I understand that the traditional way to learn the uilleann pipes best is to pick it up by ear as opposed to reading sheet music, and that years ago it was handed down from father to son, etc. There are no local pipers close enough to tutor me, and I am trying to learn with the typical tutors. Clarke and NPU. The videos are great, Clarkes cd moves too fast for me. I guess my question to the group is this…how does one learn by ear? Any advice would be great. Is it a natural talent for all to acquire? I try to listen to pipe tunes, sometimes I can figure out the note, but more often then not, I can’t. Is it just a thing that occurs the more often you do it? Thanks…I know its a tricky topic…thanks for any honest tips shy of advising me to take up harmonica…cheers.
I have no intention of learning the U.P. solely by ear. Thankfully, I already play the Great Highland Pipe. It would be nice to be able to pick up everything by ear but I’ll let the written scales and sheet music be my guide. Like on the GHP, I’ll be able to do some playing by ear once I’m proficient enough.
Like anything else in this world, you get nothing for free. It’s all about practice. At first you pick up a few notes here and there as you say, then you pick up another handful, then, after a lot of practice, you start to recognise phrases and lines, and after some 10 or 15 years, it’s easy as pie! I hope. I’m not there yet, but it’s all practice.
Being able to read sheet music isn’t something negative, and a great many of the users here supplement their ears with sheet music, myself included, from time to time. The only bad thing is to start using sheet music exclusively to learn tunes, or at least using it more than your actual ears. But in the beginning it’s useful to learn those phrases that you’re bound to run into here and there later on in your playing.
Another good resource is the many good online places for learning, where most offer either entire videos, or at least audio slowed down to different degrees, as it’s a whole lot easier to pick something up by ear if it’s played slowly than at full session pace. Some of those sites are the NPU homepage (for members), scoiltrad.ie, tradlessons.com etc.
Best of luck!
When I first started on the pipes, I was also new to Irish music. I found trying to teach myself to play pipes, learn tunes, and learn to pick up tunes by ear was too much for my little brain to handle.
So I put the learning by ear aside, and learned tunes by sheet music alone. I knew how to read sheet music from my years in the school band (junior high and high school). Now seven years later, I’m comfortable with the pipes, have a number of tunes under my belt, and am starting to learn to learn tunes by ear.
I find that there are several tunes that are played in our session so often, I mostly already know them, so learning to play them is not so hard…and sometimes realize, wait I don’t actually know how to play that tune, but as Jager said, pick up a few notes here and there..next time it’s played pick up a few more.
As an instructor told us at Swanannoa one year “in order to learn a tune, you have to already know it.” I agree, if you listen to a tune so many times that you can hum it or sing it to yourself (you know it)…then playing it is just a matter of translating to the notes on the pipes.
Hope that helps.
-gary
A number of PC applications will slow the tune down without changing pitch. For Mac or iPhone, there is Amazing Slow Downer, among others. The nice thing about ASD is that you can take a phrase, a measure, a single embellishment, or whatever, slow it down and then loop it so you can hear it over and over. As others have said, it gets easier the more you do it, and the easier it gets, the less you have to slow the tune down to hear it.
i find the very best pc application is transcribe it is just perfect for the job.
our friend eskin has a video on how to use it on tradlessons.com .
check it out.
jim carroll
There are two skills needed; one is knowing where the notes you are hearing in the tune are on your instrument. This comes after much playing, it can’t be forced but one day you will suddenly realise it is there. Once you have this you can learn a tune without your instrument, simply by learning to hum or sing it. The other skill is the ability to listen. Players are listeners.
Learners who live in musical seclusion are up against it, and can’t listen to purists saying it has to be by ear only. You have to use every possible device, dots, Slow Downer, Youtube. Using music can be a short cut to a tune. If I sightread a tune I have never heard I can listen to myself playing it and learn it in my head.
Putting the time in helps. I often say to pupils; look around the session. When you see someone who knows every tune and plays well, you are not looking at a genius, you are looking at someone who put the time in. The clue to this is to find ways to enjoy the hours it takes to work your skills up. If you are new to Irish music any good player of any instrument can help you with rhythm, it doesn’t have to be a piper.
