How to Memorize a Song: Lyrics, Chords, Solos, Melody & Theory

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If you want to know how to memorize a song, the process can be much easier.

Yes, even if you need to memorize chords and lyrics at the same time.

You can even speed up how you memorize solos on the guitar, keyboard or any instrument you play.

How do I know?

As a touring musician who also happens to be a memory expert, I’ve done more than merely explore various memory strategies for remembering all kinds of music. I’ve performed on stages around the world.

I can also remember the first time I sang in front of an audience.

Sure, I was just a little kid in grade two, and I didn’t have a guitar at the time. But it was still quite the experience.

I remember that I used rote learning at the time, a process that was more difficult than it needed to be.

These days I know better, and on this page, I’ll show you how to make the process a lot easier. I’ll help you memorize songs thoroughly — know the lyrics, the notes, and how to do individual runs or riffs.

Ready to flex your music memorization muscles? Let’s get started!

Memorizing Songs With Mnemonic Devices Vs. Without

To begin, we need to discuss the elephant in the room:

I teach and use mnemonics to rapidly remember pieces of relatively complicated music like this:

However, many people prefer to teach rote learning. Here’s what their advice typically looks like:

• Listen to the song repeatedly to familiarize yourself with the melody and lyrics.
• Break the song into sections and memorize using chunking.
• Separate learning the lyrics from learning the much.
• Visualize the song using images and scenarios that trigger your recall.
• Practice the lyrics without singing them, i.e. recite them as if they were poems.
• Engage emotionally with the music to make it more memorable.
• Repeat and use deliberate practice for the tricky parts.
• Practice regularly.

Much of that advice is great. And it can work especially well if you’re already well-versed in music theory.

However, I couldn’t use all of those tips when I was called to go on tour. I just didn’t have the time.

For example, in the image below you see me playing in Berlin after being called in to learn ten complex songs for a tour with The Outside:

In order to learn all of the songs in less than two weeks, I used a variety of mnemonic devices.

These were important because as you can tell from a song like Empire, I had to remember notes, rhythms and understand chord structure for my limited, but vitally expressive bass runs.

Here’s what’s involved.

Memorizing Songs With Mnemonic Devices

As we go through these mnemonic devices, please don’t feel overwhelmed. They can all be learned within a weekend.

Once you have them, you’ll be able to apply them to all aspects of music. Music mnemonics come with a bit of a “catch,” however. Music is inherently mnemonic. As scientists have put it, music provides a kind of mental scaffolding, so the more you understand about your instrument and things like the circle of fifths, the less often you’ll need mnemonics.

That’s okay. Once you know all the strings by note and how to memorize key signatures quickly, you can use memory techniques for many other things.

Keep in mind too that performing from memory is not always desirable. As Jennifer Mishra’s research has shown, during certain historical periods, audiences did not like how performing from memory led to alterations of the music.

Andreas Lehmann has also shown in Psychomusicology that various production factors influence the extent to which you need to memorize music.

In my experiences, it totally made sense to read from sheet music while performing in an orchestra. But it never made sense while playing in a four-piece band. The key differentiator is style of performance based on audience expectation.

With that in mind, let’s look at memory techniques for complex songs where you absolutely need to perform from memory without sheet music.

One: Visual Associations For The Main Notes & Chords

The basic strategy is simple. Rather than thinking abstractly about the notes by letter, give each one an image.

Here’s how I do it for A through G using the pegword method:

• A = Al Pacino
• B = Bert from Sesame Street
• C = Cookie Monster
• D = Dracula
• E = Ernie
• F = Foucault
• G = Grover

This simple foundation means that if a simple chord sequence moves A-G-D, then the story method helps me remember that Al Pacino is doing something weird to Grover who then does something strange to Dracula.

Two: Add Mnemonic Images For Sharps, Flats & Naturals

What you’ve just learned is the basic logic of how mnemonic images work. Using alphabetical association, you pair something highly familiar with something abstract.

To know whether a note is sharp or flat, you can place objects in the hands of your famous figures. For example, take F#/Gb:

Here, I’ve given Foucault a Swiss Army Knife because knives are “sharp.” If I needed to remember the note as Gb, I would give him a hammer and have him doing something outrageous like flattening the sun.

Three: Use Number Systems For Theory & Application

If you’re just learning either guitar or piano, you can apply number mnemonics like rhymes or a 00-99 PAO System based on the Major System to remember note positions.

You can also apply this approach to learning theory, such as the modes. In Lydian, for example, the fourth note is sharp. Since my image for four is a sail boat, I imagined a knife cutting the sail, permanently installing this musical fact into memory.

Finally, when I memorize Bach pieces like the one you see me performing here, I apply this approach for some of the trickier runs:

All I’ve done is to think of my fretboard as a kind of Memory Palace. By placing my images on the fretboard in an order that creates a story, I can look at the sheet music and memorize all kinds of instrumental parts very quickly. You’ll be able to do the same once you develop your own mnemonic tools.

