Any nice idea how to memorize piano notes?

General Memory Chat
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My first idea was turning each of the 88 piano keys into numbers. After learning this you would have them to reflex level, so you instantly know where all the numbers are located. Then you turn all the notes into numbers and memorize them in a loci in sequence, for each separate hands.

This would be quite many numbers. A rough estimation gives me 400-600 digits for both hands for one page. So for this piece around 5000 digits. This approach would not take into account what value the notes have. You would also need a way of separating notes that should be played simultaneously or not.

Can u guys give an idea?

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As a musician of 30+ years and someone who teaches kids to play piano, do not do this. This is way way way too much work for something really relatively simple.

There are only really 12 keys to distinguish on a piano keyboard. These twelve keys repeat over the course of higher or lower octaves.

Look for the set of 2 black keys.

The white key in the middle of the two black keys is D. Imagine a Dog or a Dorito or something living there. The black keys form a little barrier like a little house for your object.

The white key to the left of the two black keys is C. Imagine something starting with a C living on that key… a Cat or a Crow or a Cow or whatever you’d like. It is trying to get in to play with the Dog next door, or eat the Dorito or whatever you have living in that middle key.

The white key to the right of the two black keys is E. Elephant or Egg or whatever. Its running away, scared of the dog that is to its left.

Continuing up the keyboard, the set of 3 black keys is your next visual anchor. The key to the left is F, then G, then A, then B. Use visual clues for the sequence as before. After the B, the whole set repeats and starts again at C to the left of the next set of two black keys.

For the actual black keys, they can be two different names depending on the key you’re playing in. They can take on the name of the white key to the left and add “sharp” because it raises the tone of that note or they can take on the name of the white key to the right and add “flat” because it lowers the tone of that note. To remember these distinctions, think of a nail or a thumbtack poking up for sharp. UP is SHARP. Think of a hydraulic press squishing down and making something flat. DOWN is FLAT.

The black key directly up (to the right) from C would be C Sharp. That key is also directly down (to the left) of D, so it can also be called D Flat.

This is all you need to know to identify what key plays what note. Simply find your set of black keys to anchor your alphabetical position and use the simple visual mnemonics to help recall the letter names. After a very short while, the mnemonics will drop away and you’ll just “know” what keys play what notes.

You can also look at the white keys as a repeating mini alphabet where when you get to G you start over at A. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D… Etc. This can provide another visual clue to what keys are for what notes. If you can quickly recognize C, you should know that B is to the left and D is to the right.

There are tons of mnemonics for learning to read sheet music, easily searchable all over the internet. I won’t go into that here.

If you really want to learn piano, spend a few hours taking or watching lessons. Hoffman Academy has great beginner videos on youtube. This will be a thousand times better use of your time than trying to learn a convoluted conversion number mnemonic system that will have no application when it comes to you being able to actually fluently read and play music.

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Nice idea, but as a pianist of 25 years (not quite as long as Tim above!) I’d also advise you strongly not to try this. I easily memorize complex Classical piano pieces of several minutes long each, and even when I have the music available while playing, it’s easier for me to just play from memory. This is quite normal—I’m nothing special. It works like this:

  • With practice, you learn how the way you play notes on a physical piano is related to the sound of the music.
  • By trying to play the music, you discover how it sounds, and the brain remembers this quite naturally.
  • You quickly gain muscle memory in the fingers for playing the song (certain patterns are quite common in real music) and you can pay extra attention to the tricky sections that don’t come naturally.

Note that professional pianists—for whom an important skill is being able to memorize large amounts of music quickly—do not use convoluted memory techniques at all. If they helped, they’d use them.

Note also that if piano music were a random sequence of notes from the 88 notes available, then there wouldn’t be any context within the music to make it easy to memorize. A mnemonic system like yours might be very helpful! But real music has structure, intention, motifs, familiarity (as well as novelty) and has been designed to be played by humans with (maximum) 10 fingers, rather than 88 fingers.

