When I learn a new piece of music, whether it’s a baroque gigue or an Irish jig, I simply play it over and over until I’ve memorised it. I read sheet music and start from there, and I have a good memory for music once I’ve learned it, never having been a very hot sight reader. But I’ve never developed a more methodical approach to learning a piece than to simply play it over and over until it sticks. Does anyone have a particular method?
By listening to the music. It then becomes alive internally, I can hear it internally. Then I try to play what I hear internally. Then I try to correct myself, if it comes out wrong, and try play it again.
Sheet music can serve at times as a crutch for me: when I play some tune written down, it is just to make it alive internally. But the playing later comes from inside, otherwise I feel it is a mechanical act.
And repeated playing reinforces the body memory and helps for technical stuff. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, because I can ingrain wrong technique and also faulty phrases.
The main work, which really is a pleasure, goes on internally. Oh yes, and I remember phrases, the tune, the music, lives inside in phrases, for me.
Something like that, in any case. Others will say it much better, or say something quite different.
Sure - but when you’re playing music from a score, you’re obviously listening to it. It’s not mechanical at all, unless you have no imagination or sensibility. Personally I find that when I can whistle (with my lips) an entire piece, then I can pretty much play it, with only the (hopefully few!) technical issues to iron out. Once those are dealt with is when you really start to play the piece and make it your own. For instance, I’ve been revisiting the minuets from Bach Cello Suite n.1 on recorder these last few days and working on interpretation, ornamentation etc. - the technical issues of getting the notes right and fluent are long in the past. I’m sure I’ll still be reinterpreting them for the rest of my life.
I wasn’t really asking whether people use sheet music or not, but whether they have a particular practice regime or approach, like playing phrases in isolation, playing starting from the end and working backwards one bar at time so that by the time you reach the beginning you’ve played the whole thing countless times, etc.. Things like that.
An addition problem I find in learning is that, given ITM has no breathing spaces, when I play from music I don’t always play it the same way because of the need for a breath at different times, especially it you try and play on different whistles. So I never know WHAT to learn given the notes and ornamentation can change each time it’s played. I have a real problem learning pieces off by heart.
Hans, I think that was well said. It describes how I go about it much of the time. I hear the tune. I remember the tune. I sit down and figure out how to play the tune. And I work on it until I get it as right as I can.
Caveat, the tune needs to be memorable. Most tunes worth learning are just that. Other tunes may have a memorable A part but the B part may be less so. Then I might look for a good recording to aid the process.
Other times I may learn a tune from a friend. They’ll play a phrase or two. I’ll parrot the phrases. Bingo, bango, we’ve got a new tune, and off you go.
I generally use notation as documentation that I can come back to when I need to jog the memory, could be ABC, rarely dots these days. I do write down the tunes I write myself. That helps my process sometimes.
I go about it a little different. I generally have the tune in my memory before I start trying to play it.
I remember that was a conundrum for me when I took up the flute after playing tunes for some years on guitar, banjo and mandolin. No need to stop playing to breath on those instruments. If you learn a tune from a setting by a whistle or flute player, the space for breathing should already be there. If not, say you want to learn something you hear played by a fiddle player, just work on the tune and the breath spots will naturally come to you as you internalize the tune so that you don’t leave an important bit out. It’s rather magical how that happens.
I don’t find particular whistles or flutes need different spots for a breath. The spots where it is musically natural to breath seem to work out for both high or low whistles just as well. YMMV
Feadoggie
But it seems to be a problem for quite a few players, who have a very hard time memorising a tune. Some rely to a high degree on playing with a score, always (nearly). Some are musically sensitive and still need the score. But they may manage some kind of interpretation, so it is not just mechanical dead music. I imagine that many players find it difficult to really hear the music internally. They hear it externally, of course, when playing or it is played. Is it musical imagination, or a lack of it? OTOH one can have too much musical imagination, and get carried away by it, inventing , changing, all the time, so phrases do not “stick”. I can find it hard to focus on the listening (externally), but that seems to be fundamental for memorising a tune.
Yes, then you got it in memory and can recall it, and develop it.
When I try to learn a tune in an organised way, I would go over a tune phrase by phrase, from the beginning, adding a phrase at a time, restarting from the beginning. Some difficult technical phrase I might work on a short time in isolation, but otherwise always as part of the whole part. I never learn bar by bar, but phrase by phrase, which I imaginatively need to work out internally. I do that for the A part, and then for the B part, and then do A followed by B followed by A (with repetitions if asked for), so I get the transitions right. I’ve never learned a tune back to front. I keep at it as long as it is fun to do so, or till I get bored by it.
I’ve only been playing whistle a couple of years, although listener for much longer. I had neither read sheet music nor had efficient ear training. Even though I’ve acquired some sheet music in multiple formats and I can read it basically I’ve been focusing on the ear learning. The parts to a whole, phrase by phrase. Part A then Part B. And not tune sets yet. I focus on the single tune.
