I’ve been lurking around for a while and this is my first post, wish me luck!
I’ve played the classic flute for about 6 or 7 years reading the music as I played. All that time, I fooled around on the whistle as I enjoyed Irish music, but I didn’t have the diligence to learn more than a dozen tunes.
6 months back, I met a great Irish flute player that brought me out to sessions while encouraging me to learn tunes regularly. He ended up convincing me to buy an Irish flute (which I got from the used instruments exchange! ) What a beautiful instrument! I’ve been playing seriously since and I developed an acceptable technique, the only problem is that I have a lot of trouble learning a tune by ear. Just yesterday, I tried learning a basic tune from one of the Comhaltas albums, I even tried slowing it down! I worked on the first part for a good half-hour and I was still unable to play it. I then peaked at the sheet music and voila, I learned it in a mere minute.
I was wondering, do any of you have any tips for learning music by ear? I know it’s a very progressive process, but I don’t really know where to begin.
I found it was something that got easier the more I played as a lot of tunes have similiar bits.
What I do is to concentrate on a couple of bars at a time, learning so that I can hum/sing/lilt along with it and progress like that and then play the tune back slowly and play along with it.
On more complex tunes I’ll refer to the dots only as a rough guide or as reminder as to how it starts - you’ll find that most tunes are played slightly differently and learning by ear from a good source will help to make your playing sound authentic.
I’ve found that it’s best to learn to play with your fingers first.
Seriously though, learning to play by ear seems to more difficult for those who’ve been trained classically. You just need to slow the tunes down and break them into smaller fragments. Learn one fragment at a time and then put them all together. The more you fall back to reading the sheet music, the longer it will take to leave it behind.
There’s a group about an hour north of me that has a session once a month and they all read sheet music when they play. They have a great time playing together but they’ll never be able to play in any other sessions because they refuse to learn the tunes by ear.
The music is played as phrases. . .notation is generally not good at indicating phrasing. Learn the tune by its component phrases. Use slow downer and looping software if you must. If you use the ‘dots’ you have the added step of abstracting out the phrases to learn as discrete blocks. That said, I use the ‘dots’ for reference only, as I have a faulty ear somewhat. . .but I am diligently working on it.
Mostly listen, listen, and listen some more. Listen to as much good trad as you can. Cultivate your identification skills. When you get ‘close’
to a tune, you instantly recognize it, and then will find yourself waking up with it running through your head, and humming bits and pieces, and finally assembling it with your fingers. . .
I find it scary as well. But whatcha gonna do? It’s a psychological and political thing. They’ve been doing it that way for seven years, and this IS Western Pennsylvania where the motto is, “That’s the way we’ve always done it and that’s the way we’ll always do it!”
I know that problem very well myself! After a long time, I switched from sheet music to learning to play by ear. People told me that learning the first 100 tunes by ear will be really hard; learning the next 100 will be much easier; and that if you have learnt 300 tunes by ear, you will be able to play any tune after having heard it three times over. I don’t know if that’s all true, but at least the first part is.
There’s a neat little computer program out there which is called Amazing Slow Downer. It slows down tunes at 20% of their speed without changing their pitch, which makes it a lot easier to learn them by ear. For me, this program has been a tremendous help.
I am not competent to give any advice here. But here is a brief summary of what Conal O’Grada writes in his flute tutor book on the subject:
"When learning a new tune, I suggest the following sequence:
Get the shape of the melody in your head through repeated listening. (…) Begin by learning the melody and playing it slowly.
Decide an initial breathing pattern (…) and play it [= the tune] at a reasonable pace.
At this stage you can begin to consider articulation (…)
Begin to add in long and short rolls (…)
By now you will have developed a first draft of how to play the tune (…)"
I like the book and recommend it highly. It helped me a lot on my way.
My two cents, as they use to say here. Good luck, anyway,
You already know how to learn by ear. You’ve been doing it all your life. The human brain is amazingly retentive of melody. You can sing/hum/whistle nursery rhymes and tv/radio jingles from your childhood which you have never seen written down. Ditto “famous themes” from all genres of music which you have internalised, knowingly or not. What you are not used to doing is applying that skill to an instrument.
All of the up-thread advice is pretty good re: breaking things down, familiarising by listening without trying to play, the more you learn the easier it gets, stock patterns mix-'n-match, etc. etc. But what you really have to crack (partly through the fore-going) is directly associating a heard sound to how you produce it on the instrument, i.e. not having to think (much) about what fingering or note-name is involved, just finding and making the sound by aural matching until it becomes instinctive. I too make much use of dots, but for a while at least I’d say eschew them and work on practicing the direct associations - both on picking out tunes you already know in your head but haven’t tried to play before on the instrument and on playing along to very simple/easy stuff, slowed down if necessary. And trust yourself and your ear.
