Tips to Memorize Piano Music

Although there are a lot of sources that claim to have the secret to memory, most people would agree that a good way to memorize something is to associate it with as many of your five senses as possible. Music is a great opportunity to practice your memorizing skills in this way. When most people learn a musical piece, they are only taught to read the music and play it, nothing else. This is the wrong way to learn about music, because if you can only visually read music, you never get to experience the true value of music. Music is an aural medium. It’s sound. It’s made up of vibrations of air, which in turn vibrate your eardrum, alerting the parts of your inner ear, signalling to your brain that you’ve heard a sound. Am I making myself clear? Music is meant to be heard, not just seen.

The best way to memorize music is to use all three of the senses you use for music. Apart from visually memorizing sheet music, listen to several recordings of the piano piece you’re trying to learn. I say you should listen to several recordings so that you don’t have a biased “view” of the piece. Try to find an efficient fingering to play the piece, and use that same fingering every time you play the piece so that you can develop a good muscular memory in your hands. Once you’ve memorized the muscular movements of the piece, you can play it blindfolded fairly easily.

This will give you a way to memorize a piano piece using three if your five senses. If you have a fairly good sense of smell or taste, and you’re able to associate certain smells or tastes with music, do that if it works for you.

Improvisation Tips

If you want to compose music, you might want to spend some time improvising music. Many websites claim that they can teach you to “Improvize blues/jazz/gospel/what-have-you in 12 days… even if you’ve never touched a piano before! Buy our free e-book for $299.99!” That is because they are scams. Yeah, there are probably some good ones, but there are probably hundreds or thousands of courses on the internet that make impossible claims like this. I’m a real cheapskate, so I say if it’s not free, it’s not worth the trouble.

Before you can improvise very well, you have to know a bit about how to play the piano. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try improvising before you’ve reached pianistic enlightenment, but you should learn some practical piano pieces and some music theory as well as learning how to improvise so that you have all areas up to about an equal skill level. If you’re at level 1 (RCM standards) in playing the piano, you’ll probably only be able to improvise at about a grade 1 level, which is okay. If you’ve played the piano for years, and you’ve been improvising all that time as well as playing, you’ll be at a higher improvisation skill level.

If you want to just hit random keys on the piano and see how they sound, go ahead, no one should really stop you. Ideally, you will eventually figure out some interesting techniques on your own.

If you want a bit of a head start, though, I can give you a few tips:

-Know some, if not all, major and minor keys. This is part of musical theory, but it can also help you in improvisation. Knowing music theory isn’t necessary to be good at improvisation, but knowing key signatures can give you a bit of a guide to choosing a melody and chords as you go along.

-Know basic major and minor chords and their inversions. These are the chords you’ll be using most of the time, or at least they’re the chords I use most of the time.

-When practicing improvisation, don’t worry about making it sound perfect or even fitting it with any musical form. If you hit a strange, awkward sounding chord, no one will ever know, so just keep going. Even if you are performing in front of an audience, they probably won’t notice if you just keep going.

-When practicing, record your improvisation sessions on tape, incase you come up with some interesting sounding chords or melodies for more structured musical compositions. For this reason, try to get a higher quality sound recorder than I got (I got a not-very-good tape recorder that always changes the key of a musical piece by a whole tone or so when you play it back) so that you can listen to each individual note in each chord.

-Use this as an opportunity to finally practice scales and arpeggios. Try experimenting by playing different chords on different hands, playing scales in different directions, or playing arpeggios with scales. Do whatever you want.

-Listen to a lot of piano music in your favourite musical genre. For example, I like bold romantic-era music like Franz Liszt, so I listen to a lot of that kind of music. So, my improvisations, annoyingly, sound a lot like that.

Improvising on the piano, however, is something you learn best by doing, so these tips are jut some guidelines and suggestions. Find out what works out best for you.

Your Learning Style

When practicing a new piece on your particular musical instrument, it is important to know how you learn things best. It will help you make more efficient use of your practicing time.

For example, being a male, I learn best in a linear way, focusing on one thing at a time. Over the past week, I’ve been teaching myself to play “Waltz in F Minor” by Chopin. To be fair, this is a relatively easy piece for a person of my skill level. However, I’ve been focusing on learning this one new piece instead of a bunch of new pieces. To break it down even further, I’ve focused on learning this piece hands separately before learning it hands together. Actually, I played it all the way through hands together the first time just to hear how it sounds, and since then I’ve been practicing it hands separately. I’m starting to see why a lot of other people I know, who play the piano, don’t get the chance to play pieces by ear: it’s really easy to play the music by reading the sheet music if you don’t care how it sounds. By focusing on these separate things, I could probably play the piece hands together fairly easily.

I learn in many different ways, though. For example, my piano teacher is teaching me to play four-octave scales and chromatic scales. In my practice sessions, I always make sure to do some improvisation (which I record on a tape) and, in this improvization, I’ve put in a few cool-sounding chromatic scale-like things. So, I’m learning a very boring concept in a way that interests me.

So, take your learning style into consideration when learning new pieces or concepts.