Sloan describes learning and memorizing a song in two distinct steps:
- Learn the song until your can play it perfectly, at or above tempo, while reading the score (primed motor memory); only then,
- Visualize and articulate the song to memorize for fluent retrieval.
(He also says memorization starts the moment you begin a new piece. Sloan seemingly wrote without an editor; thoughtful but not necessarily consistent.)
‘Making conceptual sense out of [a] piece of music […] is the key to memorizing it.’ The gist of Sloan’s recommendations for memorization might be summarized:
- Find patterns in the piece
- If you can’t find patterns make up your own
- Learn music theory, the study of patterns, so that you have a deeper reservoir of patterns to draw on and betters skills at discovering them in a score
- Relate the new as far as possible to things you already know
‘Any piece of music can be memorized on three different levels: 1) the smallest parts, single notes, 2) the overall form of the piece, and 3) all intermediate structures and patterns of organization in between.’ Most of Sloan focuses on the small and intermediate.
‘Once you can play the piece perfectly from beginning to end at very slow tempos you are ready to rehearse in your head what you’ve been practicing on the guitar. This is the well-known visualization technique of playing through the piece in your head and ‘seeing’ the movements of your hands and fingers as you play, while SAYING to yourself the name and fret position of the notes as you visualize playing them.’
Until ‘say both note names and fret position’ this was similar to Iznaola. Mathews and Ossareh call for names, Sloan the only one reviewed who also calls for fret positions. It is explicitly not intervals but actual note names that are intended; Sloan gives the example of mnemonic sentences to remember note name sequences. For example, the ascending scale that begins the prelude from BWV 997 in Koonce’s transcription is A-(octave) A-B-C-E-G#-A: ‘All Aspiring Bach Conductors Expect Glowing Accolades.’ Note the contrast with jazz and rock instruction, which strongly favors interval numbers over note names.
This seems inimical to, or at least interference in, learning to express musical intention through physical performance. The capacity to make transparent the space between musical intention and its expression, the hearing in the mind’s ear and the sounds produced by the hands, seems highly desirable for fluidity in interpretation. Adding levels of indirection, as deconstructing melodies for first letters of note names does, increases cognitive burden, with paired fret numbers increasing it further. Is there a balancing reward in improved savings and retrieval?
Any learning or memorization technique has to be assessed for opportunity cost, that is, what else you might have been doing with the practice time. On the one hand, none of the other authors would disagree that finding and recognizing patterns in the current song is of high value in learning; on the other, his mnemonic approach seems like an unnecessary translation step and the time spent might be better spent on other practice techniques. ‘Memory athletes’ report that while they can perform amazing feats of sequential memory using similar mnemonics and memory palace techniques, their day-to-day memory (‘where I put the car keys’) doesn’t change. Of course, it may be that the learning value of the recommended approach is not in the product (whatever mnemonic sentences you construct) but the process of generating them.
This is a weak argument, though. By analogy, to memorize a path through the forest, attention to decision points where the path may split, landmarks that confirm you’re going the right direction, and visual and topographical patterns all may be important. Would knowing the common and Latin names of the plants and trees along the way make someone better at finding or remembering paths? My experience of trail running says, no.
‘Literally talk your way through the piece. Go as slowly as you need to go. This reinforces what you are learning, setting the first seeds in your mind for later recalling the piece. Saying the name and fret location of each note forces you to pay closer attention to the written score and where your fingers are going than you might if you only visualize the finger movements in silence.’
‘This is very important and worth repeating: you MUST verbalize as you visualize to get the full benefit of this technique. Otherwise, your attention might drift off in the middle of the song and you’ll have to start over.’ Be deliberate and specific in verbalizing, not casual. It reinforces not only what you’re trying to visualize, but your memory as well.
Sloan goes on to call for understanding the musical structure (like Viloteau, Matthews, and others): what are the chord progressions, what are the larger repeating patterns, e.g., rondos, fugues, &c. (A typical rock song with main melody [refrain] twice, a bridge [episode], then return to the main melody—the Beatles did this a lot—is AABA.)
Learning parts by association, like the sentence mnemonic above, a kind of variant on ‘memory palace’ techniques. For example, to recognize/remember a 4th, associate with Auld Lang Syne, or the first two notes of ‘Round Midnight or Shenandoah. (Though at no point does Sloan discuss intervals, so it’s not clear what ‘learn by association’ means.)
As above this strikes me as a level of indirection that could act as interference: playing Song A while remembering a part of it by remembering a similar part in Song B seems, to put it mildly, like actively eliciting errors. Imagine trying to hold a conversation while simultaneously trying to think of other conversations where a particular pair of words followed one another.)
Sloan, Matthews, and Ossareh advocate ‘talking it through.’ Sloan explicitly wants us to practice tying the music, its note-name description, and in Sloan’s case its fretboard expression together tightly as a fundamental element of learning. It’s hard to see how this would aid savings of the music. It’s not the music, nor is there anything intrinsically musical about note naming or fretboard locations. You can know a song and be able to create interpretations that are true to your own hearing without being able to say the note names. Duke Ellington was not impeded in composition, complex arrangement, or performance by not knowing how to read or write music.
That doesn’t negate the value in this ‘extra step,’ but it clarifies that this is not so much about memorizing the music or its interpretation, but rather memorizing a motor performance by memorizing a description of a motor performance, that is, memorizing a cognitive route to retrieval of a motor procedure. Consciously linking sound, the fretboard, visualization, and a verbal articulation of the notation, will almost certainly provide more paths for retrieval. (Happy left rostrolateral prefrontal cortex.) Ossareh reports that practicing solfege has saved her many times during recitals and concerts. (A brief lapse in memory for the full structure can be covered by playing the melody alone, with appropriate timing and interpretation, although it is less clear that practicing note names is intrinsic to playing melody by ear.)
Is this more efficient in the long run than learning by sounding out the song from a recording, while building the unconscious motor associations between intention and performance? (We use eating utensils unconsciously, motor performance following intention, though this is a complex sequence of synchronizations.) There can be no doubt that it is more efficient in the short run, but I question whether to really understand the music, not merely reproduce it, learning from recordings is not greatly underused.
Matthews, Viloteau, Van Betuw, and others strongly recommend focussing first on what you want to say in a song, your interpretation, prior to beginning to physically play it. Sloan leads to interpretation through understanding various levels of organization in a song; Viloteau and Matthews agree, but Sloan presents this as during or even after you can play the song from the score, rather than the first step. Instead of intention, then performance, for /sloan the order is performance, then intention.
Kappel, Viloteau, Matthews, Tennant, Ossareh, and I think every other author would agree with Sloan when he writes, ‘[Focus] your full mental attention on what you’re doing as you do it (this is the ‘secret’ to memorizing anything, and the crux of all effective memory techniques).’
A summary might be that Sloan is in line with the other authors in stating that understanding the patterns in the music and paying full attention are central; he’s the opposite in recommending being able to perform the song prior to memorizing or developing an interpretation. He’s not unique in recommending talking/singing it through with note names, but he is in adding fret numbers.
Learning music on guitar 