks Allysia. ❤😊💚🎹💜🎶
So here is something you might not have thought about, but I think you will find makes a lot of sense.
I often find it helpful to see the body as an adaptive system. And what I mean by that is simply that your body, including your brain and your memory, will try to adapt as best it can to whatever challenges you put on it. So for example to get stronger, you go work out, which makes your body go "hey, I need to handle this heavy barbell, I better grow some more muscles," and so you get stronger.
The thing is, this same principle applies to memory as well. So, if you want to remember something, you must challenge your brain to remember it.
So what does this mean in practice, if you want to memorize a piano piece by the "brute force" approach? It means that you should take a small piece, say a measure or two. Read it and play it once or twice. Then immediately try to play it back from memory WITHOUT looking at the sheet. And really try to remember. The more you try, the faster you will learn. When you can't remember any more, then you do it all again: look at the sheet, put it away, try to remember. And so on. Then the next day, start out straight away without looking at the sheet, and try to remember as much as you can, before looking.
By doing this, your brain will go, "hey, I need to remember this, because I can't look at the sheet," and so you will remember it.
I haven't been playing the piano for that long myself, but when I do this, I have no problem learning new pieces. The pieces I play are pretty simple, but I think the same principle applies to everything.
And on a final note, this means that what you shouldn't do, is just keep repeating while looking at the notes. Because think about it, then the message you're sending to you brain is "hey, no need to remember this, because you can always look at the notes", and so you won't remember.
Well, alright, that's it. Got a bit longer than I had planned :) Hope you found it useful!
I couldn't agree more, thank you. Reading the other comments saying "my teacher taught me" make me sick when their teacher exactly taught them wrong a basic.
@@Assassunn I find this concept surprisingly hard to explain. Happy to hear it made sense to you :)
This helps
Omg soooo great to see you again ❤💖💗
Thanks for the new upload.
Outstanding video👏👍. Very thought-provoking & well-presented. Thank you very much! Eye-opening for me, reinforcing my ‘concerns’ how much I am usually reliant on reading sheet music. When playing routine songs I often look away from the music & sometimes get nervous about losing my place, then looking back at the sheet music trying to find where I am. Many of your comments provides me direction how I need to try & think more about progressions, chords, etc. instead of just notes. AND I can see this won’t be easy……but can potentially make me a better player. I am an “older” student, started later in life playing piano for the past 10 years (and loving every minute of it), and been occasionally frustrated/felt limited being so reliant on reading sheet music. Your video has certainly given me something to think about & made me more aware of how I can become a better 🎹 player. I only recently came upon your channel & am now a subscriber. Thank you again 😁.
I admire a working mom!
9:56 Supermom suddenly noticing that Jr's photo-bombing the video. 😄 I love it!
I learned to play as a child and have am now back at the piano! I realize I struggle with getting away from the brute force method as you put it, to gaining the freedom of the piano by recognizing patterns, chord progressions and messages the music has to offer. It's more of a struggle than I thought, but your video was very helpful, especially sending a message that I am not alone!! Thank you
Thanks!
Thank you.. excellent and important tutorial
Lovely class
This channel has helped me so much as a adult learner. Great breakdowns and information.
This is very helpful. Thank you
super helpful, thank you.
Could not agree more with this video. I recently started doing this with some basic chord and arpeggio shapes with one of my grade 3 pieces. I was able to play half of the piece straight out of the gate without having to learn anything once I realised it was huge chunks of D major root chords. The other more complex parts needed a bit of work but it was a glimpse for me of how easy things can become if you devote a lot of work to technical exercises. Only a million more patterns to learn. 😃
Great video!
This is so cool! I started playing
Piano at age 5 lessons with very
Good teachers, six years of
Undergraduate and graduate
Applied piano and.......... Wait
For it...... Not one minute of
Instruction related to memorization.
I believe that the belief is that
You can memorize or you're
Not so good at it. I will always
Think that teachers are more
Interested in teaching " music"
As in repertoire than something
That is so misunderstood or
Simply omitted as, " memory".
Thank you.
