The SIMPLEST Trick To Memorize Music FASTER
Why is it so hard to memorize music? Do you wish there was an easier way?
Well I’m telling you that there is. All you have to is:
take the music you are learning,
hold it up to the brightest source of light you can find, (the sun is a great option. If it’s night time, wait until the morning. If this is taking too long, try going to sleep, it’ll make the time go faster)
then stare at the music for no less than 20 minutes.
And try not to blink!
With any luck, the music will be permanently seared into your retinas. And when it comes time to play the song just close your eyes, and voila! Memorized.
This is actually why you see so many pro musicians playing with their eyes closed on stage — they are simply reading the music that they’ve burned into their eyes.
This method is called ‘photosynthesis’ and has been used for billions of years.
But you may be asking, “Tommaso, is there a way to memorize music that doesn’t involve permanent nerve damage and probable blindness?”
Ah, tough audience. Ok, there actually is! It may not be as quick as the method above, but it hurts less, and you can perform with your eyes open.
In the video linked below, I’ll show you exactly what you should do if you want to memorize music without staring directly at the sun.
Want something else to memorize? How about everything you'll ever need to know about scales and modes? Check out my Master of the Modes guitar course if you want to expand your knowledge of scales on the guitar and make awesome music.
Video Transcription
Hello Internet, so nice to see you. Occasionally as musicians we need to memorize our pieces. We can sight -read them, we can memorize them, we can improvise them, we can do a number of things, but occasionally you are stuck in having to memorize a long and complex piece.
How do you do that? Well, a student asked me exactly that, and in my answer I will show you a very unconventional but unreasonably effective strategy to learn long pieces. I am showing this strategy for the piece that the student asked me about, which is a baroque piece, it's a Bach piece, but simply because that's what he's asking, but the same idea will work for pretty much any other style.
So brace yourself and here we go. Can you make it easier to memorize stuff? No. It's like too hard to do, but really I've heard this strategy, you can play it very slowly, you can repeat it a lot, work in small chunks, build your chunks up.
Is there anything else I should be doing besides that that I can do to maybe help make it go faster or alternatively make it feel less frustrating while I'm doing it? Well, I was trying to learn Bach Spore, and I've got the first half of it and I'm starting to do the second half, and I've been working on it since I've been here and I'm kind of shaky on two measures.
There are a few strategies. Now, a baroque musician will memorize the bass line first. So a pure baroque musician will just try to go through the whole piece and looking at the bass line and saying, okay, when we are in this key, when we are in the other key, what kind of patterns I do in the bass line, like 1, 3, 4, 5, 1, 5, whatever.
And how a baroque musician will think. The rest is the stuff you put on top and it's easier at this point. But that's quite a strange strategy for us, because we've not been trained that way, okay? So what I'm telling you, why I'm telling you that, because a baroque piece is completely foreign to you, because there are no chords the way you think of chords, there are, they're thinking about something that you're not been trained to think about,
maybe yet, maybe not. But, so the other, it's a solution that is literally learned not by not, which is not the best. So what I will start, I will identify where are the cadences, okay? Where is a cadential movement, like a five -to -one, maybe in what key it is, okay?
And you hear it, you hear it in the piece. It's like every time you go like, that's how, and then they go in another key and do exactly the same, no? And the same thing there, and then they go to another key and they do whatever, and then they go...
And then there's another one there, and so on and so forth. So essentially 5 -1 or 2 -5 -1 or 4 -5 -1 or something else, 5 -1, okay? And that will start from those. Even if there are gaps in between.
Something like, what is the first 1 -4 -5 -1 or 1 -2 -5 -1, or is TPI the first few bars? Okay, by the way. And then just mark it on the score. That's a 5 -1. That's another 5 -1. That's another 5 -1.
That's another 5 -1. You're going to find them consistently throughout the piece. It's just kind of the defining characteristic of the style. By the way, that will work for jazz too. So I will start from there.
Maybe I will learn just the 5 -1. So the first 5 -1 will be probably somewhere like here. The next 5 -1 is in a different key and it's here. The next 5 -1 is in a different key and it's here. I will just learn those.
Okay. Because this way, I can go through the whole piece more or less. And I can already establish where this stuff works on the guitar. And the thing I need too much is not all the notes, but the lowest note and the highest note.
The notes in between, you can fit them however you want. It's kind of understood, okay? Yeah, so you're saying that's like the big structural stuff. Memorize the big structural stuff first. Yes, yes.
Maybe separate the bass line from the melody separately. Well, the thing is that it's a cadence is a cadence is a cadence. Back and do cadence in all the possible keys, but it's still the same 5 -1 movement.
The first thing you're going to do... is that you're going to learn, essentially, a lot of different ways of playing 5 -1 on the guitar. But first of all, that's useful in general. Even if that's the only baroque piece you learn, you learn something that you can actually use somewhere else because it's going to happen everywhere, anywhere.
So you start building some vocabulary that will work for that style or other styles, rather than just learning a piece and then forgetting it. And since you're doing and you're marking this before, and again, you can go by E, you can go by looking at a score, but you just mark all of those.
And you concentrate just on that, you're going to find it's the same thing, same thing, same thing. So it's easy to remember because it's the same thing, but it's in different keys, somewhere else in the fretboard, sometimes the top note of the one is the one, sometimes the top note of the one is the three, and then the top note of the one is the five, apparently.
But you start having this kind of idea and see how the whole thing goes. Right. Okay. And you also know what keys is moving. So you're kind of learning a lot of useful stuff because you have the position on the guitar fretboard.
When does he end on the one? When does he end on the three? When he ends on an inversion instead? What keys he is going through and in what order? So you learn a lot about the piece, you learn a lot about how music works in general, and you are learning the piece.