I was taught from the very early beginning that the consummate musician develops BOTH aspects of playing mentioned in this thread. Sight Reading is always part of the audition, regardless of genre. Or it should be. But if the genre is anything modern, the ability to play by ear, also to improvise, is equally important.

As to the subject of *memory* -- the science behind how our memory works is simple enough -- we recall something because we associate it with something else.

Some folks manage to figure out a way to grasp and use the above memory association rather naturally, which usually gets translated by others to being "effortlessly" -- which is very likely to be a misnomer applied by those who don't understand that what someone else appears to do "effortlessly" very likely has quite a bit of ground work behind it.

So how to start memorizing songs?

One. At. A. Time.

Pick a song and begin trying to play it through from the beginning without the chart during our daily practice regimen.

If you make a mistake for any reason, don't keep on with the song, STOP. Start over *from the beginning* of the song and try to play it through again. This time, you may just be ready for that note, bar, phrase or whatever that escaped you the last time through. If not, and you find this area to be a repetitive mistake, stop and *analyze* what's happening that causes you to generate that same mistake at the same place every time. This could be anything from something physical, (fingering, hand placement, etc.) to something mental, (lack of knowledge as to the chord, melody or the like, or the biggie, confusing the passage with that from another song that you happen to know "at that same place").

Yes, like everything else we learn about music performance, this starts slow. One song. BUT -- and this is the good part about eerything we learn about music performace -- if we continue the drill over time, the ability to memorize the NEXT song should take a shorter time than the last. etc.

For the pianist who wishes to play modern songs in the jazz or pop setting, learning the Fake Chord syllabus is extremely important. This opens up the beginnings of how to think about your accompaniments in terms of "devices" instead of rote memorizations of someone else's written devices.

A good starting drill: Harmonize the Major Scale of your favorite key and play it through with both hands. There are two ways to do this, the Diatonic method, which sounds like "Gospel Piano" where the 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 of the Major Scale is chorded as, I,V,I,IV,V,IV,V,I - yielding the simplified "one four five" throughout all 8 steps of the scale, and then there is the more advanced harmonization, typically the division reserved for jazz, wherein the same 8 steps are harmonized as the note on the scale being the root of a chord, Maj, min, min, Maj, Maj, min, dim, Maj.

Lastly, you are never too old to teach the brain something new.

Have at it,


--Mac

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