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One more note to tie in with what Daniel said about memorizing actual songs. Musical memory is an interesting thing to put into practice because it involves sight, touch, hearing, and emotion. When all of those sensory inputs are firing at once and are linked to the experience of making music, it almost supercharges your memory for the piece. No real need for fancy technical mnemonics. If you are actively engaged in experiencing those senses while learning and practicing, the reflexive memory is built and can kick in very quickly. Much faster than a clinical deconstruction and translation to numerical mnemonics ever would.

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thank you

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thank u

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Wow!!! Thank you so much, I love your pictures and it makes it very accessible to someone who has no music experience.

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Just wondering how this connects to Do Re Mi Fa So la te? I have that song in my head from the Sound of Music. Does the Do stand for the Dog, of D?
Thanks in advance for your help.

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So this is kind of a rabbit trail, but sounds of Do Re Me, etc (called “Solfège”) refers to steps in a type of musical scale, not the actual specific notes that you would play on an instrument or sing with your voice.

The note names (A, B, C, D…etc) refer to a specific frequency of pitch. The faster a sound wave vibrates the higher its pitch becomes. We’ve standardized certain frequencies to be certain notes like A or C or F… (if you want to see exactly how, here’s a good chart) https://pages.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html

Because of this standardization, we can tune many different instruments and when they all play a “C”, they all produce sound waves of matching frequencies and the notes match in our ears. Thats also why if an instrument is “out of tune” it sounds like it clashes, because when someone thinks they’re playing a “C” but the wave frequency doesn’t match to what the standard “C” frequency is, then the sound wave frequency interferes and causes dissonance in our ears or just sounds “off” from what you expect to hear.

A musical scale (at least in western music) is made up of different combinations of whole and half steps between tones. The Major scale represented by Do Re Mi, etc… represents a sequence of steps that can start on any actual tonal note. That sequence starts on that root note, then steps up first by a whole step, then a whole step, then a half step, then whole, then whole, then whole, and then a final half step “brings us back to Do.”

If you start your scale with C as the root note (its frequency would be the pitch you would sing for “Do”) then the sequence of notes is C, D, E, F, G, A, B and back to C. Those are all the white keys on the piano. This is generally why music written in the key of C is easiest to learn and play at first. You don’t need to worry about the black keys.

If you were to start your Do Re Me major scale on the note of F and followed the whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half sequence, you’d run into a situation when you got to the A key. The next step in the sequence from A is a half step, which means you need to play the black key above the A (called B Flat in this situation.) So starting a major scale on F, you would play F, G, A, B Flat, C, D, E, then back to F as your “Do, Re Mi…”

So note letter names (A, B, C, D, E, F, G and the sharps and flats) are absolute values referring to sound wave frequency. Do Re Mi etc… are relative step labels that refer to positions in a sequence within a scale.

Hope that makes sense?

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What is your goal in “memorising notes” – to learn pieces from sheet music, or just to understand where each note is on the piano?

In either case I’d agree with the posters above. In my experience after around 35 years of playing, you become comfortable with the layout of the keys within the first few months, and beyond that completely rely on muscle memory and automatic visual cues. Mnemonics would just get in the way.

For memorising pieces, I also don’t think mnemonics would work. I tried flashcards at one point, putting scanned single lines into Anki. The front of the cards would be <piece, page, line number> or sometimes bar numbers. It was… ok, but not amazing.

However I did have better success with a single sheet of blank paper: use it to cover the right half of the page of music you’re learning, and try to play everything on the page. Then remove the sheet and check for bits you got wrong. Now cover the left half of the page instead, and do the same thing. After a few attempts cover the whole page and try to play it completely blind. Don’t worry too much about getting it exactly right; that will come.

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I’ll be the contrarian (and also a musician).

I think it’s possible and in some instances useful to memorize notes.

To be more specific, are you:

A.
Attempting to memorize the physical locations of Notes on a piano?
(eg, “The A note is located points here”, or “C3 is located points here.”

