This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com today with a great tip for you about how to memorize music faster. Don’t we all want to be able to learn music faster? Someday maybe they’ll put a chip in your head and you’ll have all the sonatas of Beethoven or the well-tempered Clavier of Bach. Wouldn’t that be great? In the meantime, we’ve got to go through and memorize music. I’ve explained in detail in some of my other videos the process.
HOW TO PRACTICE THE PIANO PART 1 – MEMORIZING MUSIC
Today I’m not going to go into all the details about how to memorize. I’m going to show you one incredibly important technique that can save you vast amounts of time:
Practicing in Chords First
Let’s say you were learning the famous Mozart Sonata in C major K 545. As I’ve explained before, you want to learn hands separately first. Start with a little section, something you can digest relatively quickly. You want to be productive your entire practice section instead of taking on a big section that wears you out for the day too early on. Pay attention to the left hand. What is it doing? It is what is referred to as alberti bass, basically broken chords.
It seems like a lot of notes. Or is it? If you think about it, it is really just several broken chords.
The whole first measure can be reduced down to one chord!
This has many benefits for you. You will understand intrinsically the underlying harmony. This is because you see the chords you are playing instead of separate notes. It also enables you to discover the best fingering to accommodate chord to chord instead of thinking separate notes. You’re going to understand the structure of the music better, you’ll find a better fingering, and it is less to learn.
This was a short tip but it can save you hours of work when learning your music while solidifying your understanding of the underlying harmonic structure. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Again, Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. See you next time.
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