Practice TIP of the week:
Here are the most recent practice tips I have covered:
🎵 April 13: Pacing Hairpins
🎵 April 20: What is Phrasing?
🎵 April 27: Connecting Dynamics to Emotional Expression
🎵 May 4: "Chunking" for Easier Memorization
Each month, I focus on a specific theme for practice tips. This month’s theme is Memorization Strategies.
Today's Practice Tip: Memorize Jump Spots
In a recent piano studio recital, one of my students completely lost his place in the music. This was a piece he had played confidently in lessons for weeks. Has this ever happened to you? It’s scary to be onstage and blank out. That’s why I teach a strategy that helps your memory hold up under pressure: memorizing jump spots.
"Jump spots" are pre-determined places in the piece you can “jump” to confidently if you lose your place.
The fact is, no matter how much you try to prepare, performing on stage feels different from when you’re in the practice room or even playing for your teacher.
Students sometimes tell me they feel like a piece has memorized itself, without any conscious effort on their part. (Does this sound familiar?) Unfortunately, that’s muscle memory at work, which is the most fragile kind. Your muscles are moving, but your brain is not actively engaged in the recall process. The reason this fails on stage is because when you're performing, you are in a different physiological state than usual. What once felt familiar and automatic can suddenly feel strange and unknown.
Therefore, when you practice memorization, it’s essential to actively work to strengthen your recall process; this is so that when you are in a stressful or new situation, you will still know where exactly where you are in the piece.
Here’s how to memorize jump spots.
Step 1: ✍️ Mark jump spots
In your score, write in letters for each section of the piece. These can be structural markers (like the start of the B section), or they can be transitions, beginnings of phrases or anywhere you are feeling uncertain about the memory.
Step 2: 🎯 Practice starting at each jump spot
After you’ve gone through your piece and written in all the letters, make a list of those letters in your practice journal, starting with “A.” Play the first two to three measures of the first jump spot, then jump to “B” and play the first two or three measures there. “Jump” your way through the piece to the last jump spot.
Step 3: 🧠 Memorize the jump spots
Here’s where it gets interesting! Practice until you can start from "A" from memory, then learn to start from "B" from memory, etc., all the way through the piece. Practice until you can go through the piece without the music and hit all of the jump spots in order, playing 2-4 measures at each one, before stopping and jumping to the next one.
Step 4: 🎲 Randomize
Once you can confidently play all the jump spots from memory in order, it’s time to scramble them up. Write each of the letters on a small piece of paper, then fold each one up and put them all into a coffee cup, hat, or container of your choice. Draw them out at random. When you draw a letter, you must start at that jump spot, from memory.
It’s okay to check the score if you need to, but the goal is to make starting at each spot feel as natural as starting from the beginning.
At first, this will be very difficult, especially if you’ve never done it before. But keep at it! Over time, these spots will become mental anchors that will stabilize your memory and give you the confidence that you can recover in performance.
You’ll also gain a better understanding of the overall structure of the piece. When you play complete performances of the piece, you will know where you are in your mental “map” of the piece.
This is a great exercise for teachers. In lessons, I often test memory by asking students to jump around in the piece from one "jump spot" to the next.
Have you used this method before in your own playing or teaching? If you’ve never done it, try it out this week on something you're memorizing. I’d love to hear how it works for you!