I moved away from the sheet music (books) because I wanted to learn the tunes I liked and from the local musicians in the area. I listen to a lot of tunes over and over. The current tune I’m learning is Maire’s Wedding from the album ‘Beyond The Watery Lane’ (2012) by Loretta Egan Murphy. Loretta is a local musician here in the area and the tune gets played frequently at various Trad events, sessions, festivals, and parties. Yes, I’m familiar with the tunes’ versions from The Session, however, I liked Loretta’s version and for additional reasons.
I’ve struggled in learning the Trad tunes when played on other instruments especially the accordion, concertina, sometimes fiddle, and if there’s a bodhran, poor guitar, or banjo, well my ear and brain just scramble the tune. Somehow I can handle the woodwind instruments with the tune.
My repertoire isn’t very large, and I don’t care about that at all. I want to play the few tunes I know well… “do a little well” 
I have fun and I love the music so its just that much easier to learn.
This is true. I have a violinist friend who is a great improviser and sight reader, but has a terrible memory for tunes/music. He really needs the score, and makes much better use of it than I do, except when he’s just improvising. A very emotional player overall.
Yeah, I think what Hans may be saying (sorry to put words in your mouth, Hans, especially if I’m wrong) is that a lot of people who learn from sheet music do seem to have a problem getting the tunes to stick. I, like Hans, would always prefer to listen to the tune first a few times until I have it in my head. Then I can play it anyway, meaning I don’t have to learn it, and it sticks much better too.
Sometimes, that’s not possible of course. But then, for those tunes which I have learnt from sheet music, I tend to have a worse memory for them.
I think I can confirm that – it’s probably laziness, because oh well, the dots are there anyway. But on the contrary, if someone shows me a tune or I learn it from a recording or so, I usually “discretise” it by jotting down the ABCs, which helps me immensely to memorise the tune. Not that I need to look at it… maybe accessing the tune from another perspective links some wires up there.
As for classical pieces, I almost always play from the sheet music. This stuff is just too complex for my porous brain.
Sorry to be posting so immediately soon after the last time - it makes me seem a bit like an obsessive… But there is a difference between the trad tunes which are generally quite short and easy to memorise, like pop songs, and a baroque sonata allegro or something similar, which can be much more involved and for which “traditionally” the only way of learning is really from sheet music. Different musical cultures in every way.
Yes, of course, it is a different musical culture in every way. Maybe we should do a quick poll and see how many people on this forum are currently working on a baroque sonata allegro at the moment … on the whistle. 
You might want to bring up the same topic over on the World/Folk Winds forum and see how people respond there. There are Baroque music forums on the Internet as well which might be more helpful to you on this topic. Otherwise it would be gracious of you to not to call us out here for playing simple folk music and denegrating our methods and traditions for learning it.
Confession: I did spend much of the afternoon listening to a couple pieces by Jacob van Eyck that I want to work on. I still want to know the music before I sit down to play it. So I listen first and learn later, once I know it.
Apologies if I sound miffed. I think it’s time for tea.
Feadoggie
That’s how I do it.
There’s the rare occasion when I do go to sheet music, but that’s in the case of really complex melodies that continue to elude my ear. I don’t ear-learn because it’s what I think I should do; it’s just what I do most naturally.
Same here. And it’s a fine point, but I also try to remember and observe the tune as a whole; for me this is key. Yes, I practice parts to get them solid, but instead of seeing parts as bits to be eventually strung together, I think of them as temporarily taken out of the greater context of the whole tune.
I usually pick tunes up quite easilly by ear but sometimes I listen to the tune on cd or mp3 and if it is difficult to work out the notes i slow it down using audio editing software and i play a few bars then write the notes out in a form of abc notation, i’ve never understood music scores but have played flutes for 30 years with no issues. I then play each bar as i learn it and find i can learn a set of jigs or reels a night by repetition.
I suppose if you have been taught to read music and understand all the squiggles, dots and numbers it makes sense to carry on that way, horses for courses.
It seems to me that this all comes down to different strokes for different folks. Some of us are good at memorisation while others are not so good at it. I have a very hard time keeping music “straight” in my mind. If I start hearing a song I know - say Irish Rover (learned that one in Boy Scouts ages ago) - in short order the music will morph - maybe I’ll hear a radio jingle and I’ll hear that for a while and that will turn into a Stars and Stripes Forever and that perhaps into Irish Rover again and so forth. Usually something will become dominant and will become difficult to dislodge. This is obviously a Good Thing if the radio at work is blaring something dreadful – I can just turn on the radio inside and listen to anything I want – so long as I don’t mind fourteen things playing at once. It’s not such a grand thing when it comes to focusing on one music. Kind of like musical ADHD.
