I can say that already I have a small arsenal of learned songs, reels, jigs, etc, etc.
But last it happens to me that forgetfulness the learned songs by which I am learning, for example: I learn Frost is all to over long ago (6 months), and now I learn The sunset, I have forgotten almost completely Frost is all to over, I feel that my brain I erase cordinacion with the fingers…
Is this normal one? , it happens to him to many? perhaps, or it suffers of some disease like Alzheimer?.
perhaps me this turning stupid?
Wait untill you start learning tunes like Ace and Duece of Piping, or 5 part slip jigs like An Phis Fluich, and Kid On The Mountain, on top of many more tunes!
I’ve got a bad memory, but I’ve found the only remedy for one, is practice, practice, and more practice. After that, why don’t you practice some more, then once you’re done, rest off with some practice…
I find there’s a substantial difference in how I learned the tune in the first place. Tunes learned by ear are harder to acquire than those learned from a score, but once they’re aboard, I never seem to lose them*, whereas tunes learned from a book come and go with the breeze.
*Although I do lose the titles. Sometimes I’ve found myuself playing something and have no idea what it is. I might play it over and over before some association brings me the title.
every now and then, i play all the tunes i know in the whole day. that way i keep them fresh on my memory so i wont forget them, and if a session comes up, i know them pretty freshly.
Try recording your learned tunes. Make a list of each tune before recording. At times, some of these tunes have many of the same riffs in them. A number of reels are very similiar to other reels that some can easily get confused. So, it can be quite easy to forget.
Use a tape recorder and that will solve the problem. Let the recorder assist you. It’s simple and effective!
My memory stinks. What was I saying? Oh yeah…
I can’t trust my memory, and so I have shelves of sheetmusic and piles of paper where I’ve written down the dots myself, the best I could. Last week I came across a guitar version of Joplin’s “Solace” which I noted down ten years ago. - I have a better version now.
I wanted to keep track of the ITM tunes I learned. I have ABC versions of them all on (computer) file, with two separate backups. But more useful than that is the CRIB SHEET.
It’s a spreadsheet file. It could equally well be a table in a word-processing file. It has
a. The title of the tune
b. The first two or three bars in ABC format
c. The Key
d. Whether it is a Reel, Jig, Air, Waltz, Slip Jig, Slide or Three-two or what
e. A number from one to five indicating how well I know it. Five is superconfident. One is “needs practice before playing in public”.
I have eighty tunes on my cribsheet. (I realise that that is pitifully few by the standards of this board.) They print out as two pages of A4 paper which I can photocopy to half size, so they fit on one A4 page and are still legible. I generally have a copy in my pocket.
…But then I generally have three or four sheets of A4 music in my pocket at any time. (At the moment I have Ashokan Farewell, The Cat Rambles to the Child’s Saucepan, Sioda, Eminem [a Turkish Slip Jig, apparently] and O’Carolan’s Sir Festus Burke.)
But the crib sheet is very useful. Now it gets checked for tunes I haven’t practiced. And even without conscious intent, tunes new to me still come seeping in.
I find I memorize the best when I use 3 different modalities together: By ear, by the feel of the fingers, and by the look of the notes on the page. Some of the Irish tunes begin to sound very similar to me. So it helps me to remember how it looked on the page, at least to get me started on the right tune.
Let me be the contrarian here. I think forgetting tunes is an important part of learning Irish music.
Personally, I am usually quite thankful when I forget a tune I learned in my first couple of years of playing. For one thing, it was years before I learned how to properly learn tunes – I spent so long memorizing the notes instead of learning the sound. I didn’t know anything about the style I would eventually want to learn to play, either. So on the tunes I’ve learned and haven’t forgotten, I’ve got seven or eight years of bad habits that are hard to break.
For instance, after learning “The Golden Keyboard” back in 2001, it fell out of my repertoire somewhere around 2004. That was great, because late last year I got a terrific recording of the tune, and after listening to it for six months, I almost effortlessly relearned it. But now instead of trying to visualize the notes on the page to play it, I hear three legendary Sligo/NY fiddlers playing it together in my head, with the proper phrasing and emphasis and rhythm.
Contrast that with “The Silver Spear”, which I learned a bit earlier and never had the good fortune to forget. What I get when I try to hear that in my head is a horrible mess of all the multitude playing it badly I’ve heard over the years (including my own playing of it). Barring something that forces me to sit down and exert painful effort relearning the tune, I doubt I’ll ever be happy with it.
Once upon a time there was an elderly gentleman suffering from Alzheimer’s. His wife of 40 years loved him very much, but she couldn’t handle him any longer. He would wander about, never knowing where he was or, sometimes, even who he was. She decided to take him to a nursing home.
At the nursing home, while the wife was filling out paperwork, a nurse had the gentleman sit in a chair. Suddenly the man started slowly leaning to his left. The nurse ran over and put a pillow on his left side to prop him up. A few minutes later, he started leaning to his right. The nurse ran over and put a pillow on his right side. Then he started leaning forward. This time the nurse strapped him into the chair.
After completing the paperwork, his wife walked up to him and asked, “So are you sure this place is okay?”
“It’s okay,” he said, “but why won’t they let me fart?”
AlonE: I doubt that you have Dementia such as Alzheimers as your thought process looks well organized on your posts; that is even considering the language difference. Simply put, what you don’t use, you loose. In fact, the process of playing and memorizing new music, while still playing the learned tunes, could assit you in not developing such conditions as Dementia. Oh, and I use the term “Dementia” which is the correct term to describe a variety of disorders affecting memory, Alzheimers being just one of them. Keeping your mind active, learning new material, challanging your thought processes is actually one of the things that can help keep your memory remain sharp and clear. As one member stated, “practice, practice, and practice”. Just keep on playing and enjoy the journey. Don.
I learned a tune yesterday, over the past 2 days actually. Played it over and over for hours. Listened to it being played. Hummed it while doing other things specifically so I wouldn’t forget.
Today I cannot for the life of me even remember the first few notes.
They have a great emoticon on the hysterectomy support forum I used to visit of “brain fog”. I could really use that emoticon right now. This one will have to suffice.
But don’t you find that if you can summon up those first few notes, the rest of the tune will usually follow? Note that I say “usually”, not “always”. There are those brain fog days…
Actually, I need to get the first few notes, plus the rhythm of the piece. The rhythm helps me feel the tune kinesthetically, which brings out my muscle memory…
I’m also thinking of writing up a list of the tunes I know, with the first few notes in ABC as a reminder of how they start. Hmm, maybe flash cards, with the abc on the back, in case I need a reminder. I have such a lousy memory, I’m always making myself flash cards for things I want to remember…
Sometimes when I haven’t played a tune in a good while, it’s even lost in my head, just simply listening to it again will bring it back to life with my fingers.
Failing to remember the first few notes is not unusual. That’s why I have the first couple of bars in my crib sheet.
But there are enough tunes that I have to kick-start myself from a phrase in the second or third repeat - Like An Phis Fliuch, or O’Rourke’s, or Merrily Kissed the Quaker. “How does that start? I forget - let’s take it from the middle.”
There’s the first few notes or bars that always helps jar the memory, but then there are those tunes that I start on one tune and end on another. And then there are those other tunes where I start playing it with total confidence and about halfway through part B I go, hey wait a minute, this isn’t that tune at all!
