It’s been years since I had to cram for my university exams. The days before finals were always the same – my classmates and I would be stuffed into the student lounge of the physics department. Textbooks, practice problems, and piles of pages covered in chicken-scratch rough work; there wasn’t an inch of table-top to be seen.
We’d each take turns working through exercises on the chalkboard that was in the room. After a few attempts and a few dead ends, we might trade places until someone would have a spark of creativity and find the one method that would unlock the whole thing. We’d wash, rinse, and repeat late into the night trying desperately to get as much of the material into our brains as possible. Our hope was that it would linger long enough to be useful on the final.
Thankfully, I made it through, so I guess my efforts worked, but looking back there are so many things I know I learned, but can now barely remember. It doesn’t surprise me that they faded from my memory – my goal was to just pass the class. If I’d wanted to keep that information for decades to come my approach was all wrong.
Great Memorization Leads to Mastery
When it comes to playing the guitar just passing the test isn’t good enough – you have to destroy it. If you want to be a master, a king, a lion on your guitar then you need to get it down and get it down for good.
There are countless bits of information that you’re going to have to memorize if you want to be a great player. Scales, chords, fingerings, a mountain of theory, songs, solos, riffs…the list going on and on. If you thought the list was big enough, the problem gets worse when you look at how you are supposed to memorize them.
Your goal when memorizing ideas on the guitar is to make them so comfortable that you don’t even have to think to be able to use them. There can’t be any hesitation in remembering or playing.
How Not to Memorize Something
The usual approach to memorization goes something like this:
Step 1 – Read the material you want to memorize.
Step 2 – Test yourself to see how much you remember.
Step 3 – Repeat.
The nice thing about this approach is that it’s really simple. However, there is one big problem: it doesn’t work most of the time. Even worse, even if you remember the information today, you will probably forget it by tomorrow.
The reason this approach doesn’t work is that it makes one big mistake right off the bat which is that you can’t completely memorize something after looking at it once or twice. Some things are simple enough to make this work, but the things that are actually worth memorizing aren’t that simple.
Your brain is very clever and incredibly efficient. It is bombarded by a huge amount of information every day in the form of TV, internet, commercials, social relationships, work, school and everything else that you have to do. Your brain is very careful about what it remembers and what it chooses to forget based on what you tell it is important.
This leads us to a few really important questions about memorization:
- How do you tell your brain that something is important and needs to be memorized?
- What is the best way to memorize something so that you don’t forget it?
- What is the best way to memorize something so that you are able to use it effortlessly when you need it?
In my own experience, the answer is exposure.
Get Exposed
What is exposure exactly? Well, I’m not actually talking about those creepy guys in the trench coats – that’s a different kind of exposure entirely. The kind of exposure I’m talking about means how many times the information has passed through your mind in a meaningful way. Those last few words are really important – when you think about it, you have to do it in a meaningful or useful way; it connects with your conscious mind. This is what exposure is and the more exposure you have to a piece of information, or the more you’ve thought about it, the more likely you are to memorize it.
Now, how do you use this idea of exposure to practice and get on with memorizing? It’s actually quite simple:
Go over the information daily until you have it memorized, however long it takes.
You’ll know you have the concepts memorized because you will be able to recall them very quickly without having to try very hard. You also then be able to use those ideas when working with other things.
Don’t Fail, Be a Success!
Another problem with focusing on memorization is what it means to be successful. When memorization is the goal, if you haven’t memorized the material by the end of your 20-minute practice session, you’ll feel like you’ve failed; you haven’t finished memorizing the material so you didn’t succeed, right? Because you didn’t succeed, you failed and will then feel like a failure until you get it down. But, did you really fail?
If the only thing that is important is memorization, you lose sight of the other improvements that you make. Memorization isn’t as simple as ‘you know it or you don’t’ – it can sit at many different levels depending on how well you know it and how quickly you can remember it.
If instead, you were to focus on exposure, then the only thing you need to worry about is whether you increased your exposure – remember, the memorization will happen naturally once you’ve been exposed to the material enough times. This means that as long as you increase exposure by just doing your daily exercises, you’re a success.
What to Do Now…
First of all, stop focusing on memorization and start focusing on exposure.
Next, increase your exposure. Keep doing exercises that force you to use the information you want to remember over and over again every day. That way your brain will have no choice but to figure out that what you are working on is important and will do the memorization work for you.
Lastly, begin using the information. Applying what you’ve learned will reinforce your memory even more and will even make you a more musical guitarist.
To help you in understanding this concept, here are a few examples of materials I’ve had to memorize myself and how I used exposure to do it:
Key Signatures – write them all down in a little notebook every night before bed.
Cycle of Fifths – practice writing it out and reciting it daily during idle time (on the bus, in the bathroom, etc.)
Scale Patterns – play them up and down, apply sequences, incorporate licks, identify chords within the shape, use for improvising.
Chord Progression/Song – write it out daily, play the song three times a day (morning, afternoon, and evening), analyze the chord progression and song structure.
Additional Points When Working With Exposure
- Use tempo to add stress and challenge your memory – practice with a metronome or give yourself a time limit.
- Try to increase your amount of daily exposure on an ongoing basis – if you were able to write out the idea once yesterday, try to do it twice today.
- Apply what you are memorizing to other areas – if you are learning the note names, think about them when you practice your picking, a new song, or with chords.
