(to JTU - where have you gone? I wasn’t my intention to highjack your thread, just to contribute -: It’s worth creating a free account, there’s much more on the OAIM.ie website than on YouTube)
I have simply been absorbing the various views. You haven’t highjacked my thread just extended an interesting topic. I have actually been trying to play bits and pieces by ear - I might not be quite as bad as I thought but it will take a long time and a lot of work - I hope my wife’s sanity stays intact. I have also joined the OAIM site.
Cheers and thanks everyone for your thoughts
I think you should have written “my brain…” because I’m beginning to think that people brains’ work in fundamentally different ways. Which would explain why students “click” with different teachers or books. For me it’s completely inconceivable to keep that many similar things apart. (But I’m reasonably good at doing very many completely different things - from tiling floors to cooking ).
Nice to see that you are still around! And good to hear that you are making progress. Unfortunately getting good at anything takes time and effort - the only “way out” is learning what we love so that we are having fun while doing the work… (Do you know Pablo de Sarasate’s quote: "“For 37 years I’ve practiced fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius!” ?)
Could you practice while your wife is out (I’m assuming you don’t want to practice for 14 hours a day - makes me wonder how he escaped RSI…)? (My dad used to practice the viola for hours - just exercises to overcome his handicap of being naturally left-handed - so I can sympathize.)
Alternatively (Mr. Gumby will probably contradict me) you could try a Clarke Sweetone - I find it very quiet and its breathiness takes the edge off the high notes so that it’s a lot more bearable for me (and my cat) than a soprano recorder (or my Feadog whistle). Though I may simply have been lucky in getting one that’s in tune!
Thanks pancelticpiper.
Do not
be too concerned about my wife. That’s mostly me being tongue-in-cheek. We have a laugh together when we are both home and she hears me playing the whistle when I am actually not playing it. I play often and hard so it sort of rings in her ears even when I’m not playing.
I do have a sweetone being one of my earlier purchases. It was not a great whistle in my humble opinion until I superglued a small square of thin black plastic on to the ramp which seemed to mellow the upper octave a bit. I didn’t keep playing it for long. I also had a traditional Clarke D at the time which I though was more air than sound. I stuffed up that one trying to make it sound okay by flattening the roof to the extent where the wooden ripple is loose and is threatening to drop out. I don’t think much of cheap whistles although I have no doubt good players can make them sound great.
Being Australian I thought I should support Australian makers hence I now concentrate on Syn’s. When and If I ever think I can play okay I’ll up the price bracket to an oz whistle but that is some way off.
I have become a bit of a fan of the OAIM. I particularly like the play along with tracks that are helping my timing.
Cheers
The thing about learning by ear, in the sense of transmission of traditional music, is that you learn the ‘language’, elements of style and nuance. It’s part of learning by immersion. An app playing you back ABC notations will never be able to give you that. You may as well go straight to the ABCs.
Hm, maybe it’s not perfect for a beginner, but IMO it can be very useful. Certainly not to learn any ornamentation, that’s true. But for practicing on the go, maybe without any internet, it’s perfect.
Yes but the point is that you’re only learning notes, mechanically reproduced and you’re learning nothing about traditional playing. Listen to real, good players’ music, absorb the music, the style and all that. Get the feel for it. That’s the point of learning by ear, if you can’t learn your tunes from that and have to resort to an app playing notations from thesession.org, you may as well go straight to the notations. But I already said that. I’ll go back in my box now, carry on.
Ehm, no – it’s not the same. I only play by ear since I started playing tin whistle 30 years ago and IMO the app is great. You don’t have to use it but this tipp was not meant for you but for the thread starter.
you’re only learning notes
exactly – music consists of notes.
if you can’t learn your tunes from that and have to resort to an app playing notations from thesession.org
nonsense – of course you can do both – learn from other players and use the app as a training tool. That’s all it’s meant to be. And using this app doesn’t mean that “you can’t learn your tunes from that”. Anybody who can learn by ear can learn from either one. Real players or an app. And IMO – stuff like ornamentation comes naturally once you have enough practice (it certainly helps to learn some traditional ornamentation). The ABC notation as played by the app serves more or less as a skeleton of the music. You make it your own by playing in your own style and yes, part of that involves listening to others – that reminds me of something one of my guitar teachers once said (he probably quoted someone else): “If you want to play Blues you have to learn everything there is to learn about music and then you have to forget it all. Then you can play Blues.”
But it was not my point to say “you have to use this app”. It’s a tool, nothing more. It’s not “either or” like you seem to think. And it does indeed help, when you wanna learn to play by ear, which is what this thread is about.
I think so long as it’s used as a memory aid meant to be discarded, it’s got enough merit. Everybody’s got their noses buried in their handheld devices anyway, these days, so might as well go there too.