I was happy that I was able to memorise one tune – I sat in front of the CD player for about three hours going over and over a little tune called Ha Neo Ket Brao on the Celtic Wedding CD (I think Chieftains or somesuch). Can still play that little tune! I also spent a couple hours on Youtube one time transcribing a French folk tune (a folk clarinet maker playing along with a squeezebox of some kind) – didn’t memorise it, but was able to write it down. Nope, sorry – it’s another Breton tune! Don’t know the name, though.
Some of us simply don’t memorise tunes very well, so I’m happy to use the dots as suggestions as to which way the music wants to go.
No, but there are several classical tunes I’m fond of on whistle. There’s a Hoteterre Rondo I like, a Rathgeber Air, a Purcell Gigue, the air from Les Oiseaux, Handel’s Water Music air is nice on the whistle, the Bells of St. Genvieve are too, Bach’s Air from Suite No. 3 is nice, one of my favorite Handel airs, Where Ere You Walk, is lovely on low whistle, Boccharini’s Minuet is nice if the whistle has a quiet upper register, I think the Ronde Des Lutins will also be quite nice, but will require very much practice at low speeds to coordinate tongue and fingers in preparation for the breakneck – or rather, breaktongue! – speed of the music.
In my tune books, I don’t discriminate against a nice sounding tune just because Mozart or Handel wrote it (or, as is sometimes the case, borrowed it from the folk tradition!) I will sometimes re-key a piece in a vèry hard key, but will tend to leave a piece in E or maybe B as is – that’s what half-holing is for! – or perhaps excise some of the more boring bits
That said, all of those classical tunes live happily enough as next door neighbours to hundreds of more whistle-y dance or folk tunes the likes of the Cincinnati Hornpipe or Jefferson’s, or The Congress or Eileen Aroon. If I like the sound and it fits the whistle well, it gets dutifully transcribed into the books!
Whatever method works best for the individual, and provides the desired results!
Cheers
I’m very well paper trained, and can pretty much play trad tunes at tempo on an instrument I’m playing regularly (that varies).
But the problem is the music flows from the paper to sound without stopping long enough to be learned. Sure I play with fairly acceptable style from the page, but then nothing sticks! I try consciously to either get rid of the music quickly or not use it at all.
As to baroque sonatas I have had several under hand without music needed, but on recorder (not a dirty word in that world . ). But I seldom play without music in that world because the music usually integrates several players, and having the music there avoids a disaster when someone takes a wrong term. This is more true with small ensembles ( trios etc) then with solo work.
No denigration intended, indeed I don’t see where you’re getting that from. I also play just as much simple folk music (mostly Playford, I have to admit, but also some Irish jigs and so on), which can be as simple or complex as you want to make it, and isn’t that a good part of it’s charm? and on the whistle. After all, most baroque music is elaborated dance music, born of folk traditions. It’s all just music to me, and also I don’t really consider the whistle to be that much different from the recorder. I love them both.
Anyway, it wasn’t my intention to ruffle any feathers.
But reading through the thread, it does seem that most people apply their way of learning to whatever genre they’re playing - unsurprisingly. I guess I’m prolly stuck with just playing things over and over then…
Not necessarily. I still think you’d do better to try the listening over and over to a version you like and only when it’s stuck in your head transferring it to your instrument. I think there are very strong advantages to that method that will become more apparent if you try it.
Ok. It’s true. I really must start listening to music.
No denigration intended, indeed I don’t see where you’re getting that from.
I also play just as much simple folk music (mostly Playford, I have to admit, but also some Irish jigs and so on), which can be as simple or complex as you want to make it, and isn’t that a good part of it’s charm? [
I guess I’m prolly stuck with just playing things over and over then…
Probably.
I couldn’t help thinking, in this context, about the old John Kelly line : ‘when I hear a man playing a tune I don’t listen to the man playing the tune, I listen to what he does with it’. I think that line touches on one of the essentials of ‘learning a tune’. What do you feel you learn when you are ‘learning a tune’. Learning the basics of tunes isn’t a big deal, you soak them up over time , you find them in a book, you hear them played somewhere or they come in with the wind from the ocean and they stick with you. And yes, there are nuances and things there I overlook there for the sake of brevity and clarity.
Important in this context is however the difference between learning a tune as a structure, a set of phrases that can be filled in at will, and memorising it as a string of notes, which tends to make it much more inflexible and harder to retain.
It’s getting a tune to the stage where it comes alive, where it feels you’ve lived inside it and know the hidden dusty corners of it, that really is the important part. To my mind anyway. Sometimes you find a tune in, say, a book, and it sticks immediately and you can move around in it without a second thought. Sometimes you learn a tune and it just sits there until at some point you hear someone play it in a ay that makes it ‘click’ and you’re flying it after that. I am always intrigued, and mystified, by that process.