I've heard it said here and elsewhere that people are EITHER sight-readers OR memorisers. This makes me feel better about being useless at sight reading because I find memorising easy. Through training I have managed to get through the sight reading sections of exams, but always get comments like "the key was not always clear" and "blemishes [aka wrong notes ] throughout".

Is everyone else one or the other, or are there some annoying people out there who can do both?

Hope the poll works - first time I've tried!

I'm about a 70% sightreader, 30% memoriser = a lot better at sightreading, but not one of those people who can get a really good mark in exams.

I find memorising really easy. For shorter pieces particularly, once I play it through a couple of times it's in the memory.

I am also, a truly truly awful sightreader.

I think that finding pieces easy to memorise has a real detrimental effect on sight reading for the simple reason that as soon as you know the piece, it becomes really difficult to actually look at the music and follow where you are - I always look at my hands. I actually surprised my teacher one day by not looking at my hands but rather looking at the music so that she wouldn't know I'd acicdentally memorised it - trouble is, when I got to the end of page 2 while still looking at page 1, it kind of gave me away

My teacher shouts at me quite often - "AGAIN FROM MEMORY??" and my response is always the same - "I didn't mean to, it just happened"

She has then given me really long pieces and exactly the same thing happens. I don't want to loose the ability to memorise but I want to get better at sight reading so am having to download lots and lots of music so I don't accidentally memorise it all and then think I'm improving when I'm really not

Definitely more of a memorizer, although on Cello my sight reading is pretty good. Piano sight reading is absolutely abysmal, but can't be good at everything can we? lol

I said I was a sight-reader, which implies I'm good at it it. It's all comparative,really. I'm not wonderful at a first rendition of something, but I can make a reasonable stab within 5 minutes of poking and getting the feel. So short-term memory is obviously playing a part there. Maybe good memorisers are just very good at assimilating? They must have had to read it at some stage. How good an exercise is sight-reading, anyway, in the format that we see it in grade exams? I think the quick study at DipAbrsm is a good test, because that's more relevant to the real world, where we might be asked to accompany something at very short notice, but how often has anybody been in the position of having had to give it their best shot without that 5 minutes?

I voted other as while I am very quick to memorize pieces and I have a good ability to play things by ear after hearing then a couple of times my sightreading is improving all the while as I'm making a concentrated effort to get better at it.

I am an excellent sight-reader but a HOPELESS memoriser!!!! I would never dare risk playing anything from memory and it's been a huge bane in my life because I'm trying to 'learn' Scottish fiddle music and it's just not sticking.

However, last night a friend asked what I was playing in our Christmas concert on Sunday and I picked up my violin and played about two thirds of my Grade 3 piece from memory and found it lovely and so 'freeing'; I had dynamics in all the right places etc. BUT then I stumbled and my mind went blank and it was all gone

It's SO frustrating but I have a very bad memory in general. I'm excellent at 'concepts' and hopeless with 'facts'.

Oh, DEFINITELY sightreader. I can pretty much sightread anything put in front of me, but memorizing is terribly arduous. Interestingly, I play a lot by ear - if I've heard a tune a few times, I can play it - I can play most musical theatre music from the last 100 years, and people assume I've memorized it - not true.

At college I'm focussing on accompanying and chamber music as much as possible to avoid having to memorize - can't get away from it completely though.

Definitely a sight-reader - although a bit like Bing and Ms Fiddle I can play by ear fairly well, so not a completely hopeless memoriser, although not a terribly accurate one in terms of eg chord positioning.

Because I've always been a sight-reader, I find it quite difficult to help pupils who memorise quickly and then don't ever watch the music again. How do you improve what you first learnt? writing things on the copy often has no effect at all (of course). We can add expression in the lesson by 'listen and copy' but it's not my ideal way of teaching it, and it often gets forgotten in the week because the visual reminder doesn't work.

I can do both. Unfortunately, though, many of my pupils look at the music once to work out the notes and then try to never look at it again - cue lots of guesswork and mistakes - and the stupid thing is, they don't look back up at the music to try to correct the mistake, they just keep playing random different notes until they find the one they think sounds right........AAARRRGGGHHH!!!!

But how do people manage to memorise something if they can't read it in the first place? Is it a case of picking through note by note? & that's just how to learn sightreading anyway - you simply get faster at it. Without developing sightreading skills it must be very limiting being able to play only those things you already know.