B. Attempting to memorize musical notation for piano?
(eg, memorizing score sheet music, for instance)

C. Attempting to memorize the order of a melody or chord progression (or perhaps the rhythm of it)?

D. or attempting to memorize something else?

There is value in all approaches, however in my experience with memorizing information from the language of music:

  • Unfortunately
    (or fortunately, depending on whether or not you’re willing to make the effort),
    music contains multitudes.
    tips hat ol’ Walt

Sheet music, for instance, is capable of expressing multiple dimensions of musical information:

  • Melody
  • Harmony
  • Rhythm
  • Speed
  • Volume
  • Key / Note structure
  • Transitions
  • Song structure
  • Lyrics
  • Relative emotionality

What am I getting at?

  • Because it’s difficult to devise a full system to incorporate Music’s arbitrarily large number possible dimensions…

(perhaps not impossible, but probably quite difficult for advanced mnemnists, and unrealistic imo),

… here’s a suggestion on a more practical way to go about devising a memory system for music or music notation:
Come up with a system for only one or two dimensions at a time.

Example:
You wanna memorize a rhythm you hear?
Devise a system based on rhythmic information.
You might make each room count as a single bar of music, and fill the room (thereby filling that individual bar of music).
You might place a tuple (your image for it, I mean) in the first room, next to the images for other rhythmic objects (quarter notes, half-note rests).

To save oneself from needing an unwieldy number of images, one might indicate the dot in dotted notation with something specific and repeatable, like a type of action or object [ex: always fruit, or always blowing up a balloon (balloons can be varied, as can who and how a balloon gets blown up)… for heavily dotted pieces, that method will be challenging, but workable for several bars of music.

Mentally waltzing room to room gives you a bar by bar musical playbook sitting right up in your noggin.

Example:
Forgive the gratuitous idea vomitting here, but I’m gonna do it anyway. I’m having fun.
You want to memorize the order of notes?

One possibility could be assigning any of the 11 or 12 notes (possibly giving the octave its own image) an image.

I once started creating a memory palace for every staff line from roughly C1 to C6. I started as a sort of (start at the bottom of the staff like you’re in hell and slowly ascend through the core of the earth, ascend through the anatomy of a person standing on the earth, continue ascending through the sky, possibly space, and end up in heaven or even on God’s face (and maybe begin at the bottom of the Devil’s face! Fun!)

The point of that was to give all staves their own relative domains (clouds, hell, earth’s crust, the face of God) , and from there I planned to experiment with other ideas.

In fact, I did give everything an image, but the followup was more effort than i was willing to put into it. And now it’s just an idea I had that I mention once in a forum post on music mnemonics. C’est la vie.

Food for thought. If you disagree, you’re probably right! Cheers! :clinking_glasses:

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I’ll caveat this by saying I’m not able to play any instruments. But I think it would be interesting to experiment with using synesthesia for music. I heard a podcast recently talking about a man who was able to “see” pieces of music playing in his head accurately:

he can ‘play back’ four different symphonies at the same time in his head, and what’s more, he says he ‘sees’ these symphonies being played in his head in three dimensions, and can fly around within this audio-visual space and listen to the music change from different perspectives

In the podcast, they talked about how each note has a distinct personality and other associations in his head, and that this helps him recognize the notes and to have perfect pitch. I’ve also read about math savants describing how they do mental math in similar ways:

Tammet visualizes numbers in their unique forms and then melds them together to create a new image for the solution. When asked to multiply 53 by 131, he explains the solution in shapes and textures: “Fifty-three, which is round, very round…and larger at the bottom. Then you’ve got another number 131, which is longer a little bit like an hourglass. And there’s a space that’s created in between. That shape is the solution. 6,943!”

I think there’s definitely some space for interesting experimentation involving synesthesia and memory techniques!

