Hi All

My music teacher has asked me to memorise a tune, but my very old brain just can't seem to do it. I've played the tune over and over again, have it on my MP3 player so listen to it time and time again - but can I play it with out looking at the music, non!

Any tips would be very welcome as this is very fustrating.

I play and make sure I look at my fingers rather than the score... try to work on memorising bar by bar (perhaps 2 or 3 if it's simple), playing it a few times if necessary and think about what notes you are hitting rather than trial and error... Once you have it right you won't need to look at your hands so much, mechanical memory will kick in.

What I do is as I learn each new bar or couple of bars, I play the piece from the beginning right up to the last part I learned, this reinforces everything, although it can get a bit monotonous Listen carefully to make sure no mistakes are creeping in. Once you think you have it you should pretty much be able to play through and glance over the score (which will now become nothing more than a bunch of prompts) to make sure you're not making any mistakes

I've memorised pieces spanning several sheets worth of music this way, although don't expect to do long pieces in a matter of days

Everyone is different so this may or may not work for you

EDIT: Learning stuff this way can be a blessing or a curse.... once you use mechanical memory, it's quite easy to make a slip and then completely lose the plot. Sometimes you'll have to go back to an "anchor" point or even the beginning before being able to pick back up again.

When I play from memory (which I don't usually do from choice) I actually "see" the music in my head.

I tend to find that when I know a piece well I can play most of it from memory anyway and it is only at this stage that I might consciously try to memorise the whole thing. I do several things:
- close my eyes and see how much I can play. When I get stuck I open my eyes and look at the bar I'm up too, close my eyes again and carry on. This enables me to see which bits I don't know.
- I tend to assume that the bits I don't know need some more work so practise them individually. Sometimes this is enough to commit them to memory.
- I read the music a lot away from the instrument (when I'm commuting to work on the train for instance).

Hah, it's funny how different people are. I don't see the music at all, it's as if my fingers just have a mind of their own and I'm not putting any effort in mentally at all.

I often memorise tunes - these tend to be the heads of jazz standards so are much simpler than many classical pieces. I find the better I know and understand the tune the more easily I memorise it and am able to recall it sometime later. Things I've found work for me are

- Learn it by ear in the first place, so you've never relied on the music
- Learn the chords and understand how the tune fits with the chords (e.g. the tune of All the Things You Are is mostly 3rds of the chords)
- Think of it in terms of intervals, and the degrees of the scale rather than as note names
- Learn it in more than one key, I usually learn tunes in at least 2 keys so I can play them on tenor or alto and some tunes I'll learn in 12 keys, although it might only be 2 or 3 that really stick

and really, really important - don't just memorise the notes, memorise the rhythm too. It's amazing how when the piece of paper isn't in front of you the rhythm can drift from what it's supposed to be to what you "hear" it to be.

Last year I would have said I could never learn anything by heart, but this year after attending a traditional harp ensemble, I am fast finding that it is possible for me to actually be quite good at picking things up quickly!

For me - I work on a few bars at at time, repeating until I know it, then adding the next few bars to it. I also find it very important to look for sequences in the music, eg in a piece I am learning at the moment, the left hand plays CGC then goes down a 3rd to AEA - and try and see music in patterns rather than thinking of it as whole page of back/white notes which is very daunting.

Don't lose heart - I have found learning music off like this is a skill that needs practice.

Elizabeth

I memorise kind of naturally. And wish I didn't, I wish I was a better sight-reading *sigh*

I more think of the finger patterns as I play. Not specific note names. So I'll think "Right, this finger starts here between this black note and that black note" and my brain sort of remembers the order of fingers and the tune rather than the music. Muscle memory plays a huge part too though It's the same on the flute though, I remember finger patterns of fingers up and down rather than the actual written music.

