How to Memorize Piano Music (FOREVER)

your ability to play with musicality and freedom at the piano is a direct result of how much your brain remembers from your practice sessions and so memory is an incredibly important aspect of learning how to play the piano regardless of if your goal is to memorize a piece from the beginning to the end completely in today's video I'm going to give you three steps that are going to help you solidly memorize any piece of piano music the first step in memorizing piano music forever is to understand the four types of memory that are at play when you are learning how to play the piano this step is essential because it's going to inform what you do at the next two steps so the first kind of memory is your muscle memory and it's usually the fastest to develop and it's also the least reliable muscle memory is the kind of memory that you have if you've ever been playing a piece of music and you are playing through it and everything is going well and then all of a sudden you make one mistake and you can't get back on track you completely lose your spot it's a crash and burn type situation and you have to start over or you have to go back in the muse music and restart in order to get back on track that's how you know that you have muscle memory but you don't have the other kinds of memory muscle memory is wildly important so don't get me wrong it's really important that muscle memory develops you just don't want to be in a position where the muscle memory develops and then you stop developing your memory the second kind of memory is your oral memory and that is remembering how things sound at the piano so you have oral memory with your piece if when you are doing the dishes or when you're doing a different task you can hear The Melody of your piece in your head or you know what it sounds like away from the piano you also have oral memory if you're playing a piece of music and you can predict in your mind what's coming up in the music the Third Kind of memory is your visual memory and that's where you can remember not only what it looks like on the page when you're staring at the music but also what your hands look like on the keys when you're playing through the piece you have a general sense of where your hands are if they're high if they're low if they're going in opposite directions if they're going in the same direction and then lastly we have the cognitive memory That's The Fourth Kind and the cognitive memory is really a culmination of all of those kinds of memory plus it's that cognitive element and the example that I always give for cognitive memory is that if I were to hand you a piece of manuscript paper and now we're going to say okay write your piece of music on this paper you would be able to do it from the very first note of the piece to the very last note of the piece you know all the notes you know all the Rhythm you could write in the peddling marks the dynamic marks everything and the cognitive memory is like the big gold star that's what you should be shooting for all the time again it doesn't matter if your goal is to actually play your piece fully from memory or if your goal is to just be able to play your piece with freedom and musicality strengthening that cognitive memory is going to be immensely helpful in getting you to either of those goals now that you understand the four types of memory we're gonna go to step two and step two is that we're going to create puzzles that our brain has to solve to strengthen each of those four types of memory now don't worry I'm going to give you many suggestions in this step and when you go to practice these suggestions it's going to feel hard because whenever you're trying to commit something to memory it's not an easy task it's not something that you can do on autopilot you have to be fully focused you have to be fully present in the moment and it often feels like your brain is breaking a little bit and so when you go to implement some of these suggestions you're going to know it's working if it's really really hard but I want you to power through and I want you to stay on that path and continue to practice in these ways because it's very much going to strengthen your memory so thinking about the different types of memory we can utilize different puzzles specifically to strengthen each type of memory so one of my favorite puzzles for your brain to solve for the visual memory is to actually take your music away from the piano and turn on a recording of your piece and just have yourself follow along in the music oftentimes people can't even do this the first time because they're not used to hearing the music up to Tempo and being able to track where the actual notes are in the score that alone is going to strengthen your visual memory a lot another thing that you can do to strengthen your visual memory and it actually also works on some of the other kinds of memory as well is to jump around in your piece so don't always start from the same point when you're practicing especially if you're always starting from the beginning make sure that you start from the end of the piece make sure that you start in the middle of the piece and always practice starting in different areas not only does this strengthen your visual memory because you have a much stronger Association of where things are on the page when you randomly start like that it also actually strengthens your other types of memory as well I'm gonna put a piece up on the screen and I want you to see if you can follow along beat by beat and track with your eyes where I am playing in the music [Music] thank you now depending on if that was really easy or really hard for you you can kind of see how that might be a good puzzle for your brain to try to solve especially if it's a piece of music that you are working on and that you're trying to get to know better to strengthen your oral memory what I want you to focus on is trying to sing your piece as you play it working towards trying to sing it away from the piano and it doesn't matter if you're a singer or not I do not consider myself to be a singer but I can certainly match the pitch enough to follow along while I'm playing it doesn't have to sound good you can do this when you're alone when no one else is listening but you're going to follow along and sing with that Melody because it's going