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I actually came up with a whole Dominic Method for memorizing notes by solfege. I used it to study scores while on the bus to work; it made my time at the keyboard much more efficient since I could hear each individual line. Here it is:

Bass voice: Bass fishing
Tenor voice: Giovanni Jones
Alto: Alpo dog food
Sopranos: Tony

Do Door
Do-do Danny Devito (dispatching taxis)
Do-re Daniel Radcliffe (spellcasting)
Do-ri Dowry (Indian bride)
Do-mi Demi Moore (pottery)
Do-Fa David Foley (comedy monologue)
Do-So Donald Sutherland (pointing)
Do-La David Letterman (behind a desk throwing index cards)
Do-ti Donald Trump (posting)
Re (ray of light)
Re-do Roald Dahl (whizpopping)
Re-Re Ronald Reagan (rappin’?)
Re-mi Remy (cooking rat)
Re-fa Roger Federer (serving)
Re-so Ringo Starr (playing drum set)
Re-la Ray Liotta (laughing too hard)
Re-Ti Ruy Teixera (debating at a cocktail party)
Mi Meal (eating)
Mi-do Miles Davis (playing trumpet)
Mi-re Mitt Romney (helping someone move with a broken arm)
Mi-mi Marilyn Monroe (standing over a sewer grate)
Mi-fa Milton Friedman (holding a pencil)
Mi-so Martin Scorsese (film director)
Mi-la Mike Love (Beach Ball)
Mi-ti Mark Twain (floatin down the Mississippi)
Fa Falk (Columbo)
Fa-do Fred Durst (rappin’)
Fa-re Franklin Roosevelt (cig holder)
Fa-mi Frances McDormand (pregnant, solving crimes)
Fe-fe Federal Felony
Fa-fa Francis Fukuyama (throwing history out the window)
Fa-So Frank Sinatra (skinny gangster)
Fa-La Fran Lebowitz (Gabbing on a TV show)
Fa-Ti Forrest Tucker (The Music Man)
Fi-do Fido (catching a Frisbee)
Fi-fi (Bomber)
Fi-so Friedrich Shiller (Ode To Joy)
Fi-si Fission (scene from Oppenheimer)
So Shakira
So-do Sandra Day O’Connor (judging)
So-re Sonny Rollins (playing sax)
So-mi Steve Martin (playing the banjo)
So-fe Sofa (lounging)
So-fa Sally Field (you like me! Right now!)
So-fi (daughter)
So-so Stephen Sondheim (playing piano)
So-la Stan Lee (doing a cameo in a movie)
So-te Salty (Shaker of salt)
So-ti Shirley Temple (tap dancing)
Si-la Seal (kissed by a rose)
La Launch
La-do Leo DiCaprio (on A Boat)
La-re Linda Ronstadt (playing a Different Drum)
La-mi Leonard Maltin (Critic)
La-fa Laurence Fishburne (Matrix)
La-so Leopold Stokowski (Conducting)
La-la Lindsay Lohan (Herbie)
La-ti Lionel Trilling (New York Intellectual)
Ti Tea
Ti-do Tim Duncan (helping with tax prep)
Ti-re Teddy Roosevelt (riding a horse)
Ti-mi Thomas More (the portrait)
Ti-fa Tina Fey (panicking)
Ti-so Taylor Swift (playing guitar)
Ti-la Trent Lott (herding cats)
Ti-ti Tina Turner (dancing in gold dress)

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Love this! Thanks for sharing!

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I have a slightly different perspective than what others have written so far.

I agree that memorizing individual notes is not the way to go. It is like trying to memorize a book by memorizing the individual letters. It is a brute force method that is incredibly inefficient. There are far more efficient and rewarding means of memorizing music.

It is important to learn how to read the notes on the page, so that is time well spent. A lot of initial success in playing an instrument is being able to translate the individual notes you read into the actual keys on the keyboard, and then doing it rapidly.

Next you might push through learning scales and arpeggios and chords (multiple notes played together, most often three) as exercises. The major scales help you learn what notes go with the various “key signatures”. The exercises also help increase your finger dexterity.