Thank you for this very interesting video. It makes sense to me with what my piano teacher teaches me, I now begin to feel that when I play some piece, I think of chords progression, degrees, which help my fingers to find the right notes more easily. It is a great feeling :)
Thanks for another good lesson. Some excellent points about reading and breaking it down, yet not totally relying on notation....after all, what we want to do is play....... 😎
Thank you so much for doing another video on this. I'm a senior learning piano and have come to realize the reason I still play so very mechanical is because I'm so reliant on the sheet music. Just recently I've come to the decision to begin learning how to memorize a few pieces. Just in a few days, with the little bit I've memorized, I'm already playing that piece much more musically. Thanks for this video.
I’m in the opposite situation.. I am too reliant on muscle memory and read music sheets too slowly to be able to sight read.
Good new video, thanks. Loved the cameos from the helicopter pilot :-)
She…is…back!!!
I love muscle memory. It's a miracle gift from the body (like altitude acclimation). On my guitar I can go a year or two and not play a song and forget it entirely and if I just sit down with the guitar and try it without thinking about it (e.g. watch TV while strumming) within an hour it all comes back. I'm talking about something like "The Rain Song" by LZ which uses an alternate tuning and non standard chord patterns. If I can get even any part of the tune, even just the ending or a middle part it soon all comes back. I can't use sheet music, because I learned it by ear. But muscle memory sure works! P.S. Cute seeing your daughter play with the helicopter in the background. 🙂
Thanks so much! This help my concerns about taking the level 1 course, CPP1, as I told you in my recent email. My take-away thoughts are : 1. do the piece analysis more carefully, 2. learn the piece in logical and manageable "chunks" (been doing that but not managing too well), and 3. get the music's sound in my head better, 4. get away from my dependence on the printed music as soon as possible. I know you have been teaching us all this in your CPPA and CPPB courses but my old head is pretty thick and I need to be whacked a few times before I wake up! I'll see you in CPP1
F
Thank you for your beautiful videos and their rich content!
P.S. - I know this is uncalled for but you remind me so much of Alexandra Breckenridge!!
Much love
You should never rely on muscle memory, it's only your friend when you have a blackout.
Alicia, can you you please do a review on the Keith Snell piano course. 🙏 I'm thinking of studying a few of the books. They only problem is that there are like eight different books for just one level!
0:58 kazoo farts made me chuckle
The tune Misty is an interesting one to study , melody jumping 3 to 7 with harmony catching up then getting tricky venturing out of the diatonic sort of then leading the melody -
subtle little tricks done in these melodies a slight alteration in pattern makes a huge difference to a different direction for me it's like getting lost in a maze then coming up with an improvisation to get back home is no good at all.
I know chords quite well (I started with chords approach to learning to play piano) but when learning a classical piece (I am currently exclusively focussing on classical music), I do not pay much attention to chord patterns - I just memorize the piece.
I taught myself seven Christmas songs in trying to teach myself piano. I thought they were a good place to start since they usually only use two notes per hand, they are in simple keys (F, C, G), they usually repeat the same phrase at least once, and both hands play a similar rhythm, just different notes. Two funny side notes; if I lost my place or made a mistake in the song (while playing from memory) I would have to go back to the beginning. It was like a chain of indirect memories. Break one link and the whole thing is gone. I'm better now, but for quite a while that would prevent me from playing for someone just on memory because one mistake and I had to start over! The second thing is how my two hands depended on each other. I would go back and try to play just the right hand or just the left hand and it was hard! My two hands were cueing off of each other to know what keys to play next. It was actually easier to play hands together than hands apart!
I can totally relate to that. If I make a mistake I usually have to start from the beginning again. I’ve got fairly good muscle memory for a few piano pieces so long as they’re not too difficult. I can manage simple sonatas and sonatinas. I so wish I had learned properly when I was a child, decades ago.
@@katperson7332 Yes, I too wish I would have studied some basic piano as a kid. Just 3-4 years. But, at least we can enjoy the years we have left. That's the main thing, just have FUN with it! 🙂
@@DesertRat332 So true. Music should be fun indeed. My arthritic fingers though wouldn’t agree! The joys of old age!