It's weird how different people's brains work. I have a couple of pupils who will make a horrendously slow first attempt at a grade 6 piece, but come back next week with it memorised. How on earth can they do that? If it's post-Grade 5 and more than a page long, I could practise something into oblivion and still struggle to memorise it. Maybe good sight-readers are more inclined to scan, whereas less good sight-readers can memorise more easily because they have to look at it so very closely in the early stages? I don't have a poor memory for other things - if I was shown a tray with 20 items on it for 10 seconds I could write down every one 5 minutes later, and I've always been good with phone numbers. So why can't I memorise music?

You can train yourself to get over these stumbles. You have to put the piece into memory at different levels, not just muscle
memory. Every stumble tells you where you need more into other levels of memory (visual, intellectual ie harmony progression
etc) Sometimes it's a a matter of maintaining concentration. After a while the stumbles come out.

Now, I'm a poor sightreader BUT it's coming together albeit slowly. I managed to read and play at the same time a Bartok piece in my lesson and my teacher was really pleased for me because he knows how hard I find it.

That's was I was wondering. I can sight read well, and memorise the music if I have to.

The usual saying I hear isn't that people can either sight read or memorise music, but that some people can either sight read well or play by ear well.

Even if I try not to memorise, it happens anyway.

Sight-reading is improving though.

Not necessarily.

In the jazz class I do we play most of our tunes from memory - but we learn them by ear rather than having them written down, and we've all got much quicker at doing this in the 2 years since we got a new teacher who started us learning in this way. Admittedly these are fairly simple jazz standards, but we can now learn a tune, harmony and chord sequence in a 2 hr class - and it's still there next week!

A couple of weeks ago we did something similar, but starting with the written music (we've all got a classical, reading type of background) that was then taken away. Having seen the music briefly I found it much harder to remember than when we never see the music at all!

As I said, these are simple standards, usually no more than 16 bars to learn, but another exercise I do is to transcribe jazz solos which are rather more complex. I say transcribe, but I don't usually write them down, just work out note by note what the solo is by ear -I find I can remember large chunks of complicated music in this way. Again, the one time I did try writing it down as I worked out the notes I found I couldn't remember it nearly as well - I started relying on the visual props instead.

Someone asked me the other week how I remember tunes like this, and I find it's a bit of a mixture of things, partly I'm thinking "starts on the 3rd chromatically up to the 5th, up a tone" etc, partly I'm thinking letter names "E", partly I'm thinking of what the written note looks like on the stave, partly I'm thinking about the pattern of my fingers on the instrument and partly I'm thinking of the sound I know comes next and trusting my fingers to know how to make it come out of the intsrument.

For me, it's a case of knowing what it should sound like first, working out the fingering from the score and bingo!

I'm absolutely horrendous at sight reading, however I can memorise music VERY well. I hardly forget music. but I forget other things. If you tell me something which is important chances are I'll forget it. I can't remember everyday general stuff very well. Whereas if you show me a music I'll come back the following week with it learnt and played by memory instead of actually reading the notes. I spend most of my times in the lessons memorising the pieces because sight reading is just too difficult for me to handle.

Do you find that you've memorised everything correctly?
If you do then how much time does it take you to work out the notes if you really are a very poor reader?
If you do learn correctly quite quickly it suggests that you are actually not too bad at reading.
Students I've had who don't like to spend much time looking at the page usually memorise at least part of everything wrongly and this becomes very difficult to correct... and this is at the pre grade 1 stage!

Have started a thread on the Teachers Forum just yesterday about this very subject....I was interested to know how Teachers developed the skill of memorising with their pupils.

I am a Sight-reader definately, and sadly can play very little from memory. I envy those that can play from memory so much ...so often people find out that you are a pianist, and then ask you "at the drop of a hat" to play at some gathering or other... I always feel so stupid and inadequate when I have to say that I can play next to nothing without music! Then some "busker" pipes up from the back who had a few lessons in 1901 or something, sits down and entertains them for hours!!
However, I suppose it works the other way round when people produce music from nowhere in some "god forsaken" key and suddenly ask you to accompany them - where are the buskers then!

There's a big difference between reading and sightreading. Sightreading = simultaneously reading + playing at speed.
So I can read.....it's the reading ahead of two clefs while playing with 2 hands (on a piano) at tempo that trips me up.
But yes, I'm getting better at sightreading, the more pieces I learn. There is an awkward intermediate stage in learning a
piece to play from memory when the notes are still travelling between the page and my head, where things are dodgy

Well I'm about 80% memorisor and 20% sight-reader I'd say!!! My sight-reading is improving though - slowly!!!

