You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Improve Memory Work

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

For today's episode, Peter and Adam answer a question on how to memorize tunes.Today's episode is sponsored by the Oxford American. The Oxford American is a magazine dedicated to documenting the complexity and vitality of the American South. Its award-winning annual music issue comes with a CD sampler and digital download - a must-have for any serious music fan. Recent issues have featured Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk, John Cage, and John Cage. Visit https://www.oxfordamerican.org/yhi today for a special subscription discount!You can also listen to Adam's Piedmont blues playlist here: https://open.spotify.com/user/12741112/playlist/5lrwwGlpLFHbMRt1PMn5hb?si=bW4mUALYSu-8pHBAsbBckgThe ending theme song for today's episode is "The Outreach Theme Song" by Christopher Wilson. To get your music featured on You'll Hear It, send an MP3 recording of your music to [e-mail] us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, what's your name again? I don't remember. I don't remember either. Where am I? I'm Adam Maness. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear at Podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you.

Today's episode is sponsored by the Oxford American. We've been introducing this new sponsor all week. Very excited. You know, I have been reading the Oxford American for a while now. And there's one article I found that I think would be an interest to our lovely You'll hear at listeners. It's called Picking Up the Piedmont Blues by Benjamin Hadeen. and it's super, super interesting

about this very specific type of blues music that goes in tobacco country. It was developed in tobacco country around tobacco farming and a beautiful article written about it. There was a event last year with Gerald Clayton who did a whole concert on the Piedmont Blues. It's what it's called. Very specific type of blues.

Sounds very familiar, I think, to most people. It's that finger-picking guitar style that has been... North Carolina, right? Yeah, and it's been completely used by so many folk guitarist, rock guitarists, but started here in Tobacco Country in the Carolinas. And Gerald Clayton did a whole concert at Duke University around that. And anyway, I made a playlist of some of the kind of pillars of the Piedmont Blues style,

and you can check that out at you'll hear it.com. And as always, go to Oxfordamerican.org slash you'll hear it, or slash, sorry, slash Y-H-I. Right. A little special subscription offer just for our listeners there to introduce you. But yeah, I mean, Oxford American

is great for learning about such things that can really be a wonderful I'm super excited to check out your playlist because I love getting inspiration from, you know, different areas to inform my music and what I'm doing and freshen things up.

We talk about all the different great recordings. But what the wonderful thing about jazz is is taking the blues, classical, folk, all these. these different elements and filtering it through this great prism of jazz. Well, what's so cool is, like, one of the hallmarks of the Piedmont style is these uneven phrases, like five-bar phrases or, you know, these over-the-bar line kind of things where the melody stretches the phrase.

And I remember Sean Jones talking about that. So it's like it's still continuing to this day, you know, like Sean Jones is writing tunes like this, you know, that started here with the Piedmont Blues. So check that out. Absolutely. Good stuff. All right. So today we are talking about beyond just the Piedmont. Piedmont Blues, we are talking about how to improve memory work.

What? I don't remember. We got an email here from, no, this is from our private secret, super special. You got to remember not to tell everybody about that. This was from Sarah, and Sarah asked, paraphrased here, how do I make a tune stick that I'm trying to memorize? How do you set yourself up to memorize for long term while practicing? Yes. Okay, so this is an area that is, you know, if you can kind of develop some techniques on this,

and hopefully we'll give you some of our ideas and you can work these in to what you're already doing, but this is something that you can apply to, you know, many different styles into your music, your professional career, how quickly you can kind of develop how you absorb music. Like a lot of, like this can really push things. Like we talk about practice techniques. This is like memorization techniques and stuff, visualization, all these different things. This can have like an exponential effect on your playing. So it's super important.

So thank you for the question, Sarah. And I think that, you know, memorizing music for me, when I've been most successful at it, has been about really getting a deep, overall conceptual understanding of that piece of music from the very beginning, from before you even memorizing it, and then getting away from the page as quickly as you can. So when you do that, it actually can take longer to learn the music. Like we think about, okay, I want to learn this piece. And, you know, we could take, it really could be anything. We could talk about a long classical piece, a very short, eight bar blues.

