I come from a high school band brass background (long time ago) before I started whistle recently. I find that the easiest way for me to memorize is to play over and over - I usually get it in a week or so.
My friend who plays accordian told me you should listen to the tune til you can hum or sing the tune to yourself - then its quicker and easier to memorize. This makes sense to me and has been helpful.
Another friend plays guitar and fiddle. He doesn’t read music at all. He can pretty much play anything Irish traditional after he hears it once - very annoying. He says he does this by paying attention to the chords and the “interval sequence” from note to note. I think he’s suggesting that he is looking at the underlying structure of the tune. This sounds pretty bogus to me, but then he is pretty successful at it. On the other hand, he is a marketing type, so all this is suspect.
I can see how chords are critical for guitar, but not for whistle. Does anyone know how “interval sequences” can help in memorizing? Is there a key to understanding the structure of these songs?
Your guitarist friend is correct and as he also plays fiddle `sees’the tune in many layers ie rhythm,harmony and melody and as rhythm also gives a melody its shape it becomes an added tool for quickly memorizing tunes. Mike
I use the same ideas (and I’m not a marketing type. Trust me. I’m a musician.)
In western (Euro-American, including Irish) music, chords tend to follow certain patterns. If you can hear the underlying chord structures of a piece, you know there are only certain notes to choose from during that chord, and any of those notes will sound good if not being exactly “correct.” Thus you can sound as if you know the tune when really all you know is the chord progression. This is how jazz musicians can improvise and sound good when all they have in front of them is a chord chart.
As for intervals, I had the “do, re, mi” stuff drilled into me in college to the point that I don’t even have to think about it consciously anymore. But the interval between, say, re and sol is a unique sound, and one that you can quickly pick up on with the proper training.
Together, these techniques make a very powerful way to learn new tunes. But without some theory training, it might seem like mumbo jumbo, or worse, marketing.
If you have time, money, and a community college nearby, a beginning music theory class can really help. Talk to the teacher and tell him/her you’re interested mostly in ear training; they might be able to help you.
My hammered dulcimer instructor showed me how to ‘fake’ a song by just learning chord progressions, and playing the proper rhythm. She said she came upon this technique by necessity when she was in a performance in a band, and the lead player spontaneously gave her a solo midtune.
On the whistle I still tend to play backup progressions, and I think it really hampers me from learning the tune itself. It’s very hard for me to swap over from backup to melody. But in learning melody I do tend to think in terms of intervals and such.
I don’t memorize in terms of chord structures or intervals at all, although chord progressions come into play when I “faking it”. I memorize by understanding that most folks tunes have a pattern. Measures tend to repeat themselves with slight variations. Most tunes have 8 bars repeated in the A part and 8 bars repeated in the B part, with slight variations. If I have a score I will visually pull it apart into its patterns. If no score I just do it in my head. Works for me.
I pretty much learn tunes as a matter of rote, either from listening to them, or reading the sheet music. Most tunes only have a couple of dozen notes, which break down into a very small handful of patterns. Since many of these patterns are repeated from song to song, it’s actually no great feat of memory to remember them once you have some experience under your belt.
Since I hand-transcribe every tune in my sheet music archive, and we’re getting close to 500 there, I’ve gotten a lot of experience hearing different tunes…I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll transcribe a tune and then check it for errors by listening to the MIDI for it, rather than poring over the sheet music. I don’t have the music theory training to really understand why, but even one misplaced note is generally like fingers on a chalkboard to me, and I can tell when I’ve accidentally used the wrong key signature (G major instead of D major for instance) just by listening somewhat attentively. I’ve found that because of this familiarity, I’m also able to learn new tunes (by ear or sheet music) pretty quickly these days. I don’t expect this is any great skill however..just something that comes with time and exposure. I’m sure that I’ll look back 10 years from now at my current efforts, and they’ll seem quite amateurish
The most brilliant musician I personally know, a guitarist named Jalan Crossland, can’t read a note of music. He is a genius with certain types of music theory, he just doesn’t know it. He is one of those lucky few who either has it in the genes or has been able to just “figure stuff out” by what sounds right and what doesn’t.
Greg, it appears that you have managed to accomplish the same thing: a grasp of music theory without formal training. Congratulations! Enjoy.
For me, it begins with learning to hum the tune so I can hear it in my head. Then, the intervals/structure analysis is what I use (fairly subconsciously) to play it by ear. It’s something I trained myself to do, and now I can do it automatically. If I learn the notes (scales) on an instrument, I can play it by ear right away because I’m not thinking "okay, here’s an A, here’s a C .. " Instead, I’m thinking: “go up 3 single steps, jump up 2 steps, down a 4th, etc.” But it’s not really thinking; it’s more feeling it. And when I read music, it’s the same: I look at it, hear it in my head, and play it by ear.
Btw, here’s how I trained myself. Take a song you know (you can hum it), pick a starting note, go through it note by note. Count the notes up and down the scale it goes through. If there’s a jump greater than one scale note, count up the scale until you reach the proper next note. If the target note is not in the scale, find the scale notes which bracket it, and then the target is the (accidental) note between them. Do this with lots of tunes. (One of the first tunes I did this on, as I recall, was “76 Trombones.” Can’t remember why I picked that one…
What happens if you do this a lot is that the counting of the intervals becomes automatic; you know immediately if its a jump of a 5th or 4th or whatever, plus you become able to identify the accidentals immediately.
You can use this technique for playing on an instrument by ear, or for actually writing the tune down - I recommend becoming good at both.
Mike