I have a “slow ear” as I have heard it called. I find it really hard to learn a tune and hold it in my head just by hearing it. Even after about six years of whistle playing I still only have about half a dozen tunes I can play from memory. I taught myself to read music so that I could play and have never really had the courage to leave the little black dots at home. I feel like an actor that can’t venture onto stage without his script. I even sneak my music books into sessions and open them secretly under the table. (Or I did, until people noticed and started asking me for a tune from the book).
Does anyone else have this problem? I’m not sure if it’s genetic or a matter of confidence. I’m getting quite competant now, but feel I will never really get anywhere until I can shut my eyes and still play!
I think there are a lot of different areas of musical competence, and few people are good at all. Most of us envy those who can to the things we cannot.
I can read music, transpose, compose, yada-yada, but I am a horrible sight-reader. I can learn a tune pretty quickly by ear, but spend hours trying to beat something musical out of a sheet of music. We have an accompanist at church who is amazing - throw a sheet of music in front of her, and pow! You get something wonderful-sounding right off. But she’s gotta have music in front of her.
I wish I could sight-read like she does - it’s truly amazing to me. She wishes she could improvise and play by ear like I do.
My thought: understand your strengths and use them, know your weaknesses and work on them.
In almost all areas of life, you will run into people who will tell you things must be done this way or that way. IMHO, it’s your life, so you get to do it the way you want. Millions of muscians around the world have full and satisfying musical careers playing from sheet music. If the group you play with has no objection, I wouldn’t worry about it. (Please note: I am a newbie to the whistle but a long-time master at enjoying my life!)
If you do want to learn tunes by heart, start with tunes you personally enjoy. Build a repetiore of tunes that you play while sitting in the bathroom, waiting in the car, where ever you can pull out the whistle and knock out a tune for your own pleasure. As you move on to memorizing other tunes, spend a lot of time listening to the tunes you want to learn. A tune is much easier to memorize if you have the melody firmly fixed in your head i.e. you can hum the tune without even thinking about it.
By nature, I have a very poor memory, but I keep being interested in things that
require a fair bit of memorizing.
There’s a lot of techniques for memorizing, and you should try them all and invent
your own as they occur to you. The actual -mechanism- of memorizing, though, really
only requires repetition, in parts small enough to hold onto (ie, phrases.) For myself,
I spend a fair bit of time playing the piece through with eyes-averted, peeking as I
need to to get through; once the piece is half-memorized that way, I really work through
phrase-by-phrase with eyes closed, or turned all the way away.
The biggest trick, really, is finding away to work out the repetition so it doesn’t drive
you crazy with boredom and also doesn’t frustrate you horribly with difficulty, which
is to say, pacing yourself on how you pull away from the paper so that you keep a
steady challenge going throughout, and mixing up some your playing of phrases,
and parts, and the whole tune.
I also think, learning even a little bit how to sing, really helps with being able to hear
and match pitches properly, which is important to musical memorization.
Regarding your comment walrii, that’s great as long as you want to play with your friends
and all that, but the trad session culture makes people with sheet music really unwelcome.
It sounds like okewhistle is doing okay where he is with tolerance on that.
I have a few questions to narrow things down a bit:
Can you hum or lip whistle any of the tunes that you can’t play without the dots?
Can you listen to an unfamiliar tune over and over and get to the point that you can pretty much hum it?
Can you play simple tunes that you’re alreay familiar with, like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or “Happy Birthday” by ear, without ever going to the dots?
I find that if I have a tune “in my head” to the point that I can lip whistle it, I can generally play it on the whistle without much trouble. (This is ignoring questions of speed–my fingering is still pretty slow.)
Most of my slow airs have been learned from combinations of listening and sheet music. As I’ve gotten better at listening, I’ve learned a few just by listening, but I’m always willing to go to the sheet music to clarify bits that I can’t quite grasp by listening.
Sometimes I have trouble getting a tune down, and then I set up the CD track to repeat over and over on iTunes, and play it as background music. I’ve had several that I was suddenly able to play after weeks of not being able to get them into my head.