Interesting thread btw

Actually, I find most of the people I know who play by ear have no problems in playing things in a different key, and any jazz pianist who's done any work with singers seems to be able to play just about anything in just about any key.

I wonder if it would be considered 'flaming' to suggest that both sight-reading and memorising are bound to be easier in an instrument (including voice) that only plays one note at a time? It might also be worth noting that we're all probably talking about different levels of difficulty in the music that we say we're either good at sight-reading or good at memorising.

Flaming?

Violin sight-reading is miles easier than piano sight-reading for me. I'm sight-reading grade 4 violin pieces from the new syllabus (albeit largo rather than allegro! ) And having only literally just picked up the clarinet, I can already sight-read some grade 2 standard pieces.

Not sure about the relative level of difficulty between the different instruments at different grades but given my standard of piano playing, I can only sight-read a proportion of the current grade 2 piano pieces in my daughter's book.

Of course, memorisation is also easier!

I am about 99.9% memoriser and.01% sight-reader.

I can play diploma level pieces on the piano, but my sight reading skills are about grade 2 standard, seriously there was a grade 4 piano book lying around the other day and I had a look at, and struggled to sight read it. It wouldn't take me long to learn them properly and memorise but it was fairly disheartening to realise I couldn't just play straight through them.

It generally makes it very difficult to study for a degree in music...

I've always felt that it's all in the way that we're 'wired' - some of us can't help being memorisers - and even though I actively try not to memorise, it happens anyway.

btw - my latest excuse for not practising one of the pieces I'm working on - 'I'm saving this piece for sight-reading - if I practice it I'll memorise it' - didn't wash but at least raised a smile!

I don't think that's contentious (being no pianist I don't really know), just as I'm sure you'd agree that playing with good intonation is a lot easier (given an in tune piano) for a pianist than a string / brass / woodwind player!

Most of the time it is correct. I just have to sort out the dynamics which seems to be the problem. Otherwise, notewise it all pertty much perfect.
oh it takes me absolutely ages. I'm so bad. What I do is, say for a new piece. The teacher gives me the book and tells me to take a look at home and choose a piece I like etc. I take it home spend an hour or so writing down all the notes and try to play it as rhythmically and notwise correct as possible. After about 4 hours a few times a week it seem to stay in my head. I rub out all the notes and play it to the teacher. She helps me sort out the dynamics and the note value if necessary.

I just fail badly at sight reading and aural. I can't spend 30 seconds doing it! I need a day or so mr/miss examiner!

When we (me and teacher) are getting prepared for the exam. It's usually me sorting out the scales and pieces myself and she finds out when she get the result how much practised i've done reflecting my scores and we tends to spend about two or three agonising months doing aurals and sight reading only. I dread them so much!

I don't know how I memorise music to be honest. It just kind of stick in my head after a few times. I think it was from a VERY early age when I was like 2 I had this light-up keyboard and forever playing with that. Maybe that was help me play as I am now. As with the light up keyboard I remember having the lights turn off and on whenever you wished and after seeing it light up twice I remember it so because of that is probably why i memorise thing so well.

What people can't forget is that there is a HUGE difference between playing by ear and memorizing. Sit me down in a piano bar and I can play for hours - songs that I've heard in any random key. What I find VERY difficult is sitting down with a score and learning it by memory. I'd probably be better off just listening to it over and over again - but it's not really helpful if trying to memorize long Bach fugues.

I've been doing a bit of research at college about it, and it seems to be about auditory/visual memory. People who can play by ear have excellent auditory memory, but have never really developed a good visual memory ie they won't be able to say where on the page they are when playing by memory. People with a good visual memory tend to be able to mentally picture the music on the page. The problem is that only using one form of memory - ie auditory, makes the memorizing very insecure - we need to use many methods to have secure memorization.

By the way, my research seems to be that people with perfect pitch have a very good auditory memory, but are generally not good memorizers. Does anyone have any views for/against that?

Should I add the fact that, I'm slightly deaf and I can't play by ear AT all?

My Clarient and Piano tried to get me playing by ear by choosing random notes and covering what their playing but I got it all wrong and It just doesn't work.

I am actually much better at the first attempt than the second but have no idea why - maybe I am concentrating harder the first time round.