It doesn't make any difference. It's the same thing. It's just how much you're having to go through. But, you know, to just learn to play something with the music, you can actually do that quicker than what you would take to memorize it at the same time. So most people go through and they say, okay, I'm going to learn this piece and then they can play it. Say on a piano piece. Mozart Sonata, Thelonius Montoon.

Wow. Okay, I know the piece. You don't actually know the piece. You know technically how to get through it, how to kind of play it in time from using the visual cues. And then you would be like, okay, now I'm going to go and memorize the piece. So then when you go to memorize it normally you're kind of starting to really think about it or maybe even not, but think about it conceptually and understand it. So I think that's you've already missed some steps and you've missed an opportunity. to internalize the tune

and really understand it from the beginning. So what I try to do, and when I look back when I've been most successful at this, I've learned these songs very deeply, is to memorize it as you're learning it. Okay? But first, to really understanding,

like memorize it away from your instrument even. So maybe you're listening to it, maybe you're looking at it and then singing it, but getting away from the page and understanding the total form of the tune. First. And then as you go through and learn it, learn it phrase by phrase section by section whatever the logic of the composition dictates go with that

organic flow and then learn it and memorize it at the same time so it'll be slower to learn it but i think in the long run you will learn it deeper you will have it memorized in a way that it'll stick i mean i've done this with tunes years ago don't seem and then someone will call it and i'm like yeah i think i know it now takes a little bit to come back but it comes back in a way that i know it much deeper than these other things that i've just read through a few times that's so that's such a great advice is to get the overall, you know, top-down perspective of it first, have it internalized and start memorizing it from the beginning. I think that's super important. You know, a couple of years ago, I did some research on how to best improve, like, memorizing stuff like this. And one of the

things that I think struck me the most is that to really learn something deeply, it takes a certain amount of times of forgetting it and then relearning it for your brain. That's how your brain locks into it, right? You can't just sit down one time shed for six hours on something straight. We've all done this, right? And then you come back two days later and it's not there. It's because you have to, from the beginning, learn it, do something else, come back to it and trains your brain to put it into your long-term memory, to relearn it again.

So start that from the beginning, just kind of like what you were saying. But I encourage you to maybe practice in your practice routine, put in three, or four things and then cycle through them so that you learn something really well. Maybe you learn a phrase of the piece you're trying to memorize. Maybe it's like a long eight bar phrase. Then work on something totally unrelated for 10, 15, 20 minutes. Then come back and see if you have it. You probably won't, even if you had it when you left, right?

That's how we work. But that coming back to it and relearning it, that's what really locks it in. And there's no cheating that. There's no getting around that. You have to do that so many times for you to really deeply. understand it. That's wonderful. And I think that can be worked in and can really work together with this concept of memorizing as you're learning it. Because if you go into it with the mindset of I'm going to memorize, like as I learn the first phrase, I'm going to actually

memorize it or as much as I can. You're still going to have to go through this process of coming back and like, oh, you have to go through that process of forgetting and doing it. But you're starting that process earlier as opposed to when you go in with the mindset. I have to technically learn it, measure by measure, and then I've got it. Now I'm going to go start memorizing. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. But you have to go in with the mindset. Now, it's going to be slower. And certainly as you start to use these techniques, it's going to be slower. But you can't say, I'm just going to learn to walk, and then I'm going to learn to chew gum, and then hopefully one day they'll both come together if you don't actually force those together

at a certain point. Hey, it takes as long as it takes. So you might as well start from the beginning doing it the long way. There's no cheating this thing. That's the thing with memory is there's no, I mean, we can always improve it. And certainly, like, there's a certain amount of... Ginkgo-beloba. Yeah, there's a certain amount of... I don't know if that works. There's a certain amount of environment and genetics that help with all of this, of course.

But, like, there's no cheating in the time it takes you to lock something in. So start from the beginning, the process of trying to memorize, and then start trying to basically learn it, forget it, fool yourself, come back to it, because that's when it really locks in. Yeah, and I mean, the whole thing, you know, when we talk about it, you know, when we talk about, memorization, like there's the kind of level of just being so familiar with something that you know it, which is not always considered memorizing.

