Good morning,
Thank you for the kind words. It would appear that, in addition to being an Englishman (and pedant), you are a gentleman, as well.
Best wishes to you and yours,
Hi,
my experience is: when I learned a tune by ear and later see the sheetmusic, it seems to be a different tune. Probably different brains areas control the different kinds of learning by hearing or seeing the notes.
Since in most workshops you learn tunes by ear, you are in clear advantage!
Isabella
For what it’s worth…
I’ve been playing Highland pipes for 20+ years and I feel I can read music fairly well. When I started to learn the whistle (actually learn it, not just noodle around), I found that I had a hard time reading whistle music as my fingers were constantly wanting to play Highland pipe fingering. I can look at the notes on the staff, recognize them, but then my brain had to figure out different fingering placements to create those notes on the whistle. I struggled with this for a bit until I decided that I would completely remove written music from my whistle learning. I made and continue to make a deliberate effort to learn Irish trad music and by extension, Scottish trad music entirely by ear when playing the whistle. For me, this works. I’m developing my ear which is a cool thing too. I’ll still read music to learn new tunes on the pipes, but that’s it. Whistles by ear only. Woohoo!
Just keep experimenting until you find what works best.
That’s the way most Highland pipers are.
They neither learn tunes “by ear” per se, that is, entirely from hearing, nor by sightreading in the normal sense of the word, that is, being able to perform a tune they’ve never heard at first sight, just as you can read a paragraph of written English that you’ve never heard read out loud.
Rather, they use written music and hearing to reinforce each other.
With ITM, I can play tunes from sheet music that I’ve never heard, yet it’s not “sightreading” in the normal sense because I’m not necessarily playing what’s written on the page. Rather, the sheet music is giving me the basic shape of the tune, which I re-create as I play, the re-creation based on my experience and personal manner of playing. The same re-creation process would happen if I were learning the tune by ear.
I suspect that many of the ITM players are like that too.
About people playing music out of O Neill’s, it seems to me when I hear people playing tunes out of O Neill’s they’re not playing them the way they’re written, evidently more influenced by the way they hear people play the tunes than by the way they’re written in the book.
Try it sometime: take a tune in O Neills’ and try playing it the way it’s written, as a true sightreader would.
Years ago I wrote out something of a Rosetta Stone, a page full of excerpts from O Neills with examples of how those passages are normally played.
I never played the piano very well but it was my first intro to reading sheet music. (my small town teacher actually abandoned me since it seemed to parrot what she played rather than read it, but that is another story which convinced my then 8 year old mind playing by ear was somehow bad-- I did get over that big time) But when I started taking flute lessons and later as an adult with whistle I would pick tunes off the page on the piano if I couldn’t get them to transfer through my brain to my hands into my flute. Now 50+ years later I am picking up the concertina and find myself “reading” the tune first on the flute or whistle if it is a tough one I can’t just remember. Though my predominate learning mechanism is still by ear. If I were to live long enough I would assume I would turn to my concertina to read the music for my sousaphone (lifelong dream destined to remain just that). It seems the instrument I’m learning takes a bit too much of my brain for awhile.
I know a lot of good players that never really did read the dots, and others that can sight read so quickly it is astounding. We are all different .
Myself, I’m not so musical. I’ve always loved music and get great satisfaction from my whistles but honestly I have minimal natural aptitude for playing. Taught myself to read music which in-turn allows me to generate a bit of muscle memory when fleshing out a tune. Once I can fluidly move through the tune I can work on making the tune musical and along the way being able to memorize what I play. Works for me in my kingdom of living room concerts. So now years later I am slowly “getting it” in regards to being able to play what I hear. Been a great journey. Respectfully, tim
To me there’s no such thing as the one and only correct way of learning tunes. If you can do it by reading sheet music - as many with eg. a background in classical music might do - that’s completely fine, as they probably “hear” the tune in their head just by reading sheet music. Those who learn just by ear will likely end up in the same result, regardless of the methods.
Personally I can learn a tune just by ear, but I will have to have listened and listened to the tune over and over again so that it’s stuck in my head 100% (or to do it in smaller pieces) and then I can work it out by ear. With some slow airs I still do that.
Usually I use both my hearing and sheet music to reinforce each other. As I become more familiar with the tune, I can figure out the notes and make the learning quicker. Also with these tunes the case happens to be that one has tons and tons of tunes in their head and they are played by memory, so it helps me to be able to somehow connect the audio to a certain point in the sheet music.
But I always start by listening to the tune multiple times from multiple sources and from multiple artists so I can compare the way it actually goes to the most fitting sheet music.