Somewhere Between Frustration and Excitement 😩

A buzzing guitar, a concert ahead, and what helps me memorize music

I’m feeling extremely frustrated today. My guitar has a weird buzzing sound coming from the bridge when I play on the 5th and 6th strings, making it impossible to record anything, let alone practice in peace. This has been going on for a while, making me feel really insecure, so today I’m taking it to a local guitar shop owned by a luthier. Wish me luck.

In the meantime, I’m preparing for a concert I play next month, March 21. Drumroll…… in Luxemburg! It’ll be at a beeeautiful castle!

So I’d love to invite y’all to come, however, I know this is probably not quite close to most of you. But in case it is, consider coming!

So as I’m practicing, I noticed that I’m struggling to memorize one of the pieces accurately. This is very uncommon for me, memorizing a piece has always been quite natural to me. Still, every now and then a piece just doesn’t want to stick, so I had to go back to some of my old tricks I learned back at university.

If you only know a piece while reading, your mind is so busy with the notes that you can’t focus on listening or shaping the music. Playing by heart brings the piece closer to you. Since I know memorization is a topic many of you struggle with, I thought I’d share what works for me.

Some common tips you probably heard are practicing slowly, taking small sections at a time, or singing the melody. Those are great. But two methods work best for me.

Mental practice. Close your eyes and imagine your left hand on the guitar. Visualize every movement, every finger placement, chord, and position change, while hearing the music in your head too. If you can go through the whole piece in your mind, you’ve memorized it. When I do this, I usually ignore the right hand, because if I can imagine the left hand, my right hand will tag along somehow too. If there’s a blank spot, that’s the exact place you’ll probably trip up in a performance.

Analyze the piece. You don’t need a fancy, academic analysis, just enough to make the structure clear and familiar. Look for repetitive patterns, themes, phrasing points, where the melody is. You can also name chords and key changes, divide the piece into sections, label them with moods or colours, literally anything you can say about the piece is good. Because simply, the more you understand, the more you remember. I really like this quote from Steve Jobs that goes, “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint,” and I think music works the same way. And then when I play, I don’t actively think about my analysis, but since I’ve done the deep work, it somehow has its hidden way of helping me remember everything.

Hope these quick tips will help you learn faster! And this can be translated into anything, really. If you can imagine yourself doing a certain movement, you memorized it. If you understand something on a deeper level, you know it. It’s that simple. 🙂

This also might be a great time to look at my educational materials, my music or merch!

1. Have a look at my shop and see if you find something you like (artworks, T-shirts and more)

2. Get my Spanish Romance course and learn this iconic piece and some fundamental classical guitar techniques like arpeggio, barree, legato from scratch!

3. My Favourite 11 Exercises is an easy to follow booklet including several exercises suitable for advancing beginners to advanced level players.