I get very frustrated by trying to learn to read music - it seems to really get in the way of progress. I see that many people here recommend playing by ear. How do you start trying to play be ear? When I listen to a tune, I can’t really tell what is being done (as far as ornamentation goes). Any suggestions with getting started with playing by ear?
Hey Holly, I play by ear, and feel free to email me if you like
I think playing by ear is one part talent and one part repetition…I have played the recorder for 12 years before starting whistle this year, and in recorder I got to the point where I could play a song through after hearing it once or twice. It’s kind of a comfort level with the instrument, and an innate feeling of the note you will get by lifting a particular finger. It’s kind of tough to explain, so if you want more than I’ve said here, feel free to email me - it’s in the profile.
Beth
Practice! 
That’s all it takes, really.
Choose tunes that sound easy to start with, and do lots of them. Check your results occasinally against other people’s transcriptions (check JC’s tunefinder) but don’t cheat unless you’re completely stuck.
You know the “ear” part if you’ve ever sung along with the radio, or sang a carol without reading it first, or whistled (lips) a tune. But there’s a lot of notes in the Irish stuff, so you have to train your ear to recognize it, and the only way I know how to do that is to do a lot of it. (You should see what classical and jazz musicians go through.)
Part of the problem might be that you’re new enough to the whistle that it takes too long to go ear-brain-fingers; eventually you reach the point where you don’t have to think about the fingers anymore, but until then, it might be worthwhile to sing the melody to yourself a couple of times while you try to get it, and once you know how to sing it, take that to the whistle.
A couple of other handy tips:
If you’ve any other musical background, learn how the intervals sound, so you can play a note and sing a minor third above, or a perfect fifth below, and so on.
And learn tunes a bit at a time – say, two or four bars. But don’t isolate the sections: always learn by playing the preceding bit and as much as the following bit as you can figure out, else you’ll develop a choppiness that others can hear, since you practiced bars 1 and 2, and then 3 and 4, more than you practiced the transition between bar 2 and bar 3. Jazz players transcribe phrases, which means they can usually stop at breaths, but that doesn’t work with trad, so you have to keep an eye out for that.
- -Rich
Find yourself a good teacher who plays well by ear and is patient enough to guide you slowly through the tunes and ornamentation techniques and record your lessons.Good luck. Mike
Holly–
I’m with Rich. When I want to learn a new tune, I first listen to it over and over and over until I can “play” through it in my head. Then I pick up a whistle (making sure it’s in the right key for the tune) and go to work on it.
If you’re new to the whistle, I’d advise not worrying about ornamentation too much right now. Just learn some tunes first, preferably slow ones.
Finally, if you can make it to any sessions or get together with any other experienced players of Irish music (not necessarily whistlers), you can learn tunes phrase by phrase, having them play it a bit slower until you have the idea, then up to speed.
Good luck!
Tom
Hello,
I play by ear and find it much more fun than being tied down to the music. But to play by ear takes time. Here’s what I’ve always done. When I have a song in my head I try to figure out the melody without the use of any instrument. I do it mentally. But in order to do so I must first figure which key I want to think about the song in, which is mostly assigned by my brain automatically, which sometimes puts some songs into the key of F# or Db (thank you, brain). You must be able to think a scale in your head. When that comes easily, then think about different intervals and determine which notes you’re thinking about. For example, if I think the note is an E, and I’m in the key of C, I start on C and thnk up to the E. That is how I check to see if that was the right note. It does take thinking time, which means you will miss a lot of conversations with other people while you take the time to daydream about which notes are going on in your head. Eventually you can do this with chords. But you have to hear the notes in your head very easily. Anyway, that’s how I do it.
JP
There is more listening needed than you might think. I feel that listening to a tune 100 times is barely getting started. Not in a row mind you. I have to drive a lot (90 miles/day commuting). For about a year I had L.E. McCullough’s CD’s in my car going every day with a few breaks for the bothy band.
The ornaments will come. When you finally start playing ornaments at a normal speed, you will learn what they sound like in time in the work of others.
Classes always seem to start with ornaments. Ornaments are something that is great if you can do them well, but other things come first.
Rhythm is #1. Music without rhythm is noise.
Flow and Swing are next.
If you can play with rhhtym and swing, you can play great Irish music without ornaments.
Ornaments can come later. You can play horrible Irish music with well executed ornaments and an absence of rhythm and swing.
