Do you do aural learning (learning by ear)?

Uilleann Pipes
1

On another thread i was lamenting about how it will be years before i will be able to play in a session. And then i got some helpful advice about a place in portland that offers sessions classes. But… They teach you to learn by ear. No sheet music. I have learned to play, badly, the clarinet, piano, guitar, penny whistle, and now the uilleann pipes. With each one i learned a tune with some form of written music in front of me… Along with listening to a tune. But i dont think i have ever been able to learn a tune without some music. Well maybe twinkle twinkle little star, three blind mice and some chritmas carols are the exception.

So asked another piper and he forced himself to learn aurally and was the better for it. Then i went online and there are many many Irish Traditional players who swear its the only way. And then there are some who say learn by the dots and listen for how others do variations.

So… What is most prevalent? I am thinking that along with learning with my tutor using heather clarkes book that maybe i should try to learn some tunes by ear using the slo mo feature of my TEMPO program.

Thoughts?

2

If you can learn Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Three Blind Mice, and some Christmas carols by ear, you can also learn Irish dance tunes by ear.

Are there any players who have achieved a high standard of competency who simply cannot learn a tune without sheet music in front them?

3

I wouldn’t say it is the only way, but it is an excellent way. Ear training takes practice. Solfege is a good application for this. Given your engineering sort of mind, I think it will help encapsulate different aspects of ear training. A really good practice is to use those slower-downer applications so that you can get used to hearing phrases and repeating them.

4

This is related to you thinking everything sounds the same. It’s about learning to listen, learning to discern how tunes stick together, what the building blocks, the phrases are, it’s about learning to hear in detail what is going on when a tune is being played. It takes a while but without the skill you’ll only ever will be able to roll off tunes you’ve learned by heart from your notation. There’s no getting away from it.


[fixed typo]

5

Another thing, memorizing a tune is not necessarily learning to play by ear. I had a student–a psychiatrist no less–who apparently had learned the tunes just fine that I taught him (melody and chords). He no longer needed the sheet music. One day, as he was playing guitar backup for me, I went from the A part to the B part early (forgot the repeat), and the B part was in a totally different key, like D to A, and he never did catch on. He’d only memorized the tune and knew when to change chords by how far along he was into the tune. When I finally caught on to what he was doing, I stepped behind him so he couldn’t SEE what notes I was playing, and asked him to find the same note on his guitar that I was playing. He’d finally get it after fishing around for quite a while and trying all the notes possible. Then, I asked him to hit the 3rd above the basic note, the 4th, the 5th, and so on. That was too much for him. He had an hours drive to work and back, so I told him to practice singing the scale up and down the octave. Then raise it one key and do the same thing again…go up the scale to the next octave and back down. Then to sing the basic note, the 3rd above, then the 5th above (a triad) and back down and get familiar with the distance between notes. He never did catch on…I mean it didn’t help at all in his desire to play by ear.

What I’m suggesting is that for most, if not all, learning to play by ear is likely a talent people are born with, but I could be wrong.

6

I think any time someone says something “is a talent people are born with” it’s a cop-out used for not wanting to put the work in to develop the skill. It’s a skill. Some natural ability may make it easier to develop the skill, or may let you start from a slightly different starting point, but it’s still a skill that requires practice and work to develop.

I have never encountered a good (at traditional irish) musician who learned to play from sheet music. I’d even go so far as to say that all good musicians have to be very skilled at listening and hearing the musicians around them, and in traditional irish music, you simply have to be able to learn by ear. Learning from sheet music is optional; learning by listening is not.

7

Yes I do. When it comes to sheet music I am dyslexic. I quit the violin because of it, and I am going freestyle for now on the highland bagpipes because of the music reading there (Oh, I bet the pipers will flame me there! :stuck_out_tongue: ) plus the competition scene is TOO much for me…


And I heard Liam O’Flynn could not read a single note…


But I heard Seamus Ennis read music, but I think as he got older it became more useless to him (I may be wrong).

8

My family and their friends always say I am musically “gifted” for leaning by ear and for other things. It drives me ABSOLUTELY NUTS!!! :swear: When I was little I listened to plenty of Mozart, Rossini, Beethoven etc… and I think that helped develop my skill of playing/learning by ear. :stuck_out_tongue:

9

Ok… I am going to hold off on the session class as I think I need to keep working on the technique that Dodson is teaching me…But in the meantime I am also going to work on my ear.

I picked a slower tune and have started learning it and so far its easier than I thought.

Also I found this cool app, there are probably other like it, “Right note”, It has lots of exercises. The one I am using is a pitch identification. The easiest starts with C. D, or E at random in 3 different octaves. You have to pick out the right piano key. I started totally befuddled. But after about 15 min… I was getting 100% right. Then you can go to 5 notes 3 octaves and eventually all the notes 7 octaves. Then it also has melody identification, intervals, and intervals in context.

