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 aural 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]