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.

Why Compose Music?

Yes, I’m still procrastinating from actually teaching you HOW to compose music. However, in this particular post, I will tell you my top ten reasons WHY you should compose music if you play a musical instrument.

1 – Composing music for a particular instrument allows you to explore the limits of your abilities on that instrument. For example, I found out that I have no sense of counterpoint, but I’m pretty good at playing big, sweeping arpeggios.

2 – Composing music requires you to use your musical ear. Needless to say, this is very good ear training.

3 – When you can only play music, not compose it, you see there being lowly musical performers such as yourself, vs great musical composers like Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bartok, Bizet, Bellini, Berlioz, and Rimsky-Korsakoff. When you can both play and compose music, this border between “you” and “them” begins to blur, as you put up with the same challenges that they might have had to put up with.

4 – Along with the border between “you” and “them” blurring, you now have the choice to compose your own music instead of/as well as playing music that everyone’s already heard. If there’s a musical piece you want to hear, but it hasn’t been written yet, you have to compose it yourself.

5 – You get to use that musical theory I’m sure you’ve all spent years studying. Finally, it’s good for something.

6 – Composing music is something you learn throughout your entire life: even at the end of J.S. Bach’s life, he was still experimenting with the possibilities of counterpoint.

7 – Like me, you get to complain about there not being enough musical composition blogs on the internet.

8 – Being able to write a sheet music score also improves your ability to read sheet music scores.

9 – Composing music allows you to take advantage of the interesting techniques used in pieces you’re learning/have learned how to play.

10 – Composing music improves your concentration, especially if you can write music without using an instrument.

The End of the Challenge

Just today, I finished my final (fifteenth) composition in my personal challenge to compose fifteen musical pieces in thirty days. I must say, I’m glad that’s over. By the end, I really didn’t care about my compositions, and I decided to make them a minimum of one line long each. Overall, I don’t think it was a successful way to force myself to compose quality music.

However, I did compose some music, so it wasn’t a complete waste. It’s my philosophy that nothing anyone ever does can possibly be a COMPLETE waste to the universe. The results may not be, in a subjective point of view, “positive”, but the universe is always changing.

Still, I think I’ll take a break from composing music for a while, and start planning for NaNoWriMo. I enjoy composing music, but too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. A good plan would be to compose music every second day, to give my brain a rest. It’s like how I update my blogs every second day. I write one post for this blog, then I proofread it and post it the next day. On the third day, I write a post for my journal blog, and on the fourth day, I edit that post. On the fifth day, I start the cycle again, and that seems to keep my mind always refreshed and eager to start on the next blog post.

A good amount of time for me to compose music each day, I think, would be half an hour to a whole hour. It wouldn’t be too hard to find half an hour to and hour each day when it’s quiet and I can focus entirely on the music. If I get tires of working on one piece, I could conitnue by working on another piece for the rest of the hour, composing for a certain amount of time each day rather than for a certain quantity of music.

Day 12 of the Challenge

It’s day 12 of my Musical Composition Challenge, and I’m still going strong. Well, as far as quantity of music goes. The quality of the musical pieces, as well as my enthusiasm, are going down, but I’ve composed 11 pieces already, only missing one day. So, I’ve almost finished the challenge.

I’ve come to a conclusion, though: composing one musical piece every two days for a month (that was my original goal) may have its challenges, but it’s not the best way to compose music in the long run. Composing 15 pieces of music in a month isn’t like NaNoWriMo’s idea of writing a novel in a month. Most people know how to read text in their own language very well, but if you’re a composer, you might not be able to sight read your own music perfectly and quickly. That’s working with the theory that most musicians fall into two categories: those who can sightread and play very well without knowing a lot aobut ear training and improvisation, or those who know how to improvise and play very well by ear but can’t sight read very quickly. I think that most composers like myself fall into the latter category.

Although perhaps filling one page of sheet music per day isn’t the best way to compose music, perhaps working for a certain amount of time each day is good. For example, one hour per day is perfect. It gives you a chance to allow yourself to get focused on the music, and if you get bored of working on one piece, you can always move onto the next. Working for a certain amount of time rather than aiming for a certain quantity of music would be less rushed than feeling like you have to compose a certain amount each day, but oddly enough, it might actually be more productive.

Trying Out Different Practicing Methods

Franz Liszt claimed that, for many years, he was sure he had never practiced the piano for less than 10 hours every day. As superhuman as that sounds, it does make sense that Liszt would spend most of his waking life playing the piano. After all, his “Transcendental Etudes” were so difficult when he first composed them that he realized that he was the only one who could possibly play them. He wrote simpler versions of them, and the simpler versions are still among the most difficult piano pieces ever composed.

Most of us aren’t Franz Liszt. Most of us couldn’t compose a set of some of the most difficult etudes of all time at the age of 15 (being 14 years old now, I suddenly feel as if all my time on Earth so far has been wasted). And most of us don’t have ten free hours during the day to practice the piano. In fact, I’m probably lucky that I have the opportunity to practice several times a week, for (I think) a little over an hour each time. But then, I enjoy playing the piano. I don’t procrastinate playing the piano and choose to do something fun: for me, playing the piano IS something fun.

I think that’s the main reason that I’m so relatively good at playing the piano: it’s because I have fun doing it. Of course, my skills are not completely unsurpassed. In fact, I might be in the top ten percent of the piano-playing population as far as practical playing goes, which may sound good, but there are a LOT of people in the world who play the piano. I always get a bit jealous when I hear about child prodigies who were able to, like, memorize entire concertos by Rachmaninoff at the age of six. How is it even physically possible for a six-year-old child to play a concerto by Rachmaninoff? Rachmaninoff’s hands were huge, he composed music with chords that were about 9 whole steps wide (that’s about from a C to the next E on a piano). There’s no way a six-year-old could have fingers long enough to play that.

But enough of my immature complaining about people who are better than be at something. My practice methods, to put it simply, are wrong, but I’m trying to make them better, one step at a time. For one, they say it’s not a good idea to practice every single day. Like weight training, you should take a day to let your mind rest. My current schedule is practicing Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. I have my piano lessons on Tuesday, but we basically just cover musical theory during those classes, since they’re only about half an hour long and the total time duration of the pieces I’m learning totals to over an hour.

Although a lot of people don’t like having to practice the piano all the time (I didn’t always like it either) I’m now at a skill level at which it’s easy, and I can progress fairly quickly. It took me years to get to this skill level, and I still have a lot to learn, but now that I enjoy learning new pieces and composing music, the rest of the journey (if there’s even an end to it, which I know there isn’t) should be much easier and much more fun.

My typical practice session consists of playing the few songs I’m trying to learn all the way through from beginning to end. They say, though, that one shouldn’t just practice a piano piece all the way through, and that they should learn the most difficult parts first. I haven’t actually tried this method: I usually just play a piano piece from beginning to end over and over again until I memorize it at the right speed with the right notes and the right dynamics. But hey, this new system of learning the difficult parts first might be worth a shot.

Another thing to try out is piano exercises. One could just do scale and arpeggio exercises, or one could by a book of piano exercises on sheet music. Me, I think most of those books are too cutesie, so I’m trying to learn Chopin’s Etudes (second in difficulty only to Liszt’s). How am I doing so far, you ask? Not great, but I am trying to get into the habit of reading and following the fingering mentioned in the book. Chopin knows best, I say.

So, that’s what I’m trying out. I’m not saying anything is right or wrong, but you should try out different practicing methods and see what works best for you. I will make a mental note to write about practicing methods in more detail in the future.