Memorization

Later on David backtracked a little on his ‘memorize 15 songs’ suggestion. He came to feel that the time needed to get and keep that many songs ‘in your hands’ was better spent learning different songs. That the variation was more helpful than the repetition.

I tend to agree. My experience memorizing (I just went back and memorized Misty again – which is a different story) is that it takes a ton of repetition and a peculiar sort of attention to song structure.

As much as anything I have no need to memorize 15 songs. If I’m playing impromptu I only need 3-4 and if there’s something more planned I’ll just grab a few fakebooks and I’ll have more songs than anyone would be willing to listen to anyway.

Plus, how do you pick just 15 songs? The list would be constantly changing and then you’re right back to the variation thing.

Good point. Taking the fun out of it pretty quickly makes one’s motivation evaporate. In general, if what you’re doing seems tedious do something else for a while – anything else.

Recently having “come back” to the Sudnow method again, I looked over the forum. I see a flurry of activity from 5 months ago, and then nothing. I wonder if those who posted then with the intent of coming back to the Sudnow method are still with it today.

Anyway, here are some thoughts on memorization. I have never been very good at memorization, but have found more success doing as Sudnow described than any other way. Still, getting even a handful of tunes memorized is a struggle, as is keeping them in hand, so I am in the same situation as others here. I think that has a lot to do with my being in and out of the Sudnow method. I get going, making progress, and then hit a brick wall with trying to maintain a repertoire of memorized tunes beyond, say, 5 or so.

In his course, Sudnow emphasizes being able to play any melody we can hum. He says that we need to spend time every day picking out melodies, and in doing so, we become better at doing it. The problem I typically face is not knowing an entire tune all the way through. This probably says more about my listening habits than anything else.

Somebody once told me that there are certain periods of our lives, mainly while growing up, that we really hear the music we are listening to because the tunes are on the radio and we hear them over and over, everywhere. For me, the body of tunes would be the Beatles. If I hear the first notes of any of their older tunes, my mind can fill in the rest. I was exposed to the standards, the body of music that the Sudnow method works with, much later in life when I had to seek them out and listen to them as an aside from my everyday life. I can recognize many of those tunes now, but they are not ingrained as the earlier Beatles tunes are. I think that in order to pick out the melodies by ear, I have to have them ingrained the way those early Beatles tunes are. I pretty much lost interest in the Beatles overall as they got into the more psychedelic stuff, while at the same time I was growing up. At 10 years old, the early Beatles tunes were probably just about right.

Joe Pas said that we should play the music of our generation because that is what we grew up with and therefore, what we truly know on several levels – cultural especially. I did not grow up with the standards, so it will take a lot more listening and effort to be able to hum one all the way through to pick out by ear. That has nothing to do with whether I like them or not, and everything to do with what my own experience and what Joe Pass talked about.

Sudnow described a time when we would be able to pick out a melody we could hum, and our hands would fall into the patterns we had learned by learning those first 15 – 20 tunes. Picking out melodies was to be as much a part of the equation as voicing and playing/memorizing tunes.

Somehow, I never hear anything about the picking out melodies by ear when I read or hear any discussion of the Sudnow method. The picking out melodies part seems to have importance only on the recording of that seminar. However, I am coming to believe that this skill is a necessary aspect of playing tunes so that we don’t have to memorize an entire tune with all the voicings and melody as one big blob that is easily forgotten. I won’t be able to prove it except by going through that effort myself and finding whether that was correct or just one huge misunderstanding on my part.

At this point, I have “Misty”, “As Time Goes By”, and part of “Danny Boy” memorized and well in hand. I found a list of songs to pick out by ear, each with the starting tone given as a numeric element of the scale so I can do them in any key. I know some of the tunes, but certainly not all of those in that list. I think that making my own list of tunes I can successfully play at least most of the way through would be useful.

Every day, I play the scales with one finger and then the whole hand exactly as Sudnow describes, followed by picking out the melody to a tune. For me, continuing to play the scales has simply become a way of easing into the practice mindset, rather than that I don’t yet know them. Then I play through whatever tunes I have memorized, and then work on the new tune. When I am finished with “Danny Boy”, I will switch over to voicing tunes from fakebooks, of which I have plenty. It will be interesting to see how far this approach gets me. It is about as close to what Sudnow described in his seminar as I can think of, based on my understanding after repeated listenings over a period of years.

Tony

Hi Tony, welcome back.

There is a slightly reworked version of David’s info on picking out melodies in the Student Resources section.

I agree that it’s a valuable, if often ignored skill (by me too). I made a comment once to my friend Mary Louise Knutson about not really having any “sounds” in my head when I thought about improvising. Her view was that picking out melodies was probably the most important skill an improvisor could work on.

So think of it not so much as a prerequisite for playing songs by ear but rather as a more direction connection between hearing ‘in your head’ and playing on the piano. Thus the particular melodies you decide to pick out are less important that just the act of transposing them to the keyboard if you will.

As your skill develops you can attempt copying recorded solos or just scatting some little riff and picking that out. I think the end game of the practice is probably much more significant that we probably realize when we start.

But perhaps this deserves a topic of its own…

Hi David. I have, as a guitar player, learned material by ear off recordings for many years. For some reason, this seems much more common among guitar players than players of other instruments. Learning off of recordings is a bit different than picking out melodies by ear. The reason is that, with a recording, it is all there and all you need to do is match the tones you are hearing with notes you play on your instrument. Picking out melodies by ear is typically done from memory, which adds the component of knowing the tune by heart as in being able to hum it before you can pick it out. Sudnow said, in one of his earlier, more complete renditions of that weekend seminar, that as you get involved in picking out melodies, you begin to listen to music differently – more carefully, listening for the melody, etc.

The guitarist, Joe Pass, when I once asked him what he recommended to get started playing chord melody, answered very simply – “learn melodies”. I think his reasoning was very similar to your reasoning, since his focus was always improvisation.

Tony