Visualization for Memorization & Improvisation

[Conn44H]

I am curious if other trombonists also find it useful to visualize notation or a piano keyboard when playing from memory or improvisation. Does anyone have other techniques for playing from memory or without music?

[VJOFan]

I am not a great memorizer- or rather I haven't tried to perform a large work from memory- but I can say that visualization is not a fundamental part of what I do.

For me, playing from memory is a lot like singing. I just know the sounds that are supposed to come out, and between me and the horn they come out.

Occasionally, there is some kinetic sense of where my slide goes or how to tweak my setting for a troublesome note, especially if I have screwed up that bit and am trying again.

Perhaps trying to memorize the look of a page of music may be helpful but it just doesn't come naturally to me.

I don't think of language that way either. To me words are just meanings in sound that have to be represented by these funny shapes at times. I don't think in text and I don't think in notation either.

[edit] Funny enough when I improvise I do sometimes see certain melodic patterns or chord shapes on the staff. Not mostly, but it does happen that I think about the notes out of a scale that are going to work. Then it all gets going and I try to "sing".

[Burgerbob]

A technique that I found useful in grad school when playing solos memorized was to literally remember where you were on the page.

For instance, you have long rest while the piano plays, and you are blanking on your next entrance... where is this on the sheet music? Ahh yes, top of 3rd page. Enter on low A, play this phrase.

For me, the most useful thing is to figure out how a piece goes together. This is a weakness of mine since form is one of my least developed skills, but I can at least do this much.

[baileyman]

For me the visualization is like a grid extending with the slide, vertical lines at the positions, horizontals intersecting representing partials. Kai Winding did a book with charts remarkably like it. Probably a pretty common image. Then the notes over music time form a path on the intersections. It seems like the path visualization should help with memorization, but it has not helped me very much on that. But hearing better the interval relation of every point to every other, especially the eight neighboring points, has been very good for improvisation.

[calcbone]

For memorization…I have always seen it much like VJOFan above in terms of it being more of a tactile thing…whether on trombone or anything else.

One strategy I discovered while in college “class piano:” I was okay at piano in college…probably better than the average “class piano” student, but I still had to look at the keyboard most of the time. That meant memorizing anything that was going to be played for a grade. I discovered that it was effective for me to start by memorizing the last phrase…then go back 4 bars or so and memorize the last 2 phrases together…and continue in that manner until I got back to the beginning of the piece. The idea was that I would avoid getting stuck because I forgot what came next…because whatever came next, I had practiced *more* and knew *better* than whatever I had just played.

[robcat2075]

I've never memorized a trombone solo but I have memorized piano pieces.

Although I was learning the notes from the sheet music, I wasn't memorizing the sheet music, I was memorizing the physical act of playing.

It wasn't a piece of music i was reading anymore, it was like a careful dance my fingers had learned to do on the keys.

Once I had that going and could play a piece reliably, it was very awkward to go back to the music to check anything. The sheet music was no longer part of my conception of the piece.

I'm not recommending any of that, but that is how memorization worked for me.

[timothy42b]

At my age I can no longer memorize but I can play by ear a little bit.
When I do that I see notes on the staff part of the time. Occasionally with a very simple piece in a very familiar key I can hear the notes/feel the positions instead but that's less secure.
I don't think people who are good at ear playing do it that way, I think mentally it is more like singing.

[timothy42b]

Here's a sports video on "looped visualization," isolating a throwing motion and setting it to music, hoping to improve alignment and timing.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOVQBy ... mAA/videos

[Wilktone]

I find it easier to memorize music on a piano over a trombone, so when I'm working on memorizing jazz standards I will practice it also on the piano. That said, just because I have something memorized on the piano doesn't automatically translate it for me to trombone. There are some things on piano that become muscle memory for me and I have to think a little about what chord I'm actually playing.

I do think that the visual nature of a piano helps reinforce memorization over instruments like the trombone and so it's useful to use piano to help memorize tunes, even though it won't directly mean that I can play it on both instruments by memory right away.

For memorizing on any instrument I think it's extremely helpful to learn the music by ear at first. A lot of "memorization" for me is being able to sing the melody and then play it by ear. Rather than memorizing individual notes or chords I usually end up memorizing the patterns. For example, understanding that four measure in a tune is a ii-V-I progression that cadences on the IV chord. I will memorize melodic patterns as running a chord arpeggio or scale pattern and such.

Spaced repetition is also a very effective method to memorize anything, music included. The basic concept is that when you work to recall the tune you put more and more time between the practice recalling it. There are ways to make this practice more effectively so that you're not spending time working on things that you already have memorized well and spend more time working on things that you don't have committed to memory yet.

Here's a nice description of spaced repetition: https://ncase.me/remember/

I use an app called Anki to help organize my tune memorization. I create virtual "note cards" with the different tunes and the app keeps track of how often I work on each tune. It asks you to rate your abilities on recalling the tune if you need to play it again in this practice session, if it was hard, good, or easy. Depending on what you respond with the app will shuffle that tune/card back into your "deck" and it will come up days, weeks, or months later.

https://apps.ankiweb.net

Dave

[ArbanRubank]

I believe there is a world of difference between memorization and total familiarization. To my thinking, memorization is more empirical or pragmatic, whereas total familiarization involves the heart and soul. I would rather be so familiar with a melody to where I feel it internally and intensely. I guess maybe that is the difference between playing cerebrally or emotionally. I prefer to hear a player emote through their horn, even if I disagree with their actual style.

[Ozzlefinch]

For me, it was learning music theory that helped my memory and improv. I started looking at music as a series if chord progression, and notes not as individual thing but rather as a fixed distance from each other. In that way I only needed to know the root note of the chord, the rest was a simple pattern based on the root note. And because the note patterns are inside a chord and this also inside a key, it now became almost impossible to play a bad note, because even if I squibbed it, I was still in tune

[Wilktone]

I believe there is a world of difference between memorization and total familiarization. To my thinking, memorization is more empirical or pragmatic, whereas total familiarization involves the heart and soul. I would rather be so familiar with a melody to where I feel it internally and intensely. I guess maybe that is the difference between playing cerebrally or emotionally. I prefer to hear a player emote through their horn, even if I disagree with their actual style.

I'm in agreement with AR here, but have some additional thoughts on this. First, I don't see playing expressively and reading the music to be mutually exclusive. If the music isn't fully internalized (total familiarization) then it takes a little more "processing power" to both recall the music and play expressively at the same time. In which case a more musical performance might be had from reading the music instead. Nor do I think that having a piece completely memorized will automatically lead to a musically expressive performance either, that needs to be practiced too.

For me, it was learning music theory that helped my memory and improv. I started looking at music as a series if chord progression, and notes not as individual thing but rather as a fixed distance from each other. In that way I only needed to know the root note of the chord, the rest was a simple pattern based on the root note. And because the note patterns are inside a chord and this also inside a key, it now became almost impossible to play a bad note, because even if I squibbed it, I was still in tune

Yep. I went back and looked at what I mentioned about memorizing by playing by ear and in the same paragraph I mentioned similar concepts. To me, ear training and music theory are both part of the same thing and I think if you begin to think of them in this way you will find that they both compliment each other.

Just to provide some additional food for thought, here are a couple of web pages that offer contrary opinions on the merits of memorizing your music.

https://www.classicalguitarcorner.com/a ... orization/

https://www.jonathandimmock.com/the-fol ... orization/

Dave