Memorising

[stevieo78]

I have been interested in Flamenco guitar and I have practiced a great deal of the rasgueos for some years. Now I am fully immersed in Flamenco. I have both of Graf Martinez books and I am working through volume 1. Should I memorise the pieces (basic pulgar exercises which I am well on top of) or move on through the method? I am also very aware and focused on compass.

[Mik]

Hello Steveo78. I never make a conscious effort to memorize exercises. 'Performance' pieces, yes. That way you can concentrate on giving proper expression to the piece. Unfortunately, I find memorizing difficult, which may account for my snail-like progress. There are probably ways of going about learning a piece which are more effective than others. Someone on the forum might suggest something.

[Bob Weisenberg]

What's important is not memorization, but learning to play the technique perfectly before moving on. It's actually hard NOT to memorize the exercise if you practice it to perfection, but it gets boring. So, fairly early on, you want to start improvising your own variations on the excercise, always coming back to it to test how you're doing. This approach keeps it interesting, but also starts to develop your improvisation skills.

Later on you'll have to decide whether you want to play others' set pieces, compose your own set pieces, or improvise as you play. Each guitarist finds his or her own comfortable mix. As for me, I chose flamenco over classical precisely because I wanted to invent my own music and not play notes as written. You might find the book "Zen Guitar" interesting and useful for your practice approach.

[falseta]

Welcome to the forum stevieo78!

Great points Mik and Bob! Along the same lines I would just recommend repetition over memorization. Focus on playing clean all the time! Just do it over and over again start slow and then speed up. Your fingers and mind will eventually take over and it will be automatic.

IME I found if I focused to much on memorization I would get frustrated and not learn the technique, phrase, scale etc... The easiest way for me to learn and memorize was through repetition and variation. Doing the same thing over and over again gets boring so what I started doing was after I felt I had what I was learning down pretty well I would start playing it my way by improvizing a little here and there. That helped me to memorize tremendously without focusing so much on the memorization part.

Hope all that makes sense.

[stevieo78]

Thanks for the tips and the warm welcome guys. I will accompany a singer yet!