The County Clare and neighboring County Galway styles of instrument playing seem to embody this concept of fantastic music without heavy ornaments or blazing speed. It would be helpful to hear that style of music which is odd in my mind because Leitrim and Sligo (faster and more ornamented styles) are just to the North a ways. I guess I don’t understand the styles thing well enought yet.
On 2001-08-22 12:06, Mark_J wrote:
There is more listening needed than you might think. I feel that listening to a tune 100 times is barely getting started. Not in a row mind you. I have to drive a lot (90 miles/day commuting). For about a year I had L.E. McCullough’s CD’s in my car going every day with a few breaks for the bothy band.
On that subject, I’ve found that I tend to absorb tunes. I’ll be listening recreationally – there’s almost always trad playing in the house when I’m doing dishes or cooking dinner or working from home – and some time much later will pick up a whistle and know the tune, at which point I can go back to the CD and get the details I misremembered. It sort of surprises me, because I’ll play and go “Hey, where did I get that from?”
- -Rich
I find it’s really nice to be able to do both. The two skills really complement each other. You can get to the point to where you can hear the music while you’re looking at it and then you just play what you’re hearing. It it also very convenient to be able to “take dictation”, to write out anything you hear. It helps you remember the tune and also can be a valuable tool to communicate it to others.
Mind you, I’m not saying I can do this on whistle; I’ve been playing it for about 5 days now. But I can do it on bass, guitar, mandolin, recorder and Chapman Stick.
joe
For me, playing by ear is meerly being able to pick out a tune that I have listened to a zillion times over (give or take a few )to the point that I can hum it without the recording playing. Holly, I would recommend starting with very simple tunes that you can already hear. I’m talking about tunes you’ve heard since childhood; “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or “Pop Goes the Weazle”. Do as many as you can think of; “Happy Birthday to You”, “This Old Man”(just try not to think of Barney 
), “All Through the Night”, etc. The more you do the quicker it will come. When you want to move to Irish stuff start with slow airs and gradually move to the faster tunes as you feel ready.
Good luck!
David de la Barre
P.S. Don’t totally give up on printed music. Just put it on the back burner for awhile. Though developing your ear is most important reading music is a valuable skill as well.
[ This Message was edited by: Feadan on 2001-08-24 11:49 ]
I don’t know if any of you learned to play the way I did, but when I was young we learned to play everything in Do, Re, Me…etc. All the tunes were written out in this fashion by the teacher. I don’t think that I even knew what key we were playing in. To this day this is the way I remember, and pick up a tune by ear.
I couldn’t care less what key it’s in and can play it on any whistle regardless of the key. There are certainly drawbacks to this method, and I would love to have learned how to read music (I am teaching myself now) but it works great for me
Cheers,
Gerry
Hi Gerry
I think it is called the European method "Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So etc. etc. In the book "The Chieftains, Paddy Maloney talks about using this method to teach arrangements to others in the band who can’t read music, but learn it by ear.
Mark
Yeah Mark, it’s really simple and it doesn’t matter which key of whistle you are playing in ‘Doe’ is always xxx xxx and ‘Re’ is always oxx xxx and so on…if you are playing in the base key of the whistle i.e. playing in D on a D whistle.
If you are playiing in G on a D whistle then ‘Doe’ is ooo xxx and ‘Re’ is ooo oxx etc. etc.
Whenever I am listening to or going over a tune in my head I am always using this method of figuring out the notes. I would say that it was a very common way to teach music in Ireland back in the 60’s/70’s. Could still be for all I know.
Cheers,
Gerry
“I can’t really tell what is being done (as far as ornamentation goes).”
I had no idea what I was hearing until I learned to do it myself. The more I became comfortable with playing the different types of ornaments and knowing how they sounded when I played them, I began recognizing them in others’ playing. It came gradually. The fun part now is listening to the ornamentation of a different instrument and figuring something that works in its place on the whistle.
I learned ornamentation straight out of a book, by the way.
Tony
On 2001-08-24 08:28, WhistlingGypsy wrote:
Yeah Mark, it’s really simple and it doesn’t matter which key of whistle you are playing in ‘Doe’ is always xxx xxx and ‘Re’ is always oxx xxx and so on…if you are playing in the base key of the whistle i.e. playing in D on a D whistle.If you are playiing in G on a D whistle then ‘Doe’ is ooo xxx and ‘Re’ is ooo oxx etc. etc.
This works if you’re playing only, say, songs in D on a D whistle. There are also plenty of songs in G and Em played on a D whistle. Learning a bit of theory and other keys just gives you more options. But the do-re-mi is, as Julie Andrews said, a very good place to start.
