Miguel de Maria -> RE: memorization (Apr. 11 2005 15:27:14)
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I have learned a lot about memorizing from a book on piano by someone named Chang. Understandably, piano scores are much more complex than guitar, in the sense that they have several times more notes than we do; and in classical music, their pieces can be ten minutes, fifteen minutes long. The very first tip is, memorize the piece while you are learning to play it; dont' learn to play it and then try to memorize it. The latter is a big mistake that lots of "visual-linguistic" types make. I used to do it, and it makes things 5 X as hard. The second tip is, learn/memorize the hard and/or hard to memorize parts first. Most people's way of memorizing it just to play the whole or half the piece over and over again, but this is a bad idea. It's a human tendency to avoid mental work, but that doesn't help our goal. Go to the hard parts and work them well. The ending is often hard. Third, cycle. Cycling is take a small segment and playing it over and over again for 2-3 minutes. Often when you have a small segment you can play it much faster than you could otherwise, so take advantage of this fact. It is the amount of accurate repetitions you do that counts. Fourth, do hand seperate practice. This is hard on the guitar, and makes much more sense on the piano, but I think it is still important. There are two things at work here: 1- the mind can't memorize when it is confused. If you pay attention, you will realize that sometimes you are not quite sure what you are doing or what something sounds like, and you will have a very hard time memorizing these things, especailly reproducing them under pressure. This is because the mind is confused. 2- We are really only able to do one thing at a time. When we throw in both hands, we lose a lot of our processing power, and each hand suffers. You will find that you can say, play fast and free with your right hand, but when you throw the elft hand in, you start fumbling. The solution is to work with each hand seperately. Again, it takes a huge amount of mental work because you have to _imagine_ the true sound and you have to really memorize two things, the left and the right. Counterintuitively, this is actually much faster than only memorizing once, with hands together! Fifth, most people don't have something completely memorized until they have forgotten it three times. Use this knowledge to make you more confident and help you to structure your work, not make you distressed. Also, the more you learn, the more you forget. Thus, a good sequence is 1. spend 5 minutes learning one passage, 2. spend 5 minutes learning another passage, 3. spend 5 on yet another passage, 4. going back and memorizing the 1st passage again, etc. Sixth, for some reason the very last repetition before you quit any particular passage is very important. You should slow this one down to not make any mistake or hesitation on it, and then quit. Most people choose this repetition to play it as fast and sloppy as they can manage, which leads them to store these errors for all eternity! Good luck!
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