If I consciously memorise a piece then I see the music in my head as I am playing so in a way it's as if I'm still reading the music.

I have no trouble memorising my daughter's pre-grade one piano pieces which I do simply by sitting beside her when she is practising (so reading and listening but not actually playing myself). OK so these are easy pieces but I have never memorised in the same way my other daughter's cello and trombone pieces (two instruments which I do not play) so familarity with the instrument must come into it somewhere.

I have a friend who can do just that - play any tune by ear, often stuff that is improvised - but he can't do what I do - memorise a score. Obviously two different mechanisms are involved here. It's all very intriguing!

I can't start to memorise a piece until I have heard what it should sound like - and then I work out the fingering from the score, correctlng myself if it sounds wrong. From what you have said, I think I probably use a combination of auditory and visual memory. I can play by ear by picking out one note at a time on the instruments that I play - but not to a particularly advanced level on piano (simple chords only).

I would love to be able to improvise - I really admire the people who can go to a piano and just play....

Same with me!!!
But I found that on piano I automatically memorise everything and on violin I can hardly memorise at all!!!!
My sight reading is ok

Yeah that's exactly the same with me, I memorise stuff way too quickly lol! It's different with orchestral music because I don't practice it as much, just as long as I can play it well with the music haha! But also because in orchestral rehearsals there's a lot of chance to rehearse certain sections of the music, so there's a lot of leaping back and forth between pages/movements, so it's slightly more difficult to memorise.

Don't know whether you can relate to this but it's a bit like being on autopilot - a classic example was the time when New Orleans Nightfall was opened for me to play - and I gave a perfect rendition of half of New Orleans Blues before I noticed!

With violin - this is interesting - because my sight-reading is miles better, if it's a familiar/popular tune, I'll play what I think it should sound like from my auditory memory - and then struggle to overcome autopilot when I realise that I'm not actually playing what is written!

I'm generally quite good at both, though sight reading I do well in, but even if I don't try to memorise it happens anyway...

(ps, not trying to brag...!)

Even though I have been teaching for years, I still am unable to memorize. Good at sight reading though and I find that more useful in my teaching.

That what scares me. I am so bad at sight reading. yet I want to go into teaching when I grow up. .. I feel that sight reading is a big part on your playing, as you have to play them exam pieces etc.

I learn a piece note by note and then knowing how it goes interferes with reading the music as my eyes don't move and recognise fast enough - but when I try to memorise it takes ages and I'm always making mistakes - this is simple music When I recognise a scale pattern my fingers move fast enough but my eyes don't. I often can't remember 'how it goes' until I've played the first few notes.
That said - I am much better than a year ago - the path is long and winding for some of us oldies

Im a sightreader trying to be a memoriser , if that makes sense. lol.

I'm hopeless at both! Can't memorise a thing and my sight reading leaves a lot to be desired!

The thing is, I can't sight-read that well, and i can't memorise that well either. The only way i play well is learning a piece thouroughly and having it in front of me while i play.

I won't accuse you of flaming, but I will disagree! Sight reading on piano is definitely harder. But I'm not a pianist, no way, yet I can memorize most piano music (assuming I can play it in the first place) to some degree or another. Not on clarinet though, but I can sight read a lot on Clari. I think with piano you have more to hold it together than just the one note - you can hang onto the harmonies as well as melodies.

I'm definitely a sight reader though. Even on piano I'm better than a friend who is a memorizer and a pianist I can transpose (To some extent) at sight as well on clarinet. Since I've been doing that I have improved on sight reading, so long as I don't forget what key I'm in!

I think memorising is definately easier when there's only one melodic line... because I can memorise really well on the violin but on piano although I can do it too, I always get the top line much easier than the rest. However with lots of practice I guess it's more of muscle memory cause your fingers just know where to go.

Just out of curiosity, how do you guys memorise? Is it by note names, or colours.. etc. Because I don't know if it's just me, but I tend to remember the solfedge of a melody when memorising (I learnt fixed solfedge all my life).

I've had the same problem. The moment I make a mistake, it takes me twenty seconds to find the section of the music in front of me, which I convince myself is there to help!



The only thing I can say about memorising is that it is, for me, a process of rote repetition. In the end, I don't have to think about where my hands are going at all. The moment I think about where I'm going to put my hands next it all goes to pot!!!!