Technology can help. I have found the amazing slower downer program for the macintosh allows you to listen to a song slowed down at the same pitch - very useful in figuring out key phrases of a tune. PCs must have something similar.
Speaking of playing by ear, I have tried and really sucked big time. I am not great at instruments, but yet I still try to play the flute and whistle. All I have to ask is how the hell do you guys do it??? I can kind of learn a song from another person but that person has to go really slow and sometimes tell what notes they are play but when it comes to trying to learn a song by ear off a record, it’s almost like forget it! No wait it is forget it. Well, I am off to try figuring marry had alittle lamb
Caryn
PS any tips would be very helpful, and I am not dissing learning by ear in any way, I am just envious because I have yet to be able to do it!
All I have to ask is how the hell do you guys do it??? I can kind of learn a song from another person but that person has to go really slow and sometimes tell what notes they are play but when it comes to trying to learn a song by ear off a record, it’s almost like forget it!
It may come to you a bit at a time after you get used to playing the instrument. Memorize a few tunes and play them without looking at printed notes. Then you’ll get a sense of where the notes are in your fingers.
On the other hand, some peoples’ brains just don’t work that way and they have to read printed music. If that’s not cool and traditional, but that’s what you need to do, then do it. Enjoyment of the music comes before keeping your critics happy.
I have to listen to a tune quite a few times before I can learn it by ear. That slow down software may be a good training device for your ears. I think it’s fabulous for learning difficult tunes. Some passages I never figure out without slowing them down. Easier ones come after repeated listening. Be kinder to yourself.
Tony
Mark J above spoke just about the most sensible words I have come across on this board so far. Fair play to you!
I think it is sensible to become used to the music you want to play (I automatically assume trad Irish, but have been give stick over that before). Listen to good players (on any instrument) and get the feel the language of the music. Listening to a lot of music will result in learning the tunes by osmosis rather than deliberately having to sit down to learn the notes. At some stage you may be able to sit down in a session and play along with tunes you have never heard before (yes, OK that will take a long while).
An example of learning the language by osmosis: I am presently teaching a twelve year old girl the pipes. It takes her about ten minutes to learn the notes of a tune, by ear.
But then, she has been playing the whistle since she was four and her mother is the best whistle player I know of(certainly the most tasteful one). My pupil grew up (well, she still is I suppose)hearing good music all the time, all her life, and we’re talking at a level of let’s say Paddy Canny playing in the kitchen here.
Speaking of which, I am not completely in agreement with Mark J’s statement that Clare whistleplaying is not very heavily ornamented, listen to Willie Clancy’s whistle-playing, extremely lively and full of ideas, variation and all that. It seems deceptively simple, yet there are few that are able to match that playing. And maybe that is true mastery of the music, using your abilities to let the music speak without the ego of the player getting in the way by layering the music with displays of fancy fingerwork that serve only to show off.
I could give a few examples of that but won’t as this is a very polite discussion area. Now get off the internet back to your practice.
[ This Message was edited by: Peter Laban on 2001-08-25 12:50 ]
On 2001-08-25 11:56, Peter Laban wrote:
. . . Speaking of which, I am not completely in agreement with Mark J’s statement that Clare whistleplaying is not very heavily ornamented, listen to Willie Clancy’s whistle-playing, extremely lively and full of ideas, variation and all that. It seems deceptively simple, yet there are few that are able to match that playing. Is there nicer music?
Peter, thanks for correcting me. I have in the past confused others by my use of the word “Ornamentation.” I think using G. Cotter’s tutor which separates variation from ornamentation (meaning cuts rolls strikes and glissando) has got me using the word differently than most folks.
If you don’t mind me pumping you for information, would you mind starting a thread about the Counties Galway & Clare styles? Being newer to the tradition (my great grandfather was the last to know the tradition well), I have had to rely on lectures, the internet and books to tell me what to look for in listening material. So far, I am basing my opinions on material from:
GALWAY:
Jack and Fr. Charlie Coen
Mike Rafferty
Paddy Carty
CLARE:
Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin
Siobhan Kelly
Elizabeth Crotty
the Russell brothers
Bernard O’Sullivan & Tommy McMahon
Paddy Canny
With the regional styles being blurred in recent times, I usually do not try to learn about regional styles by listening to recent recordings. Do you have any tips for “who/what” to listen to so as to learn more. Even specific things to listen FOR in recordings would be a huge help.
Thanks much.
Mark Johnston