Hello all,
In my music career, I've been called upon to play some challenging music. Sometimes I'm not given the luxury of a lot of time to learn the songs. There are some methods I use to memorize music rapidly and keep it sticking in my head. Granted, some gigs allow me to read charts (or basic cheat-sheets), but I like to have the music come from my heart (and head) when performing.
The main concept I employ is "chunking". In other words, I'm taking a large amount of information and grouping it into a smaller amount of "chunks". For instance, say you're looking at a page of sheet music with 100 notes written on it. That's 100 bits of information to memorize. However, if I can chunk that down into groups of chords, scales used, repeating motifs, etc., I've instantly reduced the number of "things" to commit to memory.
Of course it helps if you know a bit about theory and how music is organized, but you can get started simply by looking for patterns in the music.
Please have a look at this video where I talk about this concept. Please let me know what you think, and happy memorizing!