Four: Use Proper Spaced Repetition

One reason you might struggle to recall music is that you’re not using spaced repetition to maximize the learning process.

I used to make this mistake all the time: repeating the song like a machine with no breaks or interleaving the piece with other learning activities.

I’d repeat the same tricky passage repeatedly by starting the song over again from the beginning.

That’s problematic for a few reasons related to the forgetting curve discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Although he studied it based on words, the same thing applies to notes in music.

Make sure that you take plenty of breaks and come back to practice the song at the most optimal intervals of time.

How do you figure out what practice intervals are best for you? I suggest you keep a memory journal the way the top mental athletes do. You can learn how by watching or listening to this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast.

Five: Apply Deliberate Practice Like A Pro

Another mistake I use to make strikes me now as just plain silly.

When I came across a tricky part of a song I wasn’t memorizing effectively, I would return to the start of the song.

But beginning all over again rarely helped me remember the tricky parts.

Eventually I learned to loop just the tricky bar over and over until I got it. Then I would add the subsequent bar and loop that. Finally, add in the prior bar and loop all three.

After getting just this section fluid, go back to the beginning of the song. By the time you reach the problem area, you will have it both in semantic memory and procedural memory and pull it off much, much better.

Although he uses different words to say the same thing, Dweezil Zappa recently shared his experiences following just this process in an interview with Rick Beato:

I was pleasantly surprised to hear him confirm this very important approach, especially given his pedigree.

How to Memorize Song Lyrics

Now that we’ve covered the main visualization techniques for song memorization through the use of mnemonics, let’s add in the lyric component.

This is great for rapidly memorizing songs for auditions when you want the gig and will only get it if you can interpret the songs in your unique voice and style.

Of all the common mistakes when memorizing songs out there, that’s the biggest one. Copying instead of interpreting.

With that in mind, let me share the lyric process with you.

1. Poetic Analysis

You don’t have to have a full understanding of the lyrics in order to memorize them, but it’s helpful to understand at least the basics.

But watch out: don’t sit there and wait until you understand the lyrics before you start to memorize! One of the things you’ll discover, through the process of memorizing music, is your understanding compounds value.

In academia, the accretion of value means that “the sediments of meaning build up.” The more you work with little bits of sand and stone (in this case, lyrics and music), the more settle and get baked in, the more and more meaning builds up over time.

There’s always more understanding yet to come — and that’s a beautiful thing.

2. Emotional Analysis

This is the simplest thing to do, something stressed by the actor Ashley Strand. Ask yourself:

• Is it a happy song?
• Is it a sad song?
• Are there multiple emotions?
• What emotions is the artist trying to get across to the audience?

Do your best to interpret what’s going on with the song so you can perform it with feeling.

3. Use A Memory Palace

A Memory Palace is an excellent technique to help you learn how to memorize song lyrics (which is basically the same as mnemonics for memorizing poetry). By using the method of loci, it provides a powerful way of laying out your text word by word, in the order it appears (and the order it needs to be recalled). Then you can quickly transfer that information into your long-term memory.

It’s easier to explain how all of this works via video, so please give this section of a longer tutorial on memorizing lyrics I made for you a watch:

Once you are using Memory Palaces, you just associative imagery of the kind we discussed above for each note and chord.

The only difference is that in this case, you’re applying the memory techniques to words instead of notes.

In case you’re wondering how to memorize lyrics in a foreign language, the process is also the same. But for detailed discussion, check out how I memorized the Sanskrit phrases I spoke-sung in my TEDx Talk.

My friend and I also used this approach to memorize the rap lyrics in our “Brain Games” song to promote the Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass:

The Ultimate Trick To These Techniques For Memorizing Songs

Simply put:

Everything in music and memory is theory until you start to apply the ideas.

Whether it’s memorizing harmonies and vocal parts or working to absorb the intricacies of orchestral sheet music, these techniques are laser-targeted for getting long songs and short songs into memory fast.

But notice too that part of the targeting involves analysis of songs by breaking them down into smaller parts.

Far too many people overwhelm themselves by trying to take each piece of music as a whole.

That’s just not realistic because even in performance, it all comes out one note or chord at a time. In order to get into flow, you need to combine knowledge of the song with practice performing it.

If you need more help with developing your song knowledge, grab my free memory improvement course:

It gives you four video tutorials and worksheets to help with the Memory Palace part.

These simple activities will expand your spatial memory, which directly applies to how effectively you can handle your musical instruments.

Now that you know the essential mnemonics used to rapidly absorb music, get out there and start learning the most captivating music you can find.

Your audiences will respond with the most enthusiastic applause you’ve ever heard!