Recently I saw where they found that students who study their material a number of times a day for shorter periods learned and memorized their stuff more quickly and with better retention than students who studied for one long period each day. So if you can, pick up your whistle a bunch of times during the day and practice the tune you’re trying to learn, rather than just having one long practice session a day. I do this, and can learn a tune fast sometimes. I’ll even make a point of running through the tune a few times right before I go to bed, and right when I wake up, because the mind is more receptive then (I’ll put some tape over the windway so I don’t disturb anyone). It works for me. If vomitbunny’s cranial surgery doesn’t work, you might try this.
I also agree with everyone who said to listen to the tune a lot before even trying to play it. If I do this, it’s already an old friend by that time, it’s in my blood, and it’s not so much a mental process then trying to learn it.
As someone who has come directly from the classical ‘play from sheet music’ school, I can let you know what has worked for me as I have got to grips with learning tunes to play by memory.
Four things to consider:
Try to avoid humming tunes to learn them. One of the biggest problems with memorising tunes is that when we already know a tune well – and by that I mean, we can RECOGNISE the tune well, perhaps from a CD we always play – we don’t have to reproduce it very accurately in order for our brain to still identify it as this tune. When we can roughly hum a tune, the brain “fills in” the stuff which is not 100% accurate, and I find that it teaches bad habits when trying to learn tunes. So, when you say you can hum a tune – can you REALLY? I have found that I thought I knew a tune, but I was not actually humming it very precisely. Don’t forget, your instruments plays precise notes: if you’ve not yet got to the stage where you know it accurately (and I don’t mean hearing the notes as A-D-D, but hearing that the INTERVALS are exactly A-D-D), then it’s not going to be so easy to learn it. For example, I thought, oh I can learn “Gravel Walk”, no problem I can hum the tune OK, but: I only really knew roughly how it went. I would, for that reason, sing it slowly and accurately, trying to get the intervals as good as possible.
Simply try to play stuff on your instrument that you make up. This is a useful practise, to try to get to “know” your instrument. Think up a simple tune. Sing it (no humming please!). Now try to “find” it on your whistle. You’ll make plenty of wrong notes trying to find it, but eventually you’ll get it. Repeat the exercise for a few minutes as a regular part of your practising. When you can do this more accurately and at speed you’ll be able to learn tunes simply by hearing them. We had a session workshop recently where we had to follow a series of slow simple notes from a fiddle player: and it was astonishing how in the regular session afterwards I could “find” notes on my flute far more easily, I was even able to play along a bit with tunes I didn’t know!
You can rely on your “muscle memory” for tunes when you really know them well, but as people have already said, literally knowing the first few notes of a tune is a real help in getting started in a tune, particularly if the tune is similar to other ones. And I mean the first few notes: the first note is not really that helpful, since no tune starts on a note not used by other tunes.
Practise “little and often”. Three one-hour practise sessions over three days is FAR more useful than one three-hour practise session.
As said, these points aren’t rules, but they’ve helped me to memorise a whole bunch of stuff in less time than I’d thought possible.
thanks for all the great advice, I am now really diving into it and today I just tried “south wind” by going over and over and over and…
then all of a sudden I could play from memory!!!
I now understand that this is the way for me to learn so I will try this next on “blind mary” too!
happy sunday!!
berti
Haha! It’s good to know Im not the only one who has this trouble… I know that I am a visual learner, but I cannot read music well, so I rely on my auditory (can you spell ‘tone deaf’?) and tactile learning a lot… I always thought it weird that my fingers could remember a tune when my conscious memory had no clue what the thing was…
I always attributed it to my ADD. Seems either many manypeople are ADD, or I’m (gasp) more “normal” than I would have hoped.
I do the ‘listen to it over and over’ routine, and the ‘grab the whistle every little while throughout the day and try it’ mode of practice.
Remember - it is documented that it takes about 27 repetitions to memorize something!!
For me it seems to be about double that! (where’s the smilie with its lip stuck out??)
I’ve taught a workshop on “Throw Away that TAB” for dulcimer, but the tips work well on any instrument.
As said already, listen,listen,listen. Doesn’t have to be a “professional” CD, can be a friend playing that you recorded, a session, or a midi. The trick it to get that tune in your head first. Listen to the “ups and downs” of the music. You stated you can’t tell if the note is a “D or B”. But you can tell if it goes up the scale or down. Just try to find it that way.
For me personally, I “keep” tunes that I’ve figured out on my own much better than those I’ve learned off a sheet, in fact, I very rarely use any type of printed material now (and this came after having 8 years of piano as a kid!!!). Ok - so I may not have the notes EXACTLY as someone else will play, but as long as it’s not a really tightly orchastrated setting, what I play will fit in.
This is a quirk of mine, but I often find I can play the “B” part of a tune easier than the “A” part. So I often (for my own memory aid) start with the B part of a song to get into the rhythm of the piece.
Also work out the “bare bones” of a piece first, then go back and add embellishments. Don’t try to get every single note the first time through.
And if you can’t do it - well, that’s ok, too. Just so you play and enjoy, that’s the most important part!!!
This will work for me, too, when I’ve got the tune but it needs to be coaxed out of the clutter. I might amend -or add to- colomon’s last contribution by suggesting that B parts are very frequently simply noticeabler than A parts.
Hi,
You don’t HAVE to memorize stuff, you know. The big orchestras play from sheet music.
But, just keep playing the tunes, year after year, and eventually you
will find you do have a few actually memorized!
Or, maybe you are like me; just TOO OLD to memorize anything
any more. The brain is just too full of “stuff”.