I've been a piano teacher for 50 years!! and just love your videos. Not to detract from how great you are please don't take this as criticism but you are pronouncing Muzio incorrectly. The correct pronunciation is
Moot' zee oh.
Please make videos about Alexander Scriabin when you can!!!
👍
I play tunes mostly from the great American songbook using fake sheets. I have no problem getting the melody in my head, and I know the LH chords cold in all keys using extended voicings. I’ve reached the point where I can hear the next note before I play it. My problem is expanding my vocabulary of ideas to be able to improvise beyond simple embellishments. Any suggestions?
Oops I sent previous comment to wrong video. Meant to send it to your tutorial on playing Clementi Aria. LOL
Really interesting video with some fantastic advice. I’m very much a beginner, but I do find that feeling the rhythm of the piece I’m playing, and feeling how that rhythm is expressed across both hands really helps me to play pieces using muscle memory. Also, if I start to think about what my hands are doing I find it too easy to lose my way, so I need a little detachment between my mind and my hand. It’s not complete detachment, cos I need to be aware of the chord changes, but my focus goes more to the feel of rhythm of the piece across both hands, rather than what each finger is doing at any particular point.
You may think it's not possible but I did learn Chopin's four Ballads and dozens of other large pieces without sight reading skills. I however use the others memory tools extensively: muscle, vision, audio, and analytical. With analytical probably being the most important without which I found impossible to memorize hundreds of thousands of notes. Analytics has the power to shrink a large piece into small and un-intimidating chunks. Second and probably as important is knowing how the piece sounds in your ear perfectly. This comes from listening to a piece a lot played by your favorite interpreters which also helps later with refining dynamics. Third in importance is muscle memory without which you can't acquire speed in fast passages. Forth is keyboard visualization which helps putting it all together and spotting jump locations quickly. Sight reading a piece in real time is the least important skill to have and in my opinion often a crutch working against memorization. I say ditch this as soon as possible or use it as a reference only. Use that time for theory and analytics instead - a skill that is sorely lacking in student's learning curriculum from what I've observed.
I kind of had some brute force to myself to learn maths. And guess what? I made my son study lots when he was a pre-teen. From then on he got his wings and really surprised me. When I saw that he was studying the kind of differential equations we learn in the last year of graduation, I thought , " wasn't it yesterday I was changing his diapers?". And he went even further. And I got very surprised.
As for English I studied lots in my teens and stopped to study maths.
And I had a piano at home and I really was not that much interested in this art and I don't know why. I was interested when I was about 5 and six years old and used to see people playing piano on television.
My interest for the thing faded. We were not rich and a piano was expensive for us.
I would learn how to weave using weaving machines. Those things I learned when I was 7 to 10 years old.
I got interested in piano, but I have to write my own material that helps me memorise.
It's useless to be there on the piano playing scales and arpeggios only. I have to write things.
And one important thing is the timing of notes , time signatures , etc It's something hard to imagine that I had a kind of timeless life? It was not timeless. I has a little less than two hours to finish a test at the university. Sometimes a month or less than four month for a project. But we were no performers. And when you are playing each hundredth part of a second counts. I was not used to this and started to learn piano in my old age.
It's interesting. But it must be understood that it has no logic or math properties than the obvious ones. Unless somebody decides to write a logic and uncover the math properties that are hidden in music.
First this person would have to kick out time signatures, notes, tonic note or signature keys, chords and the rest. He would have frequencies and duration and phrasing. It would be a more abstract study that requires knowledge of music, physics, mathematics, how brain reacts to sounds, etc ...
Interesting enough the American National Institute of Health is already studying phrasing. The way they are studying, not the way the university I attended would study and there things got wrecked by the espionage of foreign actors .
Any study have become dangerous when outside actors want to see the "development". It's not for anyone to see, because there are lots of flaws and wrong paths taken in the process. You have some entities that require reports and those are stressful as leading people to death sometimes. Those outside actors can be even more nocive for people inside the university and outside it.
So all this reminds me of Noam Chomsky. He said humanity had two problems to solve: the problem of Orwell and the problem of Plato, but we would have to solve the problem of Orwell first or we would not survive.
