Every month I have a bunch of new songs I have to perform live, and this is how I (mostly) memorize them:
Identify the patterns that repeat in the songs. Usually it breaks into groups of the same 4 to 6 chords that are used many times.
Make up short mnemonic phrase the gives me the letters of the chords.
For the mnemonic, I don’t do anything to encode sharps, flats, or chord variations like, say, minor 7th. It’s not needed. If I am playing in the key of A, I know that F means F sharp minor. And my ear tells me to play the minor 7th, (Or suspended 4th, or whatever)
I don’t encode how many beats or measures to play it. No need.
So for example:
A | E | F#m7 | D
encodes to:
Archie Enjoys Fighting Dragons!
This progression is used about a dozen times in the song “Blessed Be Your Name.” It’s what I am thinking as I play the chords. But, after a I do it a few times, it becomes automatic as I simply get the chords in muscle memory.
This gets me about 70% of the song right there. It means that I am looking at the singers or audience, not with my eyes glued to the page. I find this helps me connect with the audience (in my case, the congregation) better. I still look at the page for the 30% of the stuff that does not fall into the pattern. Detailed stuff like codas, drop to 2/4 for measure, stuff out of the key, and so on.
I’ve tried other stuff, including Memory Palaces. Too cumbersome for the sheer volume of stuff I have to play, and don’t leverage the repetition of patterns enough. I have yet to find a decent way to memorize stuff I read from sheet music, like say Bach. For me that’s all rote.
So what methods has the rest of the community come up with?
@MrRefract, you have the best recommendation for practical music memorization that I’ve read so far. Music moves quickly and most musicians have a good store of rote information to work with.
Lots of people make the mistake of wanting to translate too many musical details into visuals. But the approach you use in analyzing and finding patterns for eliminating detail is one of the most important steps to do. You also let your ear fill in details that would trip up others.
As a musician myself, it feels right and would use it if I had the opportunity. The conversions from chords to acronyms is good also. An alternative would be to use the I-V-IV-II style converted from Major system with 1542 into words or an acrostic. Tile + rain or deli+nausea for word pairs. Or an acrostic could be Twin Lambs Rode with Noah.
You suggest extending the idea to be based on scale degrees (e.g. I-V-IV-ii) and tied to the Major system, and I really like that idea. Thinking in scale degrees is better for understanding the patterns in music, and how the progression works as a whole, and not just as a succession of chords.
I have tried in the past to learn songs based on scale degrees, but not tied to any images, and it was too abstract.
I recently tried using concise Major words to identify the whole progression. For example the ubiquitous I-V-vi-IV can be encoded “tall chair.” But that did not help me live performance, as decoding on the fly to scale degrees and then to the right chords is too much of a cognitive load.
But, a word per chord sounds like it could be done in the heat of performance, and over time I would build up a still better ability to think of music in the patterns. And making praiseful words that fit the theme is just a bonus.
