Memorization tips for musicians

🧠My memorization tricks!
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Now something I’ve heard a lot over the years is “Shannon how can you memorize music so quickly? It just doesn’t work for me”
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Well I understand that and I am someone who it just comes to really easily to - I will accidentally memorize a piece just by practising a lot and digging into the music.
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However…
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There are things that I do to reinforce my work with memorization so that I’m not just relying on that good old fashion muscle memory.
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👉🏻 Analysis. This is probably my main thing. Even just surface level. Right off the bat, I am looking for patterns in the music and identifying what parts are the same, the same but in a different key, what parts are similar, scale patterns, leaps, weird little things here and there that aren’t really related to anything, etc. This brings me to my next one…
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🎨 Using colour. Now don’t go playing paint by numbers in your pristine Bärenreiter copy of Bach sonatas - copy it, colour it with whatever colour device it is that you can use but still read the music. This will be like a paint by numbers kind of thing. Use certain colours for different moods if you’re trying to remember to portray moods, use certain colours for repeated sections - remember that analysis you did earlier? Yeah take some colour to that.
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🎧Mega amounts of listening and singing your part to yourself. Yeah sure you might be saying “I’m a flutist I am not a singer!” Well you’re wrong - we may not be a singer like singers are, but we sing through our instrument, and with a voice we can sing it to ourselves. We have to get used to being able to sing our music to ourselves to internalize it, and be able to present it musically and accurately.
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These are some of the things that helped me. We’re all individuals so you have to find what works for you. If these helped you or you have something else to add please do share!

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