The problem of creating a logic for music is a Plato problem. It's very interesting, but can be left for later. Now we have to find a way to survive and without moral principles our humanity will destroy itself. Moral principles means to act against one own's interest many times. However without Love it serves for nothing to lie down on the fire with serpent rolled on the neck. I mean there's no salvation far from Christ's teachings.
Humanity is not experiment and God Almighty is not a scientist.
I left the community of bablephyllia and blue cake long ago. The university or the academic life was not for me.
I knew too much already when I was 12. The persecution against my Roman Catholic family is something we never understood.
Best wishes for you and your family, Allisya.
I think I have the opposite problem! I play songs - after practising them a lot - using muscle memory but I don’t know what I am playing in terms of harmony. I just do the right movements without thinking. No concentration. I need help!
The brain is not a muscle but a set of dynamic systems. Habit, however, produces both memorization and innovation.
Can a person who does not read music use this approach
Great lesson; very helpful. But I always get a bit of a laugh over the term "muscle memory". Muscles don't move your fingers tendons do. They are anchored at the elbow and go over the back of your hand to the fingers. It's easy to see them move on the back of your hand, especially the index, middle and ring fingers. Yes muscles are involved; but tendons cause the movement.
Please define for the term "Muscle Memory."
Learning by rote you're not actually learning the notes individually, chords, chord progressions, etc. You may be seeing hand patterns without being consciously aware of it.
Some pieces that have repeated patterns you can get carried away. Like playing the same intervals over & over you lose count whether you played something 3 or 5 times.
If you listened to something often enough, your brain can act like a sound recorder. When you're reproducing a piece, it's like pressing the [Play] button. For some people who are good memorizers, sight reading is the starting point for learning the notes. They'd learn pieces in small chunks. Once they learned the notes, they find having to read a piece through too cumbersome and almost impossible.
A piece in 1 page doesn't tell you everything. You can have a baby piece in large print with just 2 lines vs another with tiny notes on 1 page.
A lot of beginners & intermediates wouldn't be able to play pieces at their level the first time with ideal fingerings. Need to try a few fingerings to get it right.
hi how is it going there
I dislike the erm muscle memory because muscles don't have memories, what's at work here is the subconscious mind!
Yes you are right. In fact the term in itself is even worse that what it looks at first as the fingers don't have muscle. The only muscles used are in the hand palm , forearm, and potentially upper arm. I think what we refer to as muscle memory is just the memory of hand and finger position.
the anecdote about your mother seems to be pretty typical when somebody stops actively learning new repertoire. i experienced the same stuff a few times when i took a break from the piano
The audio volume of this video is very low (too low)
Okay, I think I have to do some marry proposal... 😬😬😬😅😅😅😅
She confuses sight reading with visual memory. The whole idea of memorization is to dispense with reliance on the printed music. But pianists who utilize visual memory usually don’t visualize an image of the sheet music in their minds. That would be highly inefficient-a kind of two-step process. Rather, they remember the keyboard patterns, not the printed music. That is, they don’t “sight read” a score that they have reproduced in their mind’s eye. They remember where their fingers are placed on the keyboard.
Slow down!
I miss that old quirky humor and thumbnails 😕
Still, helpful videos 😇
"How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" by Bill Gates. Good for you.
No. Just no. For actual professional competence in the actual playing of musical music, there us only one way done by those at the top of the profession: know the work by being able to hear the music in your head clearly, and continually develop technique to play what’s in your head. Muscle memory is fine maybe on your first or second or third piece that you memorize, but muscle memory can fail especially in music from the classical period because so many pieces have so much the same exact material in them. Singing along with the recording, and then singing without the recording, memorizing that way instead of sitting at the piano, has helped my serious students much better than everything that i was taught as a kid. Muscle memory works, especially in technique points, but to play music maturely I find it has to be memorized in one’s head
Muscle memory is a misnomer, there is no such thing.
In her introduction, she seems unable to use proper terms. What is her knowledge of the meaning of the words and exact vocabulary ? And who uploads a video but just to tell you you don't have to watch it ??? You talk about Clarity of mind !