to get the melody into your ear one side note and like a very helpful secret to know about learning how to play beautifully is that as long as you are voicing your Melody whatever you're playing is going to sound a lot better and if you hear the melody and you are actively listening to the melody you are naturally going to bring it out if you're unclear on where the melody is or if you go to do this exercise and you find that you can't sing along with your piece that's a really good indicator that you don't know it as well as you think you do and that you really do need to sing along with that Melody to not only get it in your ear but to get it to the point that you can predict what's coming next and that you know the piece on a deeper level so if I'm doing that while I'm playing I can literally just hum along or sing along while I play it doesn't matter what syllable you're singing on it doesn't matter what words you put to it I'm just going to kind of sing like law [Music] it doesn't have to be amazing you just have to be able to follow along and doing that away from the piano you can grab your music and actually go somewhere else and I would highly recommend that you go somewhere else because that's going to give you a realistic idea of how well you know the Melody [Music] I want to have a sense of where I am and what's coming next it doesn't matter as much if I'm totally on the exact accurate pitch what matters here is that you can predict what's coming and you know the sound well enough to recall it muscle memory naturally will develop if you are practicing effectively and efficiently so if you're using revolutionary practice methods like the Post-it method practicing in rhythms those are very much going to amplify the speed with which you can develop muscle memory if you are practicing half hazardly like you're just sitting down and playing your piece over and over and over again it's going to take you a very long time to develop muscle memory I have a video called piano practice techniques to fix every problem in your piano playing and utilizing the exercises from that video is really going to help you get a jump start on the muscle memory I'll link that in the description below I'm not going to go too deep into the muscle memory because the majority of the Revolutionary practice techniques that I talk about are going to help strengthen that muscle memory lastly some great puzzles that will work to strengthen your cognitive memory are to analyze the patterns in the piece of music now this is something that will vary depending on your level because if you know music theory really well then you can do like an actual harmonic analysis of the piece and that's going to be really helpful if you are newer to music theory or you don't know a lot of Music Theory that's okay just start to look at the piece with a little bit of a magnifying glass I talk about this a lot in the course that I taught called secrets to sight reading I'll link that in the description below as well and finding the patterns in music is hugely helpful because it helps you have a context for what you're seeing on the page Beyond just the notes so some common patterns would be intervals or chords or scale passages or even patterns that you notice like when the Rhythm repeats or when a certain Melody repeats and noticing those patterns and actually marking up your music so that it visually shows you where those patterns are are going to help you get to know the piece on a deeper cognitive level one of my other favorite puzzles for strengthening the cognitive memory is to also force myself to memorize one hand at a time so I'll take a section of music and I often won't start at the beginning let's say a section right in the middle you take one phrase and you memorize the right hand all by itself and if your Melody is in the right hand that's not going to be too bad but then you memorize the left hand or you memorize the accompaniment pattern and that is almost always way more difficult and then once you memorize each hand separately you put them together going through this process really helps you understand exactly what's going on in each phrase now there are a ton more puzzles that we create for cognitive memory but they come at different levels and that leads me to step three step three is that you continue to create puzzles with increasing difficulty as the piece gets more and more into your memory memory is kind of a funny thing because it's not always a linear process success and the way that our brain works is that we don't always remember things exactly in order so when you're memorizing it's very important that you switch things up like I've mentioned you don't always start from the beginning you can always practice things backwards and that gets things really deep into your memory but once you try some of the suggestions from the video and you get to the point where you realize that they're pretty easy you're going to need that next puzzle and so I have a couple of other videos on memory and we also talk a lot about this in the Casual to confident piano player program I help piano players in our live classes work through some of this and we create custom exercises that are tailored to your pieces and your level and the skills that you need to work on specifically to level up your memory so I'm going to link in the description below to Casual to competent piano player you can check that out at the time of recording this video it's only the waitlist that is open enrollment is not open but you can go ahead and get on the waitlist to make sure that you are one of the first people to know next time it opens and I'm also going to link a couple of other videos that I've done about memorizing piano music that have some other additional puzzles that you can use to continue to strengthen your memory now if you're not already in my free Facebook Community get your booty over there it's an amazing super quickly I post a lot of content that isn't here on the channel and we do live challenges and workshops it's an incredible place I'll put that link in the description and you can also join using the link on the screen right here [Music]

Channel: Ashlee Young Piano Studio

Views: 41,164

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Id: b-4xPM9A0nU

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 20 2023