Good luck…
Chris
I’m a great believer in " By any means necessary".
many of the old pipers could read fluently and some couldn’t read music at all. I use both music at times and ear at other times. There is no absolutes so go with what works best for you 
Thanks all for those replies, all were great words of wisdom. I was working on Blarney Pilgrim and though I haven’t mastered it by far, I think I have the jist of it…now, and I know I am maybe moving too fast, I am stuck on the Kesh Jig…gotta learn it, so I youtube it and listen to every version and try to play it, but I need the sheet music in front of me…then after several times around I have it down. That slow downer sounds like a great idea. Thanks again…great help all…cheers…and Happy New Year, by this time next year I hope to post massive improvement…
I hear music using my ears, so I think there is a direct connect within the brain.
Reading music adds steps to the “music to brain” connection. However the dots do have their value, especially to isolated pipers.
The longer you listen to the pipes, the faster you can listen.
All the tips already given are great, and I also believe that if you can’t sing the tune, you won’t be able to play it. I saw a huge improvement in my ability to play by ear after I joined the choir at Church. I was better able to lock down the individual pitches. Another tip is to play any tune you know. Christmas tunes are great because you know the tunes so well and most are contained in one octave. This will help you hear and “feel” the music in your fingers.
Oh, and be careful about just learning by sheet music. The connection needs to be between your ears and your fingers, not your eyes and your fingers. You don’t want to fall into the trap of just seeing the notes on the page and all thought going to using the proper fingers to play. This will become even more important as you being to play variations of the music.
really? 
Take those words above with a grain of salt, readers:
I would never underestimate the importance of being able to sight-read.
Learning by ear has, I think, at least two main components: the ear-finger connection (hearing what notes to play) and short-term memory (retaining a sequence in mind long enough to play it back). Both can be developed with practice.
You might not have a piper nearby, but if you have a friend who plays, say, whistle or flute, or even fiddle or concertina, you might try a simple “echo” exercise to practice connecting the ears to the fingers. Start by asking your friend to play any random note, and echo it yourself on the chanter. Repeat this (using different notes) for a few minutes. Then have your friend play any combination of two notes, and echo them; do that for a few minutes. Then any combination of three notes. You get the idea. The combinations can be completely bizarre – the challenge is simply to be able to echo anything you hear. Aim at first to be able to echo single notes without fumbling for them at all. Then aim to be able to echo any two-note combination without fumbling, and so on. As you increase the number of notes, you begin to train your short-term memory as well. If you and your friend can do this exercise once a week for a while, it might help a bit with both those components.
I think a third component of learning tunes by ear is recognition of certain frequently-used combinations of notes, or short phrases. I think of them as puzzle pieces. This recognition will come with time as you immerse yourself in the music: in my experience, what happens is that you’ll learn a couple of “puzzle pieces” in one tune and then discover that they pop up in other tunes. As you go along, over the years, you accumulate more and more of them in your memory, until learning a new tune by ear consists of fitting a number of familiar puzzle pieces together, along with the pleasure of encountering new ones.
If you are new to Irish music as well as to the pipes (are you?), keep in mind that you are taking on a lot at once. Be gentle with yourself, and don’t expect yourself to be able to learn by ear super quickly right away. But do work on it. In addition to making it easier to learn tunes, I find these skills really enhance my listening pleasure.
Good luck!
CHasR is correct about the ability to sight read, and I may have written my bit a bit to forcefully. I am not a professional player on pipes that comes into issues with having to sight read piping music. I have come across this issue when playing orchestral music, but that is on a brass instrument.
I am curious what situations others have come across that would require sight reading Traditional Music on pipes?? Even at Tionols where the teacher gives out music, it is quickly stated to put it away.
Wow, more great advice. I have a good friend thats great on guitar. I am going to have to try that echo routine. Just downloaded the amazing slow downer, its awesome. Gives me a chance to actually keep up with the tunes. Thanks again to all. I had attempted the pipes many years ago, but quickly got overwhelmed and put them away…for a long time…but pulled them out this April and have been moving forward each day. The first hurdle was the second octave E, but on a new chanter that is much easier and more pleasant to hear and play, progress is coming slowly.