I found this website to have some good advice (some of which has already been mentioned here) about learning by ear and about memorizing—it goes through how they teach a tune in a session. I depend on sheet music for learning and I have found it hard to memorize. I am hoping to try my next piece using the ideas from this group. http://www.slowplayers.org/SCTLS/learn.html
It is too bad there are people who are snobs about using sheet music and the like. I do see the need for memorization (sp)—it really does make it so you are a bit closer to your playing I think—but many people are isolated and the traditional ways of learning are not an option for them. For those of us in that situation, we are very lucky we are able to read music. I should think the people in a session would prefer that one use sheet music rather than hit the wrong notes. I mean who the heck cares what someone else does—it is just so silly.
My own very biased opinion is that this is almost entirely a matter of pratice.
I used to think I had a naturally good ear, but in retrospect I listened to a lot of classical music for many years throughout my childhood. Listening is as much practice as playing, you know. By the time we become adults, we can have vast differences in the number of hours spent practicing these skills, and that can give the impression that there are innate differences.
Anyway, okay, enough of that: what do you do if you want to develop those skills? I’m not a brain-scientist, but I think some of these ideas may make sense:
Check out L.E. McCullogh’s 121 session tunes, w/ 4 CDs. Each tune is played twice on the CDs, but only once is the title announced. That means you can put the CDs on “random” and turn it into a memory game. Every other tune you hear, try to guess the title.
(If anyone tries this, by the way, I’d like to know how it worked for you.)
Listen to a lot of music that requires direct attention for long periods of time. Lose the habit of talking or doing anything else when music is playing. Turn on the CD and act like you would in a concert hall.
Good music for this is romantic-era classical music. Why? Because the volume varies dramatically. So if you turn the volume up enough to hear the quiet bits in Mahler, the loud parts will shake the ceiling. It is hard to not pay attention. Also, symphonies tend to be about an hour long.
Also, romantic-era music is easier for non classical buffs to appreciate and pay attention to, because it is so much more active.
Genuinely try to learn tunes by ear, even if you have a lot of trouble at first. Start with one recording and corresponding sheet music (again, check out LE McC’s 121 session tunes.) Or better yet, a human being. It may be a supreme chore to do the first tune, but I guarantee you that each tune will be easier. And this will improve your ear skills straight away.
The thing is, sheet music just doesn’t fit very well with the flow of a good session. There are the tunes whose name no one there knows, the ones that have too many names to track, the names that have multiple tunes attached to them, and even the tunes that you’ve got a name for but the name is wrong. There are the times you start a tune and only later work out what it is, or manage to start something completely different than you meant to. Certainly there are lots of sets where the tunes after the first are figured out on the fly. Etc.
If you had a computer that could listen to the music, identify it on the fly, and then pull up a good version of the sheet music, then it might make more sense using sheet music in a session. But the only machine I’m aware of that can do anything like that is a brain which has memorized a lot of music…
colomon, I only meant that if it was working out for someone to use it then the others aren’t nice to make fun of them.
But you have given good reasons for why you can’t rely on sheet music when playing with a group—and I certainly wouldn’t expect a group to wait while I was shuffling through my sheets of music or tolerate me making paper rattling sounds while they were playing.
It will be so long before I could play with a group that I have plenty of time to work on my memorizing skills!
If Irish Traditional Music is the goal, sheet music, MIDIs, ABCs are not the way to go. Spending time listening to high quality recordings, or better yet live performances, is a must for ITM. A person can only approximate the subtle rhythms and accents of ITM from sheet music. If a person’s musical interests are broader, books and such are fine.
Seems like there are about three ways to learn a tune, by ear, by the little black dots, and a combination of both. I do not see where one is ‘‘better’’ than the other. I learn some by ear, and some by the dots, and some I do both and also watch my electronic tuner to help me with breath control. There are always long debates on how to learn and do things. But the bottom line is, if a person is learning let him listen to his own bodhran.
Different settings require different skillsets. I used to be terrible at improvisation and playing by ear, because I was accustomed to sheet music, and lots of rehearsals.