I'm a much better sight reader than memoriser because it is how I have been taught! Though after playing certain pieces for a long time I end up memorising them, but not on purpose.

Six months ago I decided that it was ridiculous for someone that first began playing piano nearly 40 years ago to have virtually no memorized repertoire .. and to have to take a stack of scores in order to play at friend's houses, the office party etc. (Or to rely on improvised 12-bar blues ... which gets rather boring after a while).

I began by memorizing a Bach Prelude. I worked on hand memory, keyboard memory, memory of the sound, analysis of the structure and harmonies of the piece, visualisation of the printed page. Nothing seemed to work. My memory was like the proverbial seive. I thought I would never get it. I sweated blood. It was a mere 2 pages (22 bars of 4/4). It took over a month, elapsed time, before it was secure. I then started serious work on a couple of Sonata movements. Beethoven Op 13, 3rd movement. Mozart K576, 1st movement. They took the best part of three months elapsed time, learning them in parallel. On that basis If I lived to be eighty, and kept full command of my faculties I could memorize a couple of dozen classical sonatas. Not good enough! There are or have beeen 12 year olds that know by heart the 48 Preludes and Fugues, all 32 of Beethoven's sonatas, and most of what Chopin has written!


But there is good news. The more you memorize the easier it gets. The First movement of the Pathetique (longer and more complex than the third movement) took little more than two months.

And it gets better still. The rate of improvement accelerates. Several more pieces followed - a Haydn Sonata, some Debussy, some more Bach, a Chopin etude, each memorized at a faster rate than the one before. The middle movement of the Pathetique (when I finally knuckled down to it) was polished off in less than two weeks.


Last week I memorized the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 79 in two days! Yesterday I played through Chopin's posthumous Nocturne in C sharp minor twice from the score, and could immediately play 80% of it from memory. I memorised the remaining 20% with about an hour's work. Today I had forgotten just a few small details that were easily repaired.

Six months ago I would never have believed either of these feats possible.

Of course I do not yet play either piece well, but I play them from memory, so from now on the technical work I do on them will only strengthen their memories and improve the ability to recall them.


Alongside the excellent advice that has already been given in the many posts on this topic, both here and in Viva Piano I think there is another important ingredient. As Schopenhauer said "You must be despotic with your memory". When you think that something is actually stored in your mind you must find a way of getting at it, and not give up and go back to the score. Often I would come to the keyboard to review what I thought I had learned the previous day, and recall virtually none of it. But by various tricks I would coax it out of my brain. Playing the preceding section fast and without too much attention the hands would sometimes go on by themselves. Sometimes I could reconstruct a fragment from auditory memory. Sometimes I could recall the image of my hands on the keys. Or I would reconstruct a section that I knew was a more or less parallel passage transposed. Now and again I would even recall something from a mental image of the score. Sometimes I would jus move on to another piece, or go for a coffee. Relaxing in that way was often all that was needed to allow an elusive section to be recalled. Usually once a few fragments had been found the rest would return. Only then would I check what I was playing against the score for accuracy. This process is somewhat schizophrenic. There is the stubborn me, that insists on developing better powers of recall, fighting the lazy me, that wants to take the easy way out and look in ths score. To become a better memorizer the stroppy one had to triumph (and has to continue to do so).


There has been another very interesting side effect of this memory-development process. I have found that I can now play from memory half a dozen other pieces, and fragments of many more, that I have previously played only from the score. This has happened without any actual practice of those pieces, or deliberate memorization of them. For example there is a set of variations by Mozart, K500 - I find that I can now play six or seven of them from memory. (Previously all I could recall was the theme and the first two variations.) All of this stuff must have been memorized already! It seems that the effort of developing better recall has unconsciously (subconsciously?) disassociated the recall of those pieces from dependence on visual cues from the scores.


What is more, far from deteriorating, my sight reading has improved. [I mean reading genuinely new pieces for the first time - not playing over pieces that I habitually play with the score in front of me - that isn't sight reading at all]

I'm not too bad at sight reading but i can really easily memorise pieces - even if it's a 10 minute long concerto i can just remember it XD I sometimes prefer playing by memory than from music too =/
My sight reading has gone kind of down hill in the last few months though o_O Well, on my grade 8 flute sight reading i got 19/21, but in my auditions i don't exactly do great on sight reading... something i need to work on.

I'm quite good at sight-reading but rubbish at memorising! Which is useful for exams cos they require sight-reading but not memorising.