You have a new piece
in front of you and you know it's going to take
you some time to master it. So you're wondering what's the better
way to learn it? Should I memorize the piece? Or should I keep reading
my sheet music? Hi, I'm Jazer and today I'm going
to explain if you should memorize or keep reading
your sheet music. Now I have students who rely
on memorizing music. I also have students who rely on reading music. Every student is very different. Every student has different skill sets that they
use to learn pieces. Some of my students have really, really great
oral awareness. They might have perfect pitch and therefore these
students tend to rely on those skills
to learn music and so perhaps they don't enjoy reading music as much. And I've also students who are really, really great in their literacy skills. At schools, they tend to have
really good English skills, so their reading comprehension
spelling is quite strong. And so these kids
tend to be quite great sight readers on
the piano as well. They're really able to make sense of the
data they see. On a page and translate
that into meaningful musical information through their fingers. This video is requested
by Burton from Germany. Thanks for the question, Burton. Now the answer to your
question will depend on what your piano goals are. Now, are you wanting to play this piece in a performance setting, or are you wanting to improve
your sight reading. So if the answer to
that question was you want to perform this
piece in a physical setting or you want to, let's say
record this piece. My recommendation is
you should try to memorize the piece. So Take however long you need to
read through your music. Maybe it's a week, two or three. Maybe it's a couple of days. It really depends on what
your skill level is at. And then once you kind
of have a good grasp on the key signature on the
general form of the piece, start to memorize it. Start to do a one, two, three lines, in every practice session. See if you can chunk those information and and get playing without looking at
the music bit by bit. I've always thought memorizing a
piece for performance is a great idea. If you think about, let's say,
let's use the example of American idol or Britain's got talent
or something a talent show. Imagine if a singer held a piece of sheet music in
front of himself or herself. And there was singing
on this world stage with sheet music in front of them. That probably wouldn't make that great an emotional
connection between them and the audience,
would it? Probably not. Now, where pianists were
different from singers, but we kind of have a similar
goal as performance as musical performers. When we get up on stage, we're
trying to create an emotional connection between ourselves and the audience. So what memorizing is good for is when you memorize a piece and you put yourself
on that stage, you're more likely to get
into the flow of the music. You're more likely to get into the zone. You're more likely to express and feel the music. And when you're able
to do that, guess what? Your audience will feel
the same way too. Just doesn't really
happen when you have this piece of black
and white paper in front of you and
you're trying to perform hard to really feel it, hard to really
express it. Because when you're
reading music, you're kind of using a really logical process
of your brain. You're trying to interpret
black and white data and play music through your
fingers. You're not really sort of feeling that music, you know, going with it,
feeling it. Now, if your goal is to
improve your sight reading, then of course, keep
reading your sheet music. Read as much as you can in the 10, 20 pieces that you're
going to learn this year. Really try and just push that reading even more. You know what they say?
Practice makes perfect. You want to get better
at sight reading, read more pieces. Get out those beginner books. Get out those
intermediate books. Start somewhere that is not
overly difficult for you. Try and read as much as you can.
Get familiar with key signatures, get familiar with
chord patterns. You can check out my
sight reading video. I'll link it up here so
you can click on that. A good tip I have for you is whatever grade you
currently are in piano. If you take away two or three grades down, let's say you are
right now in grade five and if I take away two or three
grades, that means it's grade
three or grade two. If you're in grade five,
and you can sight read grade
two or three pieces reasonably well, you make a couple of
mistakes here and there. It's alright but you can generally keep the beat
of the music going. That is pretty good. Okay? If you cannot do that, if I put a great, let's say two piece in front
of you and you a grade five and you just could not
for the life of yourself, play through the piece in some sort of
reasonable fashion, then you probably need to get
your sight reading chops up. Start reading is a tricky topic. It requires a lot of patience. It requires a lot of practice. Start from those beginner
books and work your way up. If you are just not a sight reader. Personally, I've always been more of a memorizer than a sight reader. When I was younger, my mom told me that I would listen to a song once or twice and immediately I was
able to sing the tune perfectly because my brain just
made so much sense of it orally. What that meant though was my
sight reading was not as good as I would've liked
it to be throughout my childhood
because I always relied on memorizing music. Good in some ways not good in some other ways. I wish my teacher
would have been able to help me more with
my sight reading because as you constantly improve in your piano progress
in your piano technique, the pieces you play
are going to get harder and if your sight reading is not at the level at which you
can play those pieces, you're gonna really take a hit to your piano progress. You're not going to increase at the level that
you want to. Similarly, if you only know how to sight read music and you have no memorization
techniques, chances are you're not going
to be able to play those really, really high end
complex pieces. You know, really,
really fast pieces require you to memorize pieces. There are so many
notes in so many, there's so many things
going on in the pieces that it's just physically
impossible to make sense of the 20 notes that you've got
to play at one go. You just got to be able to have some sort of skills
in your brain to make sense
of different chord patterns, different running notes. So if you're a big reader, also work on your
memorization techniques. So the simple answer
is as a pianist, you want to be great
at both of these. You want to be great both at reading music as well
as memorizing music. Often students tend to rely on one
or the other because every brain is different, every brain is unique. Identify which
one you're good at and then start to work
on that other area. So you grow and develop as
a very balanced pianist. Do you prefer to
memorize your music or do you prefer to read sheet music? Let me know in the
comments below. I'd love to chat with
you there. My name is Jazer. Remember to like comment and subscribe
to my channel and I'll catch you in the next tutorial. [Music]