Where I play regularly now, we may get two or three runs at a new song, and the only music that goes around is lyrics and guitar chords, so I had to learn to figure out the appropriate key (and therefore whistle). Then I had to learn to abandon myself to the dangers of playing what I “felt” instead of what I “knew” and hoping like crazy not to be too much of a distraction. I’ve gotten pretty good at it, but I still struggle to sight-read. Funny thing is, the guitarists are always scrabbling for their sheet music at rehearsals, and all I ask is, “what key?” Mind you, it took me years of thrashing through weekly rehearsals to become reasonably fluent with my very unorthodox (but pragmatic) method.
I would probably get thrown out of an ITrad session for taking off on some countermelody riff, though. I don’t know a single session tune.
You don’t play music as the musician you want to be, you have to play music as the musician you are (at least this week).
It’s interesting that so many of us are either dependent on sheet music or rely on the sheet music to aid in our memorization process.
I noticed, in my children, a marked drop in the use of memorization when they each became fluent readers. As if there’s some cerebral shift from a culture of listening to one of visual learning.
We just need to keep oiling the machinery to keep that mode active, I think. To learn to play by ear, try playing by ear… But it’s silly to close off another mode that can greatly increase efficiency in learning. So I still use both.
Here are a few observations of my own learning. The first thing I did was learn to read music. Then I learned a few simple tunes. I decided to learn some tunes completely by ear.
The only ones I could do this with were my favorite hymns. These I learned with just a couple of attempts. These were the ones I knew extremely well having sung them from my youth. As Darwin was saying if you have it firmly in your mind sooner or later it will come out the whistle.
Recently I began to play along with some of my Irish CDs at speed, even some I didn’t know real well. At first I was not doing real well but ocassionally I would find myself in sync with the recording. I even began to add ornamentation in that I knew how to do but had not been able to work into the tunes I had learned. An interesting experience. I think playing along with a CD is a great exercise. Playing with real people might be another great experience.
That does tend to be frowned upon, yes. With everyone else in unison it can really stick out, and sound less like counterpoint and more like the player is just on the wrong “page.”
Also, there’s the fact that if you have a good enough ear to play counterpoint well, then you have a good enough ear to pick up the tunes swiftly. Thus nobody really has a good excuse to play counterpoint.
This is my own experience in learning to play without written music:
I am a poor sight reader but I need the dots to see how an unfamiliar piece goes. Nevertheless, I try to get away from the sheet music as quickly as possible by learning the tune phrase by phrase. After playing a phrase reading the music, I try to play it without looking several times, working through the piece until I have the whole tune. I seldom can learn the tune at the first day but I can keep working at it until I can play it whenever wish.
Although memory playes a part, memory alone is not sufficient to play by ear; you have to develop your ear to hear a note or phrase and play what you hear, not what you see on the paper. Some people learn to play without music by visualizing the written music and play what they see in their head. That may work to some extent, but it is not playing by ear; it’s playing by eye just as if you are reading the music.
Ear training can be done by playing along with a recording or with live music or by playing from the dots and then looking away and repeating what you have heard. As others have stressed, it is important to do a lot of listening to help you along.
I have friends who have been playing certain tunes for over a year, yet cannot bring themselves to play without the music in front of them. I know they can play the tune without the music, but just cannot bring themselves to “take off their training wheels” and play without the music stand in front of them. They have excellent eye training but poor ear training. They seem to be waiting until they “memorize the tune”, but will never memorize the tune unless they practice without music.
These are just some random thoughts concerning playing by ear.
Here’s an interesting (to me) thing: I can pick up a tune on the whistle or flute in a couple of days (usually by ear, with the dots as a guide for the fingering to start with).
But not on concertina. I can play slowly but well enough from the dots, but can’t make the brain-finger interface remember the button combinations. Of the 60 or 70 tunes I know well enough to pick up and play on whistle and flute, I just can’t seem to transfer them to the box.
Gary, I wonder if you are visualizing your finger positions on the whistle and flute more than going by the sound, as bozemanhc mentioned. I know I have done this. That might explain the transfering to concertina problem where you might also memorize by visualizing your finger positions on the concertina. I know I have trouble relating my finger positions to sound so I need to work on that. Not saying it’s your problem, just pondering.
