How do they do it?

[Cecil6243]

As I'm memorizing and learning the piece Classical Gas, which compared to some actual classical pieces is not that difficult, I think back to a concert I attended where a classical guitarist played for I believe it was an hour. Everything from Bach to Flamenco. How do they play such difficult pieces for the time period they play without making a single mistake?! It just amazes me someone can be that accurate note for note for such a long time period. For the 2/3's of Classical Gas I have learned I can play it well, but sometimes there a minor buzz or finger on the fingerpicking hand that slightly catches another note. Fortunately they are still in key!

I know, I know, practice, practice, practice. But still I find some guitarists out there amazing!

My goal is to fully memorize CG and play it flawlessly but still!

[rick-slo]

Or accomplished concert pianists who have hours and hours of difficult and long material memorized. Probably a combination
of virtually constant daily playing and a gift for memory from the get go.

[FrankHudson]

I have increasingly problematic memory for repertoire now that I'm old, but in my youth I could memorize quite a bit of information.

A few things help support that kind of "super power:"

The biggest one I think is understanding musical structures. Structures give you cubby holes to put smaller parts inside, and work like compression algorithms do with data. If you can think of section as particular harmonic cadence and top lines as arpeggios or scalar families you have something hang the exceptions and particulars of the piece onto. You learn each pieces logic and rules, which make the individual notes come to mind as needed.

Repetition. Mentioned already, but it's amazing at how much the mind can contain things through repetition. Knowing structures (the above) can speed this up, but just again and again will drill a lot of things into memory.

Synesthesia and the like. Probably less important than these other too and less common,, but an allied connection to other things can aid memory. Mnemonic phrases are a rough example of this, but thinking a sections as colors probably occurs to some, or visualizing the score or other representation visually may occur to others. It weird how some of this works, and I almost hesitate to mention it in that the first two are more important.

[MThomson]

Originally Posted by Cecil6243

How do they play such difficult pieces for the time period they play without making a single mistake?!

They don't. They still make mistakes, just comparatively fewer, comparatively smaller, and they're better at covering it up. Unless you know the pieces completely and utterly note for note as they're intending to play it, you likely won't notice.

There's an old adage that says "Amateurs practice until they get it right, professionals practice until they never get it wrong". And the professionals are all still practicing!

[JonPR]

Memory is an amazing thing, for sure.

I agree that for complex pieces, it seems harder to imagine how a performer can hold so many in their head. But once you master one piece (through enough hours of practice), you start to get the idea. If you keep practising it for a while after you first manage to do it flawlessly (from memory alone), it embeds itself more securely. It becomes subconscious, so you're not working from conscious memory all the time as you're playing. It's as if your fingers remember. You just have to remember how it starts, and then it will all just reel out automatically.

It's the same thing for singers, who remember the words of scores of songs. If they forget the first line, they can be lost. But sing the first line, and out all the rest comes - without thinking. It's like memory works in a linear fashion - like DNA is all coded in linear strands, and computer processes are just strings fs 0s and 1s. Enormous amounts of complexity can be encoded in one-dimensional linear fashion - and that's how music works after all: one note (or chord) after another, not 100s of notes at once.

Once you have one tune filed away in your subconscious, you can start working on the next one....

The problems come when you haven't played a particular tune in a while, perhaps years. Then you often find that linear strand has breaks in it. You might remember the start (even decades later), but you get to a point in the tune and - stop. What's next? It's gone. Maybe a section further on comes back to you, but the missing section - it might only be a bar or a couple of beats - has just disappeared. Even if you can remember what it should sound like, that's usually just vague, not enough to find the individual notes. There's no option but to go back to the sheet music (or tab) or a recording.

[rllink]

The more one memorizes the easier it is to memorize. I think that people like that have honed their memorizing skills to the level of their playing skills.

[Brent Hutto]

Someone asked the great concert pianist Rudolph Serkin late in life to summarize his career. He said, “All I ever did was practice”.

[Bluenose]

Practice until your neural pathways become neural trenches. My problem is that if I play something over and over, I get sick of it way before I can play it flawlessly. After about 40 yrs of trying, I'm a pretty good sight reader but it's hard not to slow down for the hard parts.

[TBman]

Originally Posted by Twiddle Dee

Practice until your neural pathways become neural trenches. My problem is that if I play something over and over, I get sick of it way before I can play it flawlessly. After about 40 yrs of trying, I'm a pretty good sight reader but it's hard not to slow down for the hard parts.

Sums it up for me as well.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Twiddle Dee

Practice until your neural pathways become neural trenches.

Nicely put.

Originally Posted by Twiddle Dee

My problem is that if I play something over and over, I get sick of it way before I can play it flawlessly.

There are three solutions to that:

1. Find a piece of music you like better. (Getting sick of it before you master it just means you don't like it enough. Even if you loved it beforehand...)

2. Learn simpler pieces of music.

3. If you do still yourself getting bored with a piece, just try listening differently. There's always more going on in any piece of music than you might think at first.

Originally Posted by Twiddle Dee

After about 40 yrs of trying, I'm a pretty good sight reader but it's hard not to slow down for the hard parts.

Sure.
I'm not even a good sight reader, even though I learned notation (60 years ago) before I started learning guitar (56 years ago). I use notation when learning tunes (either from sheet music or more often transcribing them myself), but I've never been in a situation where I had to sight-read anything straight off, so I never bothered to get any faster.