When the weather is nice, as it is now, I walk to work, and my walk takes me thirty-five to forty minutes to complete. As I walk, sometimes I listen to my MP3 player. Other times I replay in my head a tune I’m working on and keep step to the pulse as I might tap my foot. I try to improve the tune running through my head by changing what I am hearing (which is the way I have been playing it) to the way I know it should sound. I think that this helps me to learn the tune and improves my ability to play it better when I get back to my whistles. I haven’t played many slow airs but imaging that when I do, my walk to work may take twice as long.
I have some trouble memorizing tunes because I learn them from sheet music. I have noticed that once I get to a certain point with it, fragments of it will pop into my head while I’m, say, folding the laundry and I’ve started trying to reconstruct the tune from the fragment and I get a little further. And then one day it seems I can whistle the tune and then I know it. I make mistakes on the whistle, but I don’t refer to the sheet music again, I just try to refer to my head. I think this has really helped me. Perhaps one day I’ll get to your point of hearing how they should sound, but for now just hearing them is a start. I hope you watch for cars as you are working on your tunes!
As a songwriter, I often get my best ideas while walking. Lately, I’ve been listening to some of Bill Och’s tutorial tunes on my walks. Most days there is music in my head, sometimes it is someone else’s music, sometimes my own.
Listening, especially to high quality renditions is a good way to improve, and memorize tunes. Many beginners overlook this vital step. If they stay on that course (books, sheet music, ABCs, MIDIs only) they can end up with what someone else termed “celtic inspired melodies,” instead of Irish Traditional Music.
Whatever you do, enjoy your music.
- Bill
I’ve discovered that my standard dog walk is pretty much exactly the length of Peter Horan & Fred Finn’s Music of Sligo…