When learning a new song, how many notes/chords do you feel is best to put into groups for fastest retention?
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Thereās no right answer to this, I think. Because it changes as you grow as a player.
When youāre a beginner youāre encoding information as āthis string, that fretā which is a very inefficient way of encoding information. As you get better the chunks will grow, e.g. you might recognize a piece of vocabulary in a song youāre learning and thatās now one chunk instead of say seven pairs of (string, fret).
Learning more music theory is also a way to make this stuff easier to remember. Instead of encoding a bunch of strings and frets you can now think in terms of e.g. a lydian scale run. At that point you just need to remember the start and end points along with the shape of the run.
As your ear and fretboard knowledge increase you get yet another angle of attack. If youāve already listened to the song a lot then youāre able to use your inner ear to guide you. Now you donāt even need to remember the start points and end points of that lydian run because you can pre-hear that itās starting on the third and ending with a wild bend from the flat 7th to the root of the target chord in the next bar.
At the very end of the spectrum you have people like Mozart whoāas the legend has itāwas able to instantly reproduce long complex pieces on the piano after only hearing them once.
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I agree, tho no matter the familiarity with music we still mostly learn in sections or blocks of info, Iāve read most people can hold about four unique bits of info in working memory. So there is bound to be an optimum number of notes to practice at a time?
This guy (a piano god and conservatory professor) memorized 265 minutes of Bach! I suspect that he memorizes at a very high level and hears the music in his brain while his fingers magically reach out to make the notes (that then hit his ears). I think that āchunkingā makes sense at the start, but it has to be replaced with much higher-order abstractions.
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Maybe somewhat off-topic, but this is an interesting book on the subject. Itās written from the perspective of classical music but it contains some interesting thoughts on the subject.
It might also be worth mentioning that this is something that might lend itself to visualisation practice. Try to mentally play through the song or sections of it away from the instrument, provided that you have some way of checking that youāre recalling it correctly. A lot of the process of memorising is in the act of trying to recall, according to a couple of books Iāve read on the subject, so if you donāt remember the section then it might be more useful to try to recall it for a couple of minutes rather than reading it again from the sheet music. The harder it is to recall, given that you actually manage to recall the information without cheating, the stronger the neural pathways(memories) will become. Link to one of them for anyone interested:
There would probably be an optimum number of notes to practice, but thinking in a ānumber of notesā classification of the music might be limiting memorisation in that one might use up the chunks on individual notes. I imagine that being able to shift the perspective to other types of chunks would be easier, rather than remembering the notes C, E, G, then it could be chunked into āC-chordā. Rather than C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C then chunked it could be āC-major ascending onceā etc. This is probably just repeating Larsā point but I think it bears repeating. I still catch myself sometimes trying to memorise individual notes but donāt think to shift the perspective to realise that I can remember a passage as arpeggios over a common chord progression, once I remember to do this the whole section can be remembered as āarpeggio over I-ii-V, starting og fret xā, for example. So maybe the best number of notes would be the biggest ālogicalā chunks you can make based on how it looks on the fretboard, how strongly you can connect the sound to the fretted notes, the biggest section you can fit into a music theoretic concept or any other memory hooks you can use?
@kgk: Do you think there is a difference in āhigher order abstractionsā and chunking? In my mind you can only really increase the size of chunk and would think of anything I can conceive of as higher order abstractions as a very advanced way of chunking. Would be interested to hear how you would differentiate the two concepts.
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Unfortunately I donāt have the level of education that these top-tier musicians have, but I have spoken to a fair amount of them and have some hints: I know with ācertaintyā that they think in terms of musical phrases and the intent of the composer, and that while their technique sometimes requires painful note-by-note optimization to figure out how to play something as they wish, I donāt think that itās how they remember anything. I know that when their eyes are on sheet music paper they hear their piano, perhaps by analogy to how I can look at this text and hear āvoices,ā and I also know that when they are playing they āhearā their mental piano just before their finger hits the real piano key. GG was talking about playing guitar this same way, and I suspect it is common to all top musicians.
I think that @Mmason has a very interesting idea, to read the books that classical musicians use to memorize pieces, although pop music is likely much easier given the simplicity of the structure and the large amount of repeating material.
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I think Pete Thorn done a video about how he learns large amounts of materialā¦ havenāt got the link to hand, but Iām sure that you could find it easily on YouTubeā¦
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I learn it in sections.
If I cant find a good tab I make a lead sheet but thatās another topic.
Other things that greatly assist me
Are listening I listen over and over until I can hear it in my head.
If there are spots that are rythmicly tricky my teacher taught me to sing that section out loud and this will help you feel it.
Usually I can find a way to count it though.
Once I have the listening and some form of paper form down I attack sections.
Not necessarily in order, some stuff is difficult and some is easier. I tackle the largest easiest portion so I feel progress. While Iām doing that I still toy with the tricky parts but not so much that it frustrates me. More or less focusing on memorizing the order of the notes and best fingering.
Once Iām mostly there I focus more on the tricky stuff while still running through the easier stuff.
Once Iām pretty good with all that I start combining the parts. Actually I did a bit of that earlier too but now smooth transitions is the focus.
Now I run it as a whole until I feel good
Next itās time to play it in time with a beat/back track etc.
This can feel weird but keep At it and focus on the trouble spots and it will come.
Now and only now do I feel ok about telling my buddy Iām ready to come over and play it together. Sometimes that goes smoothly but I mostly expect that we will have some stuff to iron out between us unless we practiced from the exact source material.
Of course the chunks will at times need to be focused on note by note but that will be obvious
One problem is people can tab a song without actually playing it up to tempo.
So you will find lots of tab with convenient or impossible positions. This is where fretboard knowledge comes in handy.
To me itās like eating an elephant.
You do it one bite at a time.
And try not to think about the butthole too much
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you guys know of āthe memory palaceā?
Thereās a system to convert numbers to images for memorization.
Iām wondering is there one for notes,chords?
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Instead of converting numbers to images
We convert them to sounds.
Like learning the alphabet via turning it into a song.
Melodies are good memory aides.
Not saying there is no merit in investigating
Just that we do have a system.
Thatās the approach I use. If I can remember what itās supposed to sound like, I can usually remember how to play it. The only times I struggle to memorize music is when I try to memorize with my hands or mind instead of my ears.
I tried to walk on my eyes once, didnāt work out