Even Sir Paul McCartney said he had to forget some of his Beatle
tunes to be able to play the new ones, ha ha
So have fun, and don’t worry about it!
Lolly
Or, at least part of the answer… I too used to have a memorization problem. I was like the vacuum cleaner salesman who, if interrupted mid-pitch would be stumped, and have to start at the beginning or forget it! It took me about 30 years of music to figure out this one. The most important thing is to NEVER, ever learn a piece from the music (the written music), because once you do, you’ll be stuck at this rote level of knowing it, but you won’t ever really own it (i.e. so aptly named, “by heart”).
What I mean is this: when you are ready to learn a new piece, either learn it by ear (from a record or a person) or use the written music ONLY AS A GUIDE. In other words, don’t just read through the whole thing and play it, over and over again, staring at the music… before you try to memorize it. By that time it’s too late. By that time, the initial (and very powerful) hook-up has occured between brain and fingers everlastingly tied to the music, like a chick imprinting on its mama. Your screwed. You’ll never be able to memorize it completly after that. When you use the music only as a guide it is much slower AT FIRST. But once you’ve got it, you’ve got it.
Now, there’s one other thing I’ve noticed. It takes sleeping on a new piece to help me remember it. I can practice that darn thing for hours and still be shaky. But after a night’s sleep I always notice that I own it more the next day.
And finally, another way you can improve your ability to memorize is to observe HOW you learn. Meaning, what’s your most natural and easy way to learn anything? Does hearing it work for you? Or, are you visual? Or, do you get the feel of the piece and that’s what cements in your ability to play it well? When you figure out how you learn best, you can get clever about structuring ways to practice that make it much easier to learn new pieces – and that includes memorizing them.
Please let me know if any of these ideas are helpful to you!
Sounds right to me. In Irish trad there is the great advantage that the tunes are structured very clearly, creating meaning, and those chucks of musical meaning are building blocks for learning the tune. So if you are going to use sheet music to pick up a tune, I’d recommend going backwards: learning the last phrase of the A part first (that is the answer or resolution or what you want to call it), then the second to last phrase (the restated question) and so forth. The advantage is that you, as you are getting away from the sheet music always end the strongest, becaust that is the phrase you’ve played most often.
Can you play Mary had a little lamb by ear? It begins on a B note.
If you can’t, this is a great place to start. If you can, then see what other really easy tunes you can play, Row Row Row your boat (start on low D) etc.
Chances are, these songs are so deeply forged in our memory that we instinctly can play them. The trick is getting other songs deeply imbedded as well. This can happen any number of ways, but listening and doing are the best ways.
Find an easy song with words. One that you know really well and preferably one you like.
Type out the words to the first verse and chorus. Type the words out in large font with lots of space between lines. Now, above the words, pencil in the first note for each phrase. Try playing the song. If you need more notes, put the first one for each bar above the word that goes along with it. Now as you get more and more comfortable with the song, erase notes until there are none left. Quite often if we have the first note to each line, the rest come naturally.
Can you play Mary had a little lamb by ear? It begins on a B note.
If you can’t, this is a great place to start. If you can, then see what other really easy tunes you can play, Row Row Row your boat (start on low D) etc.
Chances are, these songs are so deeply forged in our memory that we instinctly can play them. The trick is getting other songs deeply imbedded as well. This can happen any number of ways, but listening and doing are the best ways.
Find an easy song with words. One that you know really well and preferably one you like.
Type out the words to the first verse and chorus. Type the words out in large font with lots of space between lines. Now, above the words, pencil in the first note for each phrase. Try playing the song. If you need more notes, put the first one for each bar above the word that goes along with it. Now as you get more and more comfortable with the song, erase notes until there are none left. Quite often if we have the first note to each line, the rest come naturally.
When I first started, I learned from a whistle tutor (had to learn to read dots, found out they actually are just finger positions) and to start a tune, I both had to know the name of the tune and the starting note to play it. Reading music was very hard for me to get the right timing. I think my musical thinking was “linear” using dots.
After a few years of putting my ears to work rather than my eyes, I find the learning process by ear much faster. I can play a tune without knowing it’s name or starting note and I think of it going up and down (vertically rather than horiziontally). I may play it in the wrong mode, but I notice some identical tunes written in different modes having different names (ie The Swallowtail in the E mode and some other name {The Dancing Master?} if it’s played in the A mode).
It takes a while for the ear to learn to listen to this music and actually catch all the variations, etc.
I like to collect all the recordings of a tune I want to learn and make myself a “drill it into the old bonehead” playlist for my XMMS and put that on overnight to soak in while I sleep.
Recently, a few new tunes just fell under my fingers when someone else played it (but I couldn’t start the tune until I had played with that person a few times to get it completely under my fingers.
Then, I forgot if I learned it on pipes or whistle and grab the wrong one.
I can’t wait until tunes can jump from my whistle to pipes automatacilly…
I started out three years ago playing bits of tunes from the dots. Memorising finger positions then putting it together. It took something like a couple of weeks per tune and was pretty painful, but I was keen and still am.
Some tunes I just played from the dots cos I couldn’t be bothered to memorise. When I did decide it worth while to memorise them it was very easy. I didn’t have to think where the fingers go. My fingers knew from the sound in my head.
Now I play from the dots over and over and then memorise by letting the head sound guide my fingers. I try not to think where the fingers should go while playing except for some points in the tune. This works for me and has the advantage that there is no pain at any stage and the tune can be enjoyed from the start.
I also find it a big advantage to be able to play from dots since I sometimes play duets with others who bring the music along with them.
