Learning from ear

I have a question about learning from ear. What are some good CD’s to get that have some good songs that are easy to pick up by ear. I have some music, but the problem that I have is that most of it is lightning fast, and its very hard to pick up the notes at that speed. Any help would be appreciated.

I think your best bet is to listen a lot, a lot to the stuff until you get the melody clearly in your head. On the technical side, there’s some free software that will allow you to slow the tune and keep the pitch, perfect for learning fast tunes. Maybe you can also, yes, God Save My Soul, use sheet music just to find out the few notes you might have been missing. Just to fill the gaps, you should still learn the tune’s “meat” by ear.

It probably depends but Flogging Molly and The Pogues are generally my favorites (stuff like: ol’ beggar’s bush, The Wanderlust, Devil’s Dance Floor by FM, or Mahones: Cragataska, most things by Blood or Whiskey) of course those are all ‘punkier’ than a lot of people like; theres always The Corrs (if you can match Andrea) or the Dubliners. I’m curious as to what others play to though because I’m running out of material I can play with my D. Oh Cruachan also has a whistler whos pretty easy to follow.

Oh and although I might get crap for this one: Eire Og has some really easy powerful rebel tunes to jam with (I got in trouble before for mentioning the Ra). You can kill the revolutionary, but never the revolution a chara.

Well, when I first started the whistle, I had a couple flogging molly cd’s,(swagger and drunken lullabies) A dropkick murphy’s cd (Do or Die) and also a few Pogues cd’s - Red Roses for Me, and Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. Great stuff. And I learned the simple songs from those cd’s. There’s a few on all cd’s I just mentioned. Battle of Brisbane (from Red Roses for Me) is a good beginner tune. Far Away Coast is from Do or Die is a good beginner tune. I’m sure there’s plenty more tunes out there that are easy to learn, such as Foggy Dew, Down by the Sally Garden (the slow one I mean, I know there’s a reel version called Sally garden (s?) Anyways, I pretty much stick to learning all the chieftain’s tunes I can nowawdays. I also enjoy playing highland bagpipe tunes on the Bb or Eb whistles. But, I’m sick and I’m rambling so good night.

-Eric

I’m trying too, but I’m afraid I’m failing miserably (not having been able to “play” the last three weeks didn’t really improve matters)… I would love to be able to play some Skyclad tunes, but alas, they only do sound good when I’m nowhere near my whistles… I know it shouldn’t bee too hard to hear what Eric’s playing in “Great blow for a day job”, but still no luck. I’m hoping that Santa brings some sort of enlightment to me for Christmas :slight_smile:

To pick tunes up and learn phrasing, get some albums that are very sparsely arranged. Some people that come to mind are Jack and Charlie Coen; Mike Rafferty; Catherine McEvoy; the Kevin Burke solo live disc. None of these folk generally play at breakneck speed, either.

Since I’ve never been able to play by ear, I always keep trying. I don;t try to learn to play by ear from cds. I go to the Wandering Whistler site and pick tunes there. They are in an unembelished midi version. It’s a great place to practice picking out notes. The tunes are also there in musical notation so you can check if you’ve got it right.

A possible solution is what I do: I’ve got installed an audio editor, many of them have the timestretching function whereby you can make slower the melody and ear all the notes clearly :slight_smile:

The Amazing Slowdowner is a good option for slowing down tunes without distortion.

Susan

Apparently quite a few people don’t know that Windows Media Player has a slow down function that does not alter pitch. It only works on tunes from CD’s that you have ripped (copied) to the WMP library as far as I know, but ripping is also a thing WMP does very easily from a CD, and it’s all free. To set up goto the view menu and then enhancements and there it is, called play speed settings. Select it and you’re away. I have the latest version of WMP running under XP, so I cannot say if it is available on older versions.

Also, the writer of the Amazing Slow Downer created a plug in for
Winamp called “Slow me Down”

http://winamp.com/plugins/details.php?id=21827

I say get your hands on as many Chieftains albums as you can, you can’t really go wrong. Pretty much any one of their cd’s is going to have a mixture of some slow stuff that is fairly easy to learn, all the way up to some fun reels. Since most of their music is traditional, you can find sheet music for it pretty easily to aid in playing. I play by ear as well but I do need to reference the music on some of the faster songs.

John Skelton’s A Few Tunes and A Few More Tunesare very musically played at a relaxed tempo, and you can get a transcription of the tunes along with the CDs. I highly recommend these.

Carol

I came to whistling with no music experience, no training in either sheet music or learning by ear. Two best pieces of advice:

  1. Learn to hum the tune first. Pick simple tunes. Learning by ear takes practice. It used to take me an hour or more to pick out a tune, once I could hum it. Now I can usually get in 20 minutes or so, depending on the tune. If you can hum it, you can pick it apart eventually. I even started by doing non-irish tunes. Try it first with tunes that you are really familiar with, like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Scarborough Fair, Silent Night, etc. You can train your ear, just be patient.

2)Use a slow downer. I use the Amazing Slow Downer. I used it quite a lot a the beginning and it really helps to pick apart a tune, phrase by phrase, even note by note. I still use it when there’s a note of phrase that eluding me.

As for some good session tunes, played at slow to moderate pace, many of them solo whistle, there are WMAs and MP3s of quite a few trad tunes at www.ccepittsburgh.org (though I wouldn’t start with the first listed, Christmas Eve, that’s a hard one).

Happy whistling!

Zoe

In terms of what to listen to, - tunes that you like to listen to and want to play! even seemingly complex tunes will go quicker if you find them exciting.

You could try here. They go pretty fast but the dots are there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/r2music/folk/sessions/

Martin Hayes- all his cd’s have very moderately paced tunes.
Laurence Nugent- Windy Gap has a lot of great tunes, many of which are played slowly.
Planxty- Cold Blow and the Rainy Night, a classic from the '70’s
Mick O’Brien and a guy with a really long name: Kitty Lie Over
All the Chieftains music from #1 through about 9- some tunes are ridiculously fast, but a great many are not.

All these collections are good music whether you’re trying to learn it or just enjoy it.

Also, the book by LE McCullough, 121 Favorite Irish Session Tunes- 4 cd’s and the printed tunes. Great learning aid. Some people gripe about some of the arrangements or style, or whatever. It’s been very valuable for a lot of people. Under $50.
Tony