Like sometimes there'll be a piece of music that we've listened to so much. We can just sing right along with it. I don't know that we'd consider that memorized though, would we? Well, maybe you memorize the lyrics to it. But the music, you might not even know what the chords are. Like somebody who's not even a musician might know it, but they don't have it memorized. So it's like

this concept, even as musicians, we have to do both. So we want to, I mean, obviously you have a, you have, I shouldn't say obviously, remember you have a big head start if you've heard something so much that you can sing along. Like we talk about learning a solo transcribing. We always say transcribing, what we really mean is memorizing or learning. By ear. So that's kind of an example where you're almost skipping over the process of reading it. Yes, you could get the transcription that someone else is done and learn it from there, but it's going to be the same thing. You want to get away from that. Memorize how to write it out. Yeah. You want to memorize how to play it.

Exactly. You want to get away from that as quickly as you can. And, you know, everybody learned things in different ways so you do want to take these different ways and then start to see how do you pattern recognize because that's memorization is always some level of pattern recognition but the visual part and some people are like

I can memorize things visually I have photographic memory and all these kind of things everybody has some of that and some people have more but the whole thing is like you don't ever want to be playing music or memorizing it based on how it looks on the page only so that might be like a little way for you to get into it but you have to be careful because there's some

traps that are set for you in the how music looks on the page. I think there's too many traps for that to be a viable way to memorize anything. Isn't the classic scam, the honey pot? Isn't that a classic trap for what is that? I've almost been caught in a couple of those. The honey pot. That could be on the music. Don't stop the car.

No, but you know what? I think to your point about, you know, it takes maybe longer to learn it deeply. This is why we talk about transcription about learning from the records. Yeah. About without any music. That's going to be longer for sure at the beginning than looking at the transcription. Yeah, but you're going to retain it at so much deeper level. Yeah.

Because you're going to be able to, by listening to it over and over again, that's going to lock into your brain, you know, the memories of these phrases. And you're not thinking about there's no disconnect from like visual to audio. It's like you're just dealing with music, you know. Well, and I mean, I think even the total time, once you start to kind of perfect or really just develop these techniques by putting on this mindset and then, you know, actualizing it in your practice. I think that once you can do this, the total time, if you memorize as you're learning to the promise land of really having it memorized and internalized is about the same. If not even quicker than learning, I mean, like, look, learning it without memorizing, you're going to be able to play it quicker. But then when you take the time to separately memorize, I think that ends up taking longer, actually.

So you have to be a little bit more patient and like push through this. And then like anything, as you start to do this more, it becomes easier anyway. And then as you say, the total retention, and that's what we really want. To me, the gold standard of or platinum, which is worth more than nowadays, I can't remember. Platinum. Platinum. Okay. Whoa. So the platinum level of memorization is when you can leave something for years and come back to it, not 100%, maybe 80% on the first chorus, 90% to the second chorus, and then bam, the third chorus, you're back in there.

That means you learned it deeply. It's not about like, I remember on bar seven, there was an eighth. note and it looked like this. I mean, no one's going to remember that. But you remember how it sounds like those mental triggers and patterns based on the music, you know? I mean, for me, and there has to be a certain amount of trauma involved, too. It can be self-inflicted trauma in that you're memorizing something before you really know it. That's traumatic in a way. That's what I'm saying is you have to do it in pieces and then forget it and then come back. And then forget it and then come back. Forget about it. That's a process that no one skips over. No. Like, I mean, some of the

things like the songs that I know best I mean I will never forget them were things that I learned traumatically like on gigs like do you know this no and they didn't hear then you have to kind of learn it like you know as you go under under fire forcing you into that like learning and memorizing at the same time yeah like that that's trial by fire and and but we can do those same the same kind of mindset we can put on ourselves but we have to do it we have to like be disciplined to do that in our practice that's excellent excellent question sarah so you know we're still doing our listener tunes at the end of episodes. Yes, I've been getting excited about these.

Today's tune is the Outreach theme song. I love that title by Christopher Wilson. Also, don't forget, for a limited time, you'll hear listeners can subscribe to the Oxford American for only 25 bucks. Visit Oxfordamerican.org. Look how beautiful these are. Slash Y-H-I to subscribe today.

Amazing, amazing quarterly literary magazine all about the best of Southern culture. I feel smarter just touching this. I mean, this is the kind of thing. It's like a fine fabric or like a Steinway piano or something, you know. It's good stuff, good stuff. That's awesome. Well, until next time, you'll be ready.