Like I said, you can already do all this with another (presumably/usually) untutored instrument which is a part of your standard kit as a human! (your brain, not just your voice!). You aren’t learning something totally new, but learning to apply it differently.
Jem’s posting is more or less what I was thinking as I read through these posts. You can’t learn tunes ‘by ear’ if it isn’t first in your head. The term ‘by ear’ is misleading when it comes to learning tunes - tunes are played without notation because we know them already, like singing a song only heard on the radio. No one reads the notes to sing along with a favorite song. The biggest adjustment to those of us not raised around ITM is allowing those tunes to get in our heads the same way a hit song or jingle does. Eventually, you wake up with whatever tune you’re working on (or some other you haven’t thought of in months or years), and you can play it as if you’ve been practicing it all the time. Reading notes is a great way to break down the tune, but, eventually, you should hear the tune in your head, and can easily hum it or pick it out on the flute, because you alreadyknow it .
But what you really have to crack (partly through the fore-going) is directly associating a heard sound to how you produce it on the instrument
I think this is my problem. After listening to a tune for a while I’ll be able to pick up a general structure, but as soon as I pick up my flute, I’ll have no clue on which note to start it on.
Yes. No-one is suggesting you need “perfect pitch” to hear a note, name it and go to the fingering. Handy for those who can, but very few of us can. No, start with a recording of something slow, just go over the first few notes repeatedly and use your ears while experimenting with fingerings/notes until you find/match the notes, even just the start one, just as you would if singing along. But I would start with picking out a tune (anything) you know in your head but haven’t tried to play previously. Pick any note and go for it with a nursery rhyme or national anthem. If it turns out awkward for key or range, abort and start again from another note…
I am extremely proud to announce that I just learned my first tune by ear, all thanks to your precious help (and Audacity for slowing it down to 75% speed)!
In case you’re curious, it was Garrett Barry’s jig played by Comhaltas.
Brad Hurley said something on this forum a few years ago that has always stuck in my head. About 50% of the process of learning to play trad tunes is “listening to trad tunes”.
As the main posts are turning into “for sale” ads… thought I’d add to this & provoke a few thoughts… maybe? Firstly as your a reader of music I find the concept of throwing that skill out of the window hard to understand. I know of many who have been playing… and I add here “BAND” flutes for 50 years or more & still playing the pieces all wrong or with additions that are not on the original scores. I have been an advocate of the use of a wrist lyre but as they usually cannot read a bar of soap am resigned to the ear brigade winning overall. So why not make that a compromise in your scene?
That way you’ll still retain your sight reading ability and be able to add the other subtle parts which would other wise be probably missed such as pp or mf and so forth?
Yes I know the two types of player are not to be compared with, but the question was learning to replay by ear…so now ready for incoming:-)) By the way I have a dozen pre WW1 wrist lyres that can be “sold off”. ( See original comment above:-))
Hey fiddle player can you text me the next tune before you change so I can rummage through my brimming pockets for the tiny sheet so I can put it in my wrist lyre, thanks.
Why not just do things as they are done in the traditional music scene and use reading music as a tool, but never in a performance or session. Just do the work that countless others have done before you. Go through the process. Listen, imitate, take the tune away to a quiet corner and work it out.
I thought the flute player was the top man & called the tune, add to the wrist lyres “for sale”… music pouches to be worn on the waist belt for the 6 & 3/4" X 4" parts glued to card both sides to load and unload when required, nothing flimsy there.
Somewhere in this thread there is “that’s the way we’ve always done it” which is a flimsy reason & I repeat it is only my opinion on why waste his reading talent & hope to shift these two aids, keep it up & I’ll add a bass drum stick to make sure the fiddler keeps in time. As for (even a token Glaswegian) I thought their pockets were stuffed full of IOU’s…LoL
I don’t think anyone is suggesting abandoning the ability to read altogether, but stepping away from it to learn a different approach. I think long experience of many people shows that the very valuable ability to sight read fluently is, for many, a hindrance to acquiring the skills of learning by ear. For those for whom that is the case, best to avoid the distraction of the dots for the time being. Moreover, notations of trad material are not definitive nor do they normally include interpretative instructions. They are not like classical or band scores which should be played exactly as written. One can acquire knowledge of the interpretative techniques of traditional idiom and physically practice them in isolation, but to integrate them properly it is vital to learn from good aural example.
) What a beautiful instrument! I’ve been playing seriously since and I developed an acceptable technique, the only problem is that I have a lot of trouble learning a tune by ear. Just yesterday, I tried learning a basic tune from one of the Comhaltas albums, I even tried slowing it down! I worked on the first part for a good half-hour and I was still unable to play it. I then peaked at the sheet music and voila, I learned it in a mere minute.
‘dots’ you have the added step of abstracting out the phrases to learn as discrete blocks. That said, I use the ‘dots’ for reference only, as I have a faulty ear somewhat. . .but I am diligently working on it.
