One of the greatest decisions we ever made to our worship team was to memorize our music.
It has helped our stage presence, our stage cleanliness, and improved our musicality. But this doesn’t come easy. Memorizing anything can be hard, especially the older you get.
At least, that’s what we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe.
But what if you started to tell yourself a different story? That you could memorize your music. And not only memorize it, but play with a greater level of musicality and passion than ever before?
I don’t know about you, but that excites me. And I know you can do it. I’ve seen it happen to myself and dozens of musicians at my church.
I’m convinced that people disqualify themselves too quickly. They choose not to memorize because “they don’t have a good memory,” they’re “too old,” or they’ve failed in the past.
3 Tips for Memorizing Your Music
But I’m going to outline a simple process for memorizing your music for the weekend – chords, song structure, and parts.
1. Engage in Passive Listening – If I’m scheduled to play in a week (or in a couple weeks), I create a playlist of the songs we’re leading. This becomes my daily soundtrack. As I drive, workout, do work, or waltz around the house, I’m cranking these songs in the background. This is what I call passive listening – I’m doing other tasks as I listen. This subconscious activity helps me internalize the songs better due to the sheer repetition of hearing them.
2. Schedule Time for Active Listening – In addition to passive listening throughout the week, you need to schedule a single time slot (possibly more, depending on how many songs you’re preparing) for focused listening. This is where you diagram songs, take notes, notice what your instrument is doing, notice what the other instruments are doing, and chart out the song structure. I’ve always found that creating your own charts for songs helps you memorize like nothing else. Don’t just follow a chord chart. Go pro and write it out yourself. Trust me, you’ll surprise yourself with how quickly you memorize just by writing everything down yourself.
3. Practice Memorization – Most people just play through songs when they practice. I’m sorry to say it, but this doesn’t help you memorize. What helps you memorize is when you isolate section by section and play each individually until you memorize it. Then, you put each section together. Like this:
- Play the intro by itself (5 times)
- Play verse 1 by itself (5 times)
- Play the intro AND verse 1 (5 times)
- Play the chorus by itself (5 times)
- Play the intro, verse 1, & chorus (5 times)
- Continue throughout song
This may look like it takes eons of time to practice and is only reserved for the professional musician who has 40 hours a week to devote to this. Umm…no. It’s just very strategic, specific practice on what will help you memorize and internalize the songs better.
Finally, when you show up to rehearsal, bring your own song diagram charts to use as a reference. Only use them if you have to. Rehearsal is the best place to apply the memorization work you did in private.
Question: What has helped you memorize your music? What would this make possible for your team? You can leave a comment by clicking here, or simply scroll down to the comment section.
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Thanks again David for your continued faithfulness in hitting on so many important worship topics that I am sure we are all thinking about. I also appreciate many of the practical tips like this one that you provide from your background and experience. Many members on our team have lamented recently how lazy we have all become having Ipads in front of us and speak affectionately of the “olden days” when we had to memorize our music. Anyway, these are great tips and I am going to share them with my worship team this week. Be blessed! – John
Hope it helps out, John! I’ve just found that the more we musicians internalize the music the better worshipers and worship leaders we are. iPads are great but can become such a crutch!
Good tips!!
One of the things that I find helpful after listening and recognizing the different patterns of my instrument is practicing without the song, only using a metronome specially if you’re not playing the song in the original key. I’ve found night practice works a lot better too; when you go to sleep your brain keeps processing what you were doing before, it works for me.
Mariano, that is super helpful. I’ve never considered the nighttime practice, but it makes sense. Practicing alone with just a metronome is great because you can’t hide from anything. Everything is out in the open 🙂
Whoho..this is so helpful brother…I know that as a worship team or leader that we have to memorize our music. But i never knew how to do it…This really helps. Love your posts brother. Keep posting.
Let me know how it goes!
GREAT! Thanks for this post. What we always do is your guide #1, Passive Listening, and #2–our musicians always writes diagram and charts by themselves that’s why we can memorize and master songs faster. Your guide #3 is a very nice idea, we’ve never done that in the team before (but I already tried that, chunking by groups). Another great and very helpful post indeed. More power, more blessings! 🙂
That’s great, bro! Glad to see you’re already doing some of this.
Great post, David! I memorize music by getting the chart and playing it front-to-back with my guitar, vocals and the track for consecutive evenings. An hour per night, usually no more than 2-3 for worship music. Sometimes, I pump up the track in my car to get a better feel of the song when I go to work.
Like you, I really believe in the band doing all their individual homework before practicing together. Keeps very efficient practices.
Does the rest of your team memorize as well?
Most of the team does, yes. A few need their charts, but they come prepared the best they can to execute, which I think is the point of us as leaders — giving our best to God in leading well.
Great post brother! Charting the song out and practicing away from the instrument is a technique I plan to lead my teams to more in the future.
I’ll also second the earlier comment about practicing without the original demo, only a click. It helps me own the song to force myself to sing the song while practicing.
I like to stay with my mind set on the journey we want the people to go into the sermon. The story of each song will mean something a little different depending on a person standing there in service based on their person filter of their life story and personal journey that they or someone they know has gone through. My instrument is my vocal. Its very important that all words are heard when its time to sing and that the whole tone of the song is in my voice as well as being on tune. For example: Today is the day – So I won’t worry about tomorrow given you my fears and sorrow ect… Believable tone without over kill on it. And know your notes going into it as not to swoop the tones and distract from the song. And following the leading know when to be louder softer or silent. Pay attention to leading as practice is one thing and what may have to happen in a service is a continuation of a song. Be ready to roll with it. I like the idea of memorizing. Sometimes it can be tuff to remember all dimentions so good to be doing everything with grace. Practice hard and serve fully. Thanks for the post!
Memorizing patterns is the key, such as the ubiquitous I-V-vi-IV and thinking in 4 bar or 8 bar blocks is key. Ear training is also very helpful so if you forget the next chord, you might just be able to “hear” it in time. Practice is key!
I’m a massive fan of ear training. I think everyone can improve in that area, not just those who are “born” with perfect pitch, if that even exists 🙂
So blessed by all of your hard work. As a vocalist, it’s obviously lyric memorization. By also being a songwriter, we know that each word was chosen specifically. I follow patterns of consonance (repeating consonants usually beginning words). Think of the “Bending beneath the weight of his wind…”. I’ll also use assonance which is the pattern of similar vowels or rhymes. I’ll mark up my lyric sheet to account for the patterns, as well as bars before vocals, tags, etc. As a vocalist, if you really want to interpret a song well, you need to know it well. Hard? Yes. But worth it…absolutely. You’re awesome David!