Maybe I turn myself into a musical genius :thumbsup:

10

One of the most gifted musicians I have ever known was allowed to play at a keyboard from the age of three. After she had made random noise for a while, her mother, a violinist, introduced her to intervals. . . ‘now what interval is between these two notes?’. And so on. ‘Can you sing the note you just played?’.
She was a whiz. Her ear was amazing. But she had easily achieved thousands of hours of ear training by the time she entered her teens.

Bob

11

I find if I try to learn a tune from the dots, I end up having a much harder time learning to play it without the sheet music in front of me, compared to learning either by listening or from a teacher coaching me. Unfortunately I don’t have a great ear (yet) so sometimes I resort back to the dots.

12

I usually learn the tune by listening to it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, until it then just mysteriously comes to me out of the blue, and then I just know how to play it…

13

Interesting, when I was young I would like to play intervals on the keyboard when I was little, for years. I would also like to hold them down to listen to the “beating” of the notes together.

14

Another juicy, loaded topic from Bob! You’re on quite a roll, my friend. And clearly on the right track.

But I can’t resist weighing in anyhow. Some people want to believe music notation is the Devil’s handiwork, supposedly because reading music makes it impossible for you to play with any nuance. I think that’s a load of hooey: in fact I think “reading vs. hearing” is a completely false choice.

If a musician is stylistically lazy, the sort to play “cold lifeless dots straight off the page,” then if you were to force them to learn tunes only by ear, they’ll be no more likely to improvise variations, imitate other players’ nuances, etc. – instead they’ll pick out only the basic tune and stick to that. (Or the basic tune with, say, one slight variation in the B section which they’ll play the same way forever after.) There’s nothing inherently lifeless about playing from sheet music, any more than there’s something inherently creative about parroting what you hear from a CD. [/end rant]

Anyhow, I agree with Mr. Gumby: it’s fine to learn tunes from notation, but you must also develop your ear if you want your playing to ever be interesting and “authentic” sounding – variation and improvisation are key parts of the tradition. Whether or not ear-training becomes your preferred vehicle for acquiring tunes, you have to be able to hear the smallest details in everything you hear, and you need to get so closely attuned to what you hear that you can imitate it (small chunks at first, bigger swaths later on).

You also have to be attuned enough to hear bad stuff in your own playing, and get rid of it. After years of teaching music in various contexts, time and again I see beginners (plus some supposedly advanced players) who are prone to unintentionally ignoring their own mistakes, sometimes to the point of being quite deaf to them. Not just missing notes, mind you; also, always slowing down the same hard parts and rushing through the easier bits (which is highly incompatible with group playing :wink: ). “Selective hearing” is really dangerous: if you play the same mistakes all the time, that’s what you’ll get good at. Developing a critical, fact-based ear is at least as important as being able to imitate good stuff.

Like everything else about the pipes, ear training is a long journey. Be mindful and deliberate about it – sweat the details! – and it will come.

Good luck (to us all),
Mick

15

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that if you learn from sheet music, that learning from sheet music will cause you to have a stilted style (or whatever). What I’ve heard, and what I’m saying, is that if you don’t (or can’t) learn by ear, you won’t be able to learn this music. The simple fact is that the notation does not contain all the details you need. But you are right, learning by ear is no guarantee that you won’t play badly, but I think it is a prerequisite to playing well.

That said, there does seem to be a correlation between sheet music addicts and poor musicians… But I don’t think it’s caused by the sheet music, but rather by the musicians’ laziness and/or lack of listening.

16

Nobody on this thread has gone that far, Nico; I didn’t mean for anyone to think I was accusing them of being so narrow-minded. But I’ve encountered this opinion before (“reading music causes bad musicianship”), nearly always from people who are needlessly defensive about not being able to read music. I guess I was proactively discrediting that notion before it cropped up, aka borrowing trouble. :wink:

(For the record, I have seen firsthand that plenty of non-music-readers can play little circles around many of us classically-trained types, and more expressively. Around this one, anyhow!)

I think most of us on this thread are actually in violent agreement that you need strong listening skills regardless of whether you read music, and that sooner or later you need to be able to learn tunes just from hearing them a few times.

Regards to all,
Mick

17

In the Highland piping world you have to play it ONE WAY ONLY, which I really dislike. Which is why I said earlier that I only play solo. Whereas in the Uilleann world, you can play your own style, which is why I took them up.

18

Careful now ennischanter, I’ve heard more than one terrible highland piper use that excuse for why they stopped participating in highland pipe bands. I think for many of them it was just because they couldn’t keep up with the technique… :laughing:

Good highland piping isn’t so regimental. I’ve heard some extraordinarily expressive highland piping from pipe band people.

19

That’s totally untrue ennischanter.

20

I sure hope so…