At the beginning of this year I started taking whistle lessons, stopped during the summer while my teacher was busy, and started again this evening. Before the summer break, I learned some tunes that sounded fairly good when I played them for myself but horrible when I played them for my teacher. During lessons, I would squeak and squawk and my fingers would fumble and wouldn’t cover the holes. Even though I practiced faithfully between lessons, I was somewhat discouraged and embarrassed to return for my lesson from one week to the next. My teacher, however, is very patient, encouraging, and kind and tells me that I am playing well.
During the summer I concentrated only on a couple of tunes and tonight, during my lesson, I whistled much better. I think that I’m slowly getting over my performance anxiety thanks, in part, to some suggestions from C&F board members. I have been working to wean myself from a dependence on sheet music by memorizing the tunes. And this evening I closed my eyes when I played. Both helped. In two weeks I will do better yet. Thank you.
I had similar problems in playing more poorly for the teacher then in practice. He told me it’s better for me to be bad at lesson than bad at home, so he can see the places I need help.
I gradually got better at translating my practicing to my lesson. I don’t have any advice for you about that. It’s just a matter of getting comfortable. And realizing that we aren’t giving a concert. He said kids are better at not getting uptight at lesson because they don’t have the hang ups adults have about performance and image and ego. They just play the damn tune however well they can manage it at that moment in time, then move on.
It’s kind of funny though… I can only play by ear and memorization, and I never had the benefit of a teacher (hence my ever slow progression learning the whistle), and one of the things I really wish I COULD do is read sheet music, but there are a lot of times on here that I read people have a hard time ‘dealing’? with it, so I guess there’s always two sides to each quarter… but it seems to me like it would be so great to be able to read the sheet music! And to understand what all the timing, notes, and key signatures mean, etc. just by looking at a piece of paper.
(aside from mentally counting off "ok… Every Good Boy Does… ok that’s a D… )
It sounds like you’re on the right track though!! I’m really glad you have a good teacher too, I can’t imagine how much that’s going to help you in the long run. (If only I’d known what rolls, cuts, taps, and crans were when I started! )
Thanks for your responses. Most importantly I’m making music and having fun.
FJohnSharp, if I remember correctly, and sometimes I don’t, you once wrote that you met my whistle teacher, Brian McCoy, at the Dublin Irish Festival. Brian plays U-pipes, flutes, and whistles with a band called The Kells. They released a new CD this summer. Great music.
Last winter I called the Shamrock Club of Columbus looking for a teacher, and they led me to Brian.
I close my eyes most of the time I perform in public (solo). It helps me focus and relax, though it somewhat subtracts from my contact with the audience.
It’s very hard to make the songs sound right when playing form sheet music. I have to get thenotes from the sheet music until I have it well enough memorized then try to get it to sound right without. Otherwise It doesn’t soud like a song but just a bunch of conected notes.
I think this is the case with all music for most of us. Reading music is not the same as playing music. Lots of people can play off sheet music, but one must learn the tune/song/piece well enough to make it sound like music.
There are exceptions. I had a piano teacher who could sight read damn near perfectly. She couldn’t memorize a lick, but set it in front of her and she’d play it wonderfully. She made a great church organist.
I like to learn tunes while reading them off sheet music and listening to them at the same time. The sheet music is like a crutch to me, though. I really wish I could just listen and learn them w/o music in front of me. This seems more optimal in my opinion…it really doesn’t sound “right” when you are just playing it off the sheet music.
There is a disconnect in my brain that I have the hardest time learning by ear. I suppose a lot of it is due to never really having to do it, and I would expect that I could get better with experience. But my favorite way is to have the music in front of me and a recording (preferably, a good player having taped it for me at a slow speed) and I use the music to learn which notes to play and I use the recorded version to learn how to play them. I find I only need the sheet music for a little while and I continue to use the tape to work on musicality.
That’s the rub…sheet music dependence has a psychological aspect. It takes great work and focus to convince myself I can do it without the paper, otherwise, if I purposefully look away I experience brain-freeze and screw up. The thing is, I may know the piece well enough that the music is in front of my eyes but I’m not really following it closely…it is just a mental crutch. And the song comes out so much more naturally and nicely if played from my head.
This summer, like FJohnSharp said so well, I too used the sheet music to learn which notes to play and the recording to learn how to play them. I also used the sheet music to memorize the tunes. I’m amazed and excited that the tunes I have learned to play by memory actually sound good (to me).
While I have not yet tried to learn an entire tune by ear, I have successfully changed parts of what I see on the sheet music to match what I hear in the recording if the recording differs from the sheet music and I like the recorded version better. That has been fun and given me the confidence that I will be able to learn an entire tune by ear someday.
I had a friend who played clarinet like that. He literally couldn’t play two notes in a row by ear, but give him the sheet music, and he could whip through Flight of the Bumblebee without a hitch. I mean, he couldn’t play one bar of a song that he could sing perfectly well. It took him a while to convince me that he wasn’t just putting me on.
But he loved blues, and could put a lot of feeling into what he was playing. So, playing from sheet music doesn’t have to limit your expressiveness.
Having said that, I can only read haltingly. I’ve gotten much better at it since I took up the whistle, though. I’m really bad at figuring out melodies by listening. I very commonly substitute simpler turns of phrase for what is actually being played. So, I find the written music invaluable. I might eventually be able to learn without it, but it would certainly take a lot longer.
On the other hand, I have a lot of trouble figuring out timing and phrasing from the notation, so I still have to listen to something to get that.
I do advise listening as much as possible. I often set iTunes to repeat a particular piece on a CD and just let it run as background music. A while back I took a stab at a couple of tunes that I had found difficult to track, even with sheet music. I started playing from the music and found that the notes just flowed out of my fingertips. Still, having the written music kept me on track.
I have a tune list that I try to work my way through, but some tunes do get negelected, so the written music is a good way to remind me of how they start off when I’m not able to play the CD.
To sum up, for me the notation is a very valuable learning tool. I wouldn’t want to do without it, but I’d hate to be tied to it like my clarinet-playing friend.
I find that when you listen to music more, and try to pick it up, you start to notice ornamentation more. Right now, I learn from sheet music first most of the time, than I try to play it from my head, and add my own ornamentation. It’s good to pick up at least some stuff straight from ear, though, I think, as you develop an ear more and more as you do that, and you eventually find yourself depending less and less on sheet music. I find that happening for me. When I add in ornamentation after I memorize a song, I treat it like asking someone out >. You don’t want the line to sound dull, but you don’t want to put suppurflous stuff in when you ask them out either. Then you just sound bad! Same with music. My teacher pointed out that you don’t want to overdo ornamentation, and I tend to agree.
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