Quote:
Originally Posted by rllink
It.
One thing, if I don't use it, I lose it. I don't retain songs that I've learned and memorized if I'm not playing them regularly.
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For sure. There's 2 phases, I think. Memorizing it in the first place, then keeping it. For me, it helps to perform a piece. Once I've played it for others - and probably barely get thru it, it seems more "burned in". But you can still forget over time. One of the ideas out there is "spaced repetition". I forget if the Brainjo book talks about this or not, but it's all over the place. The basic idea is that you need to repeat something often at first, and then as it gets more ingrained in long term memory, it just needs less frequent refreshing. Kind of intuitive, but there are spaced repetition apps that can manage the process and that claim to have some sort of optimal schedule.
I have a friend who has done this in a low tech way for ages, I'm not even sure if he knows of the label "spaced repetition". He just writes all of his songs on a deck of blank cards, shuffles them, and then every day, he plays thru the ones on top, however many he feels up to. If he remembers it well, the card goes to the back of the deck. If not, it stays on top to be in the queue again for tomorrow. The apps and web sites that manage this for you just do it with a bit more sophistication, like prompting you to do something every day for a while, then every 3 days, then every 7, and so on. If you mess up, it goes back into faster repetition mode. The claim is that they bring it back into short term memory at precisely the moment you're about to forget it, if I recall correctly.
Another angle that I think some people alluded to is I'd think that memorizing depends a lot on how unfamiliar something is. If you know the blues chord progression, then learning a new blues tune is probably pretty simple - you're only needing to recall any quirk to the specific song (or the words, if you're singing). You don't have to memorize the chords, or the chord progression, just the key, and maybe some unique riff.