hours, day, weeks??? etc.
In the personnel I delay around 1 week to dominate it totally.
post please!!!
thanks all!!
i think it depends on how long you’ve been playing?
usually 2-3 weeks at least i’d say, i dont play everyday
Probably about a week for me to totally get a tune too, but sometimes it takes longer if I have a lot on my mind at the time. College and learning tunes doesn’t always fit well together. (What the next note?..it’s not self-defeating behaviors…and it’s not CSS).
-Casey
Some tunes slip into the mind easily - they are there from the off, and only need polishing. Others need a bit of effort to fix in the mind. Yet others need effort to fix in the mind and still more effort to get the fingers to do the necessary. (The Kid on the Mountain, for instance).
But the very very worst, is the tune you thought you had, and one day you find you are playing the B part of something else… Arg! Discord!
Précis: It varies. /Précis
If you have one tune to learn, and only one, then a week to get the bones of it into your head and fingers, unless it’s a stinker of some kind.
If you suddenly find yourself surrounded by half-a-dozen tunes you want to learn, in two weeks’ time you will know four of them and the other two will take a year, if not longer.
In my experience it varies greatly. Some tunes can take short time but others need a lot of practice, especially the fastest tunes.
However, even if I can read music I prefer to learn tunes by ears. I’ve noticed that in this way it’s easier to memorize them.
Any tune I can get into my head, I can learn pretty quickly. But some tunes will not go into my head. I seem to have an easier time with jigs than reels. Maybe my brain works in 6/8.
Does this mean that you spend 2 or 3 weeks just playing that one tune and nothing else, except maybe exercises of some kind?
Do you just play it over and over and over or do you try to slip something new into it each time, trying to work out your own interpretation?
Me I find I can learn a tune but then I forget how it goes once I learn another one. I feel like I have to keep starting over.
To actually be in control of a tune often takes me months,
sometimes years, of practicing it. Some tunes
are simple and easy; others less so. There are tunes
I’ve played for years that I still don’t have entirely.
I know the notes but I can’t reliably play them.
It depends, if I get to know the song well, and start singing it all the time, and have nothing really to do,..like now, it takes about a week. It depends on the song too if I really like it, it will take less time
For some simple tunes, mainly slow airs, I can catch them down to less than one week, while for some other tunes (breton breeze, tamlin), I’ve been trying to play them decently for months now (back to october) with times off.
But what do you mean by learning a tune? When do you consider that you ‘know’ it?
I think it is a complex combination and it doesn’t look like I’ll be ever satisfied with my playing.
Though I must confess there is no tune that I dominate totally. Most tunes are still kicking my butt on a regular basis. Sometimes if they’re sleeping I can sneak up on them and get in a couple of good licks.
All this is going to really mess with your translator. Sorry.
To play along at session, I have to have heard it a few times, so
that I could hum along, then I can usually jump in and be playing
all the notes by the third time through. If I want to play it solo
with ornamentation, that’s going to take me a couple weeks of
practice and analyzation.
I’ll never be a member of Lunasa. I’ve been working on Devil In The Kitchen on and off for a couple of years. I only recently played it in public for the first time. Easy stuff takes me a couple of weeks, but there are tunes I’ve played in public for years that I’m still polishing up.
Answer: Forever!
Somewere in the thread was a question of playing only the new tune or others as well. I find that I can only learn a certian amount at one go, and I HAVE to play something else and then come back to the new tune to make progress. Or put the whistle down altogether and pick it up again later - maybe only minutes or hours - then toot for a minute or two and then stop again. I find that as long as I’m playing correctly it’s worth continuing. If I start goofing up a lot it’s time to stop. No point learning the wrong things well.
Which brings up the technique of playing the tune VERY SLOWLY at first. Once I can play the right notes in the right order, then the speed and rythm come fairly easily.
For me it depends on the tune. Some tunes take me weeks, or even months of practicing to really get a good grasp on, then some tunes are a piece of cake. Like today I finally sat down and learned two new slip jigs, Boys of Ballisodare, and Comb Your Hair and Curl It just within 30 minutes time. However, I also have really been listening to these tunes extensively for the past 2 months or so.
What Key of D said. It’s not unusual for me to learn a tune by ear in 30 minutes. It’s also not unusual for me to sit down and try to learn a tune by ear and whiff; I just don’t get it on that particular day. Eventually tunes of the second type become tunes of the first type. And normally this is with a backdrop of months or years listening to the tune.
Well I’ve been working on “Downfall of Paris” for over 18 months now, and still having problems with more than 1/2 of it.
But some other simple tunes that I can work out by ear, maybe 30 minutes to get the basics, and a couple of days to cement them in.
I’ve only just started learning tunes by ear but when I’ve come up against one that just didn’t click (about half of them), I put it aside but include it on my mp3 playlist. I tried “Dunmoore Lasses” several months ago and got nowhere. I listened to it almost daily then tried again last week. I figured it out except for a few bars in just a just a couple days. Those few bars continue to elude me, so I’m back to listening. As colomon points out, listening a lot seems to be the key.
To actually be in control of a tune often takes me months,
sometimes years, of practicing it. Some tunes
are simple and easy; others less so. There are tunes
I’ve played for years that I still don’t have entirely.
I know the notes but I can’t reliably play them.
I would agree with jim, I would also find it difficult to try and learn one tune and stick at that one, because it can get tired of practicing it over and over. so i try and learn my tunes in pairs that would be very dissimilar EG: sean reids reel Vs banish misfortune.