Understand that I’m not talking about anything but aiding the memory, here. I’m totally an ear-learner, and when I can’t remember something in a new tune’s basics, my first impulse is to rely on a recording or useful musician to help me along. But sometimes I don’t have such a source, so then I go to the dots, and less so, to the ABCs. Whichever it is, we drop all that when we’ve got the tune, don’t we. The thing is, in the process of getting the tune we might have to return to any of those sources multiple times - or just once - and I think we all know the frustration of having, in the meantime, a new tune run thru your head, only to know that it’s not really the same one you’re trying to learn and you want to end the torment, but you have no recording, musician, dots or ABCs. It’s just you and your detestable brain, and it sucks. Is the app just more instant gratification? Maybe, but at least this one serves what I like to think of as a higher purpose. It would be far more organized than my battered pile of staff notation, but there’s a certain timeless romance to that battered pile, too. Courses for horses. I’m not sure how much I’d rely on it, personally, but the app would be just another resource for jogging the memory.
That done: Then, as Mr.Gumby says, the real work starts.
I agree 100%. It’s a reminder of the notes. Nothing more. And it has its advantages, since you can slow it down and it loops endlessly. So I like it. But a good recording of a tune by a good player is better.
I used to be absolutely vitriolic about the versions of tunes notated on thesession.org. I used to say that they were all wrong, and an awful lot of them are. I do think it’s a very useful resource for jogging memory. But I still think it’s a very bad resource - or perhaps, just the wrong resource - for learning tunes, because there are so many badly transcribed settings, and it’s hard to tell which are the good ones and which the bad.
I once played a gig with a person who, technically, is not a bad player. I hadn’t practiced with his group before - just went in cold to the gig. That was fine, because I knew all the tunes. But then I was thrown by that fact that the group played almost every single tune, most of which were really quite common session tunes, wrong. Not ‘different settings’. Just wrong. Turns out that yer man learned all his tunes from notation at thesession.org.
I haven’t been booked by that group again - they think I play all the tunes wrong. The man himself said to me that he was sure he’d got the tunes right because he “had the sheet music”.
I would be concerned that a person using that app would get wrong versions embedded in their memory, and find it hard, later, to learn the right way to play tunes.
I think therein lies the problem with the app. The beauty about (Irish) traditional music is in the way it is played. In the hands of a competent musician it constantly varies and changes as the tune goes along. A musician like that does not have a string of notes memorised that s/he plays back a few times, it works in a differrent way. An app like this treats music like a string of notes, repeating it a few times in exactly the same way. And as you feel this app is a tool for beginners, it will teach those beginners that’s the way to play tunes. In other words, you teach them to learn and retain tunes in a fundamentally different way from a player who is immersed in the playing of living musicians.
One wellknown fiddleplayer is on record saying ‘when I hear a man play a tune, I don’t listen to the tune. I listen to what he does with it’. Which, to my mind, sums up how traditional; music is listened to, where the enjoyment lies. This is very simple music and its lifeblood is variation, nuance and above all rhythm. Without all that, there’s nothing to it, it brings to mind an image of groups of learners by internet plodding through the same version of Drowsy Maggie three times with each and every note the same each time. Whereas in the hands of a well versed player, any old tired and overplayed tune can take on a new life. Learning (Irish) traditional music as a string of notes repeated is a flawed way of learning it, this app only promotes that.
I can, to an extend, go with the aide memoire argument. Notation functions like that. But again I will have to wonder if it’s not better to go to a real life player (or a recording of one) rather than a lifeless mechanical app running off the notes. All I can say is I lost a few bars of ‘Bunker Hill’ a few months ago. Listening to Paddy Canny once brought them right back but what came back was not only the little turn of phrase that had gone missing, it was the spirit, drive, the zest for life and bounce that was present in Canny’s playing. I was given back living music, so much more than the notes.
I have had too many arguments over that with a certain someone who was resolutely dots-only. The premise is always that if it is written down, it couldn’t possibly be wrong. Well, of course typos happen, and if you’re not going to listen, then where are you? Our last locking of horns was over Cailleach an Airgid, IIRC, and it was a matter of just one note and its chord setting, but a most crucial one, because it changed the tenor of the whole tune, and what she was doing didn’t match up with what everyone else was doing even with variations and all. It’s one of the most well-known tunes, after all, so I was dumbfounded. She cited the sheet music as her authority, and I asked to see her source. Sure enough, the key signature was wrong. So much for blind faith.
It’s exactly for reasons like that that I don’t like going to sheet music to learn tunes outright. I need to hear it. As I said, I only use notation to jog the memory. Much of the time those sources don’t match up with my preferred version, but it’s close enough to get the gears moving.
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