Having good memorizing skills will help later on if you ever want to perform a piece for a recital. There is something freeing about playing from memory rather than having to use energy to read the notes off the page. First you have more room to think about phrasing and bring out certain notes – that is the essence of the performance experience. It is also good for young children that haven’t learned to read music. This develops a good ear training and intonation rather than thinking about reading music. Note reading will be taught later in Book I.

Let’s take the Variation A of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star a.k.a. “Pepperoni Pizza”.

When you memorize a piece, you always need to take it in sections. You cannot expect to play through the whole piece several times and memorize it. The brain likes doing things in layers and sections.

With Pepperoni Pizza Twinkle, you have your larger A section, two small B sections , then the A section again to finish. I always describe the Pepperoni Pizza Twinkle like a sandwich. The A sections are your breads and your B sections are the meats.

First thing, LISTEN to the recording along with practicing. Listening to the songs is just as important as practicing the songs.

You first want to play through the “bread” section – use the music in the beginning. This is the opportunity to work on intonation and tone. When you’re playing on the open strings, you want to have a brilliant and clear sound coming out or “ringtones”.

Try playing the bread section without the music. If there are any missed notes, go right to that spot and correct, don’t start from the beginning.

Once you have mastered the bread section, begin learning the “meat” section. Take the same approach like we did in the bread section. Be sure you have two sets of meats in your Twinkle sandwich!

After memorizing the meat section, play the meat sections and add in your bread section at the end.

After that start from the top with your bread and you should be on your way to building your Twinkle sandwich!