I don't know if that's helpful... it's just how my brain works when I memorise things.

i only play trad music, so i don't know how helpful this will be, but it seems to work for me - i've never had a problem memorising a tune...

the first thing i do is look for the structure of the tune. nearly all trad tunes follow the same format: 2 repeated parts (A and B) of 4 or 8 bars. (some tunes have 3 or 4 parts, or longer parts, but the same principle applies). within this, the melody often follows a question/answer style, where either the question or answer will be repeated in each part; for example, the A part of Drowsy Maggie is:
E- BE dEBE | E- BE AFDF | E- BE dEBE | BABC dAFD
the first bar forms the repeated question.

other times, the same answer from the A part will be used at the end of the B part, so if the A part were subdivided into 4 bars as A-B-A-C, the B part might be D-E-D-C (Staten Island: see the repeated |d d efge | f d d| at the end). or, you might have the same question with a different answer, but this is quite a bit less common (Irish Washerwoman).

many trad tunes have a noticable 'low part' (A) and 'high part' (B), and when that happens, the B part often has many similarities to the A part (Mountain Road: the B part rhythm is nearly identical to the A part).

i should note that i don't spend hours sitting down analysing tunes; the things i described above become obvious very quickly by the second time you heard the tune (at least when you do it often enough).

once you've recognised the structure, it's easier to learn the tune: you know what comes where, and you don't have to relearn the same repeated phrases. at this point, if you're reading from dots rather than by ear, you can probably hum the tune, even if you can't play it through. if i'm learning from dots, i always make sure i know the tune first, by finding a recording (or several) if i don't already know it; if i can't, i usually won't try to learn the tune, although i make an exception for hard-to-find tunes that are played at my session, since i can 'check my work' next time it's played. (i'm thinking of getting an audio recorder to make this a bit easier...)

at this point, if i'm playing from dots, i'll play through the tune repeatedly until it's "in my fingers"; then i'll look away and see how much of it i can play without them. it's important that you really try to do this; if you just play it from the dots all the time, you'll never learn it, or if you do, it'll take much longer. by deliberately playing without the music, you force yourself to remember it. it usually doesn't take me many tries to memorise the tune like this.

I memorise naturally too, I don't know how! Strangely my sight reading is also quite good (apparently people can normally do just one or the other!). I think on piano it's more muscle memory than seeing the printed music but on clarinet it's the other way round, both methods are used but I always see the music.

I find some music, particularly Bach, harder to memorise than others - possibly because it's contrapuntal? Or because often it's canonic? I have managed to learn 2 of the 2-part inventions by heart, but it took a lot of practice, memorising 2 or 3 bars at a time, and then going over the whole piece over and over again!

Hi All

Thank you for all your postings, clearly a topic I need to work on.

Sandy

Hi Sandy, can you sing it without your instrument?

Often when people can't memorise it's because they don't actually know how the tune goes - one thing I've learned since coming to traditional music after years of being reliant on the score was that you learn the tune, then you learn how to play it on your instrument - whilst this might seem obvious, it helped me to stop trying to remember technical things and fingerings, but to focus more on the sound I wanted to hear - I found it hard at first but now anything I can sing, I can play by ear. It takes a while to get used to where each of those sounds you hear in your head is on your instrument, but you'll get there.

It also has the advantage that my memorising isn't confined to one instrument - anything I can play from memory or by ear on the fiddle, I can also play on viola, piano, whistle, pipes etc because I'm not remembering how the instrument plays it, but how it goes.

Give it a try.

It gets easier.

The first one is the hardest.

I may have had a glass of red but I'm not drowsy (yet) ...

This is going to sound obvious, but . . .

. . . Before you go into techniques of how to memorize a tune the first tip is to pick a memorable tune. I'm sure most of us could hum a Souza March such as "Liberty Bell" more or less after the first time we heard it (most likely on the credits for Monty Python) because whether you like Souza or not he couldn't half write a tune. Trying to remember the tune for something by Stockhausen would be rather more difficult, even if it were of equal length.

Hi Rosfrog

I would not describe it as singing! My daughter (6 going on 30) says I can't sing and she is right.



That sounds like me!

Well, I've managed to do it - not one of the tunes my teacher has asked me to work on, but (don't laught) Baa Baa Black Sheep - I could sing it and "knew" the tune having sung it so much when my daughter was at nursery.

Well it is a start!

I do think the first is the hardest.


Thanks for ALL your tips and advice.

I like Stockhausen, but I still wouldn't describe it as a tune.



I wonder if this is because it's contrapuntal - there are two tunes going on at once, plus the interplay between them.

Great stuff Sandy - no laughing here - any piece of music is a good start to get that process going (a concert pianist friend of mine swears it's how he learns pieces by heart too).