As time goes on, you will start noticing the chords in the music you play. Initially you will focus on major and minor chords. You will notice different inversions where you play the same notes but some of them higher. You will notice that many melodies are just rhythmic “noodling” through the notes of the chord with a couple other notes added in for flavor. You will notice some of these extra notes being added to major and minor chords to add dissonance that somehow still sounds good, and they start sounding like jazz chords.

Then you will start noticing patterns of chords being used. In a certain key, you will usually have 3 major chords. In the key of C, they would be C, G, and F. And there are usually up to 3 minor chords. In the key of C, they would be Am, Em, Dm. Extra notes are added to these to make more jazzy chords.

You may notice patterns of chords in each phrase of a song. These are chord progressions. A large percentage of popular music is made up of these. You can take a look at 7 super common chord progressions, and you will get an idea for how they are used in modern music. Chord progressions are an excellent choice to focus on for memorization! They form the foundation of the song, then you can add the melody on top (which may need other strategies for memorizing).

At some point you will start noticing songs that change keys in the middle of the song, often in the bridge. But then you will find some songs that are constantly changing keys. A lot of Chicago (albums 15-17) and Peter Cetera songs did this, and check out what Rick Beato thinks is the most complicated pop song ever.

So if you care about both playing/performing music and the ability to memorize it, I would suggest first getting good enough with the notes, then focusing on chords, including jazz theory. (I avoided jazz theory growing up because I associated jazz with progressive and smooth/cool jazz, neither of which appealed to me. I now regret that immensely. Focus on jazz standards and how jazz theory is incorporated into popular music.) They will give you the foundation to memorize music in a way that is less than brute force.

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Whoa! This! Okay, I’ve been playing by ear since I was young. Fairly rudimentary level though. Haven’t had a piano since I moved from my parents’ home 20 years ago. Recently got my hands on a decent, weighted digital. Loving it!

I am beginning to understand how melody, chords, harmony, and scales work. I am working my way through Patrick Pietchmann’s arrangement of Chevaliers de Sangreal. First, as a challenge, I played at it by ear (from memory, not listening). Challenging and fun. Couldn’t do his complex arrangements, of course. But, to my delight, I got the gist of the chords used almost right. I was blown away.

Now, I am working my way though his video, piece by piece. Your description of this Dominic-style helped me have an ah-ha moment! I am currently learning by rote (surprisingly effective for music, as covered by several other here, given the multi-sensory aspect of playing). But, I want to better understand when these combinations apply.

My question is, how do you determine the solmization for a chord? (Is that the appropriate term?)

For example, looking up the chords online, I’ve learned that his progression is:

Dmin Fmaj Fsus2 Cmaj Amin

D    F    C     C    A

The short notes between these go like:

Dmin A#maj Dmin D-F-D Dmin Fmaj ...

D                          F ...

How would this be notated using your 2-prong solfege? Or, because Do-Re-Mi is a major scale, does this not translate for anything but major chords?

Your input is appreciated. Cheers!

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I generally found the solfege more effective for melodies than chords. To learn music like this effectively from scratch, I would start researching the Nashville Number System…

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I think I’m ready to weigh in on music memorization after considering it for a few years now. I’ve cemented my opinions on text memorization and they reflect the memorization of music as well.

Both text and music reflect language construction. Both have two basic styles of memorization techniques. Rote technique involving many reviews works for those with good natural memories. For those of us that don’t, we need mnemonic techniques.

In text, you can memorize themes or verbatim. In music you can get a starting phrase and key and move with chord charts like the one from @MusicalMemory or you could convert a series of notes using some mostly tedious system that is better done by rote. Text verbatim by first letter is clumsy but just about the only system to use, improved when you can create acronyms.

But it usually comes down to building natural memory strength, repetition, and knowing a few tricks in either text or music. It’s a difficult realm to do well either way.

Doug

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