Music Memories

Does music exit your brain when you haven’t practiced in a while?

I’ve recently had a very busy period at work, and so haven’t been practicing as much as normal. I’m also trying out running at the moment and spoiler alert: two hobbies take up a lot of time. Double spoiler alert: I can’t run.

So after 6 days of not playing much music and practicing very little, a friend came over for tunes and wine tonight. I couldn’t tell if it was the wine, or being nervous about playing music around another human with ears with which to judge me, but I could BARELY remember any of my regular session tunes. Maid Behind the Bar took me a good 3 goes to remember, and even then I caved and looked up the notes. Admittedly, I did get a lot of the notes in the end, and probably needed just a good warm up and a bit less wine. But it still threw me that memory can just disappear so quickly from your brain!

I was ashamed and disappointed by my lack of retention that I was worried all my toiling and practicing this year had all be for naught. So I decided to research a bit about memory and music.

There are a couple of factors that go into memorisation in music playing and practice:

Muscle Memory

Muscle memory is what a lot of Tune Players rely on heavily. Muscle Memory is basically when you’ve practiced so much, the nerves and muscles in your fingers are so used to playing the shapes and patterns of a piece that they can do it very easily – even if your brain hasn’t quite caught up yet. Sometimes when I’m trying to remember a particular tune, I might rattle through 2 or 3 beginnings of tunes before I land on the one I’m looking for, and this is purely muscle memory. I have no idea what I’m playing. There are apparently 3 phases of learning a tune with muscle memory – Cognitive (actively memorising and learning every.single.note and it just sounds like a string of random sounds); Associative (that note reminds me of this next part and I’m making less mistakes) and Autonomous (I can literally play this with my eyes closed).

Playing with others

Playing music with others vs practicing on your own is a huge blocker for me with my memory. Just the very sound of another instrument is enough for my brain to go ‘That sounds completely different to how we know it, Kate, abort this now’. Tapping into someone else’s rhythm and phrasing requires you to actively listen to someone other than yourself, and this throws up a lot of issues when you’re used to marching to your own fiddle, so to speak. It took me a while to ‘synch up’ with my friend, and get into the groove. This can be improved by learning off more ‘call and response’ type tutorials, and playing along with CDs. I’m going to focus on that in the lead up to pub sessions starting back up again, just so I can get used to the mesh of sounds again.

Practicing in a Pattern

I’m both chilled and regimented about my practices. Sometimes I have a chart that I made myself that I fill in all the little boxes and show what I’ve accomplished at the end of the practice, and other times I’m literally just playing scales. According to neuro-patterns and from a habit forming perspective, it’d be better to pick one and stick to it – but divide the ‘learning’ sections from the ‘playing’ sections. This primes your brain to go ‘Okay I need to focus on everything right now so it sinks in’ when you’re learning, and ‘Okay this is fun, let’s show what we can do’ when you’re just playing.

Calm yo’self and warm up

Brain function is heavily affected by your mood and sense of comfort. If your breathing is ragged and quick, chances are you’re going to nervous. If your breathing is calm, relaxed and deep- you’re way more likely to be content, happy and calm. Calm and content is what you want when producing music. Performing for others or playing, for me, is a strong anxiety-inducing activity. I should’ve known this and warmed up, played a few scales, familiarised myself with the instrument again and ran through a few tunes to get back ‘into the music’. The Calm App actually has a whole series of meditations on performance anxiety, which I can highly recommend. Next time you feel slightly anxious, nervous or a bit flighty, take 6 deep breaths. This is said to be the perfect number to calm your immediate nerves.

Use the ‘She’ll be Right’ Approach

By the end of the night, and bottle of wine, I was having SUCH a nice time just playing tunes with my friend. She wasn’t judging me, she wasn’t worried about my playing being out of tune or out of time, she was my friend. It’ll all be right in the end. If you’re still feeling disappointed with your playing after a break of practice, just don’t take a break! After my friend left, I played through some of the tunes we’d fumbled through and I could definitely still playing them. Nothing was really lost in my head, it was just buried a bit momentarily.