There isn’t a mystery to learning to play by ear. The “echo” exercise is excellent, but this can be done solo. pop a CD in the CD player and queue up the song you wish to learn. Play a measure on the player and hit pause. Play what you heard. Simple enough. I’ve done this with other instruments for years and have applied this with success on uilleann pipes. No mystery.
Well I will stand up as the exception here. When prepared, I’ll usually bring a manuscript notepad to workshops and transcribe down what the instructor;s doing, often before they get around to explaingin it. (so ..watch out you lot- Im onto you 
)
Also, Ive done far more work pipeing with “non-Itm” instruments/ situations. The skills of sight reading and perhaps more importantly, sight-transposition have served me quite well. With many years in music conservatory, on various woodwinds & GHB prior to uilleann, it is more difficult for me NOT to see the notes on the page going by as somone plays. When/if someone calls out, say, ‘drops of brandy’ my brain pulls out the written chart first and then sends the execution signals to the tendons, the ear double-checking as it goes out. the more the ‘file’ gets pulled, the more automatic it becomes and the 3-step process becomes a one-step process. and again, this is only one way of producing a tune from memory. So, to discount the written note as relevant to memorizing & recreating Itm seems a bit like letting a few lifeboats loose before the ship hits the berg(ah, we dont need them things slowin down the boat, ensign 
).
Anyhow: a refrence pitch is very helpful, to train your ear. Play A, sing E above it,
then the D below it. good. now sing B above the A. Sing, whistle or hum a major scale while holding A. Lets not forget rhythm- play the passage staight, then dotted. now reverse the dotting. play triplets while tapping eights in the foot. invent similar exercises. noodle knowledgeably.
Although its not quite as good as having somone sit behind a piano, play stuff then ask ‘major minor or diminished’, '3/4/, 2/4or 6/8 in what key?" …there are a number of free websites (just a google away!) offering standard ear training. Seeing as most trad European folk tunes consist of mainly of scales, scale passages, broken & arpegiated diatonic chords within a modal framework, I fail to see how any training in standard musicianship can be a detriment to the practise of Itm or Uillean pipeing.
Jager has it absolutely correct when he says that it’s all about practice (and that you get nothing for free). It is a lot of work, but keep doing it and you will get better at it. I think we all have a slightly different angle on learning by ear, but we are all headed in the same direction. I know one thing to watch out for when reading Trad music from sheet music is that hornpipes are always written in straight eighth notes, but never played that way. Keep listening and it will come together! 
Thanks again all. Practice is key. Slow down the music and practice at a suitable pace is really helping. Day by day. So long as the whiskeys a flown’. Cheers
This is how I learn tune either on my own of with an instructor. Repeating what others have said but I’ll add some specifics to what I like to do. First, listen to the tune a bunch and get a feel for it. The better you know the tune, the easier it will be. When learning alone, I use slow down software. I used Amazing Slow Downer on the Mac. Works great. You could also just use Quicktime which has the many of the same abilities. Find the first bar or two of the tune and set things to loop. If you were working with a teacher, they would just play the first bar.
Listen to it slowly and start to play along. If you can’t get a feel for it right off, make the segment shorter or slow down further. I’ve had tricky bits of ornamentation I’ve worked on where it’s taken me forever to figure out exactly what I’m hearing and I’ll loop a three or four note section forever to figure it out.
Once you can play along reasonably well, work the second bar. Once you’ve got the second bar down, play the first and second. You’ve now realized that you’ve forgotten the first already but it usually just takes a few passes to get it again. Keep doing this until you have the A part of the tune down. Play the entire A part several times. Now start in on the B part and do the same thing. Once you’ve got the B part add the A part (which of course you have forgotten). Play the whole tune. Repeat.
Using this method, which really is the most common method of teaching, I can usually learn a tune in 15 minutes or so. The advantage is that once you learn a tune by ear, it is really in your memory. Using notes I find it take me forever to commit a tune to memory. As you learn more tunes, you’ll realize how many common themes there are and you’ll find yourself able to play much of the tune without “knowing it”. Learn a few reels and it’s like Rakish Paddy is a bonus thrown in for your trouble.