I’m curious about how many tunes should one be “working on” at the same time? I realize this is a very subjective question, but I"m curious what long time players usually do?
Do you pick out a few new tunes and concentrate on mastering them, then once mastered move on to a new tune?
Or, do you work on many tunes during the same time period, bouncing between them over a longer period of time?
I find myself concentrating on just a few tunes, working them over and over trying to get them down and adding little refinements here and there. My problem is, being fairly new to this, my practice is getting very repetitive hearing the same tune over and over.
Currently, I have 4 tunes I’m working on. Is this a low number?
Chewing is part of the learning process. When you are not practicing, you should have the tune(s) playing in your head, working on the fingerings and articulation. There has been an observed phenomena where behaviorists can actually measure progress on learning a piece of music by walking away from playing it and just thinking about it as opposed to slavishly playing it over and over.
My advice is to do whatever works for you. When you notice something is not helping you make progress, step away and re-evaluate.
Quality, not quantity, wins the race. And the race is a marathon not a sprint.
Interesting. I tend to do that automatically, many times to the point that it drives me nuts! I remember having Fred Finn’s reel stuck in my fingers and head for weeks, and I just couldn’t get it out. I could play it my sleep… TBH, I probably did!
I have been playing in Rock bands since the 80’s and I always seem to have between 2 and 5 tunes at a time to learn. I think it is good to have enough tunes to work on that you don’t go mad from repetition. If you go with too many tunes it just seems that they don’t get enough attention to master.
I don’t how well this experience translates to whistle though.
I don’t worry about this too much. I reach my saturation point and adapt to it. Since I don’t HAVE to learn any tunes for any particular reason, I just enjoy what I’m doing when I’m doing it and leave it at that.
Playing with other people brings a whole new level of fun. To me, that’s the whole point. I learn tunes better when playing with others, too.
I have still a bit problem with exact meaning of “working on”.
I’m a beginner and I know just 18 tunes now.
When I learning new tune, I spend about a week almost exclusively just on this new tune. To learn it.
But it doesn’t ends, every tune I learned I still play again and again (mostly because it still doesn’t sound as I wish - sometime yes, but often not).
Where is the point/place of “working on”? Should I say “I’m working on this one tune this week” or “I’m working on all tunes I know”?
Actually, now I probably should to say “I’m working on to play few tunes as a set” .
Great replies! Thank you, this helps a lot. Even the humorous responses. So, do I have to only play one tune at a time? What if I stick 3 whistles in my mouth at the same time, play the two outer whistles with the base of my fingers, leaving the tips of my fingers to play the middle one?
One more question to throw out there.
Let’s say you’ve gotten to the point where you know 15 to 20 tunes (I’m not there yet). Do you, at some point, require musical notation as a reference to get through the different songs, or have your fingers memorized the tune for you?
I often see players on Youtube looking off camera at something, don’t know if this is their computer screen or sheet music? What’s the most tunes you have at your finger tips at any one time?
I don’t know notes. More precisely, my ability to read notes is approx one note per 5-10 seconds (and still, I can’t play it, first I need to hear it). So I have tunes memorized (that’s why I need a week to learn).
But sometime I need to hear at least two or three tones of tune to start, because I didn’t remembered names of tunes well and this helps me which one it is.
Looking of camera or somewhere else is probably … I don’t know how to say in english, in czech it is “čumět do blba” … eyes looking for something but you don’t know what are you looking.
EDIT: I found that in english it should be: Stare off into space.
I am new to the whistle, but I have been playing in rock bands sina long time. When you play in a cover music band such as the one I perform with, you need to memorize 60-70 songs for a four hour performance. That sounds pretty daunting at first, but as long as you keep rehearsing the tunes you know and adding new ones, you will get up to a large number of songs that you can play from memory.
I don’t ever use sheet music to play from (for irish traditional music). Sometimes I forget a tune, and looking at the sheet music, or more often listening to a recording, and even more often asking my wife, will help me remember it. And often I will learn tunes (but almost always ones from collections that aren’t played much) from sheet music.
But I probably could play through a couple hundred tunes without too much bother at any given moment. It’s a shifting morass, though, so the exact couple hundred might be different on any given day (just yesterday I listened to Tommy Reck and remembered a great tune I hadn’t played in a while). And I might not recall specific tunes, but others will come to mind. All told I probably “know” in excess of five hundred tunes and airs. Maybe more. Maybe less. My wife probably “knows” twice that. It’s really hard to count; in both cases “knowing” includes being able to start, being able to play along with immediately, and being able to join in fairly quickly. She’s been playing for over 15 years, and I’ve been playing for over 10. And we both have put in hours and hours and hours of listening. So there are tunes that neither of us have played that we could play almost right away.
Put in the time listening and practicing and you’ll get there.
By the way, songs (with words) I think are much more challenging. Tunes are pretty short and pretty repetitive, and so comparatively easier to learn and remember. My wife’s dad probably could sing a couple hundred songs at any given moment. He is awe-inspiring.
Your brain and fingers learn the tune, assuming you weaned yourself off the sheet music at some point. Your tongue can sing dozens of tunes from memory right now - quick, sing Happy Birthday, your favorite hymn, your school fight song - you get the idea. Your fingers can learn to do that too.
Memory is a funny thing though, as Nico points out so well above. I can’t seem to play “Napoleon Crossing the Rhine” from the beginning on a cold start; can’t seem to get the first three notes right. But if I play the jump from G to Cnat a few bars in, the rest of the tune, including the beginning, will flow out of the whistle smoothly.
I focus on one.But, I am new to the whistle. I learned saxaphone in high school learning to read notes and all. Since taking up the whistle I started out learning The Rattlin’ Bog from youtube tutorial and found tab music to a bunch of songs at tinwhistlemusic.org. I just go through playing all kinds of stuff from the easy music section. I hit them about 2 times and move on. I work dilligently on The Irish Washerwoman several times a day though. I’m close to getting the 1st part. The easy tunes I know from “having an ear for music” I just play them and look at the notes to get my learning on where the notes correspond to fingering. It’s easier for me that way. I was able to figure a few out before I even found that page just playing around.
I’ve only been playing five months or so, but I’ve found that focusing on 2 tunes, learning 3 or 4 others in the background and switching to primarily practicing them once I’ve got one of the two primary tunes down, and going through all the tunes I know multiple times each practice session helps me steadily memorize new tunes while not getting rusty on the ones I have. It also keeps practice from getting repetitive.
and going through all the tunes I know multiple times each practice session
unless played very, very quickly going through all the tunes you know will become impossible once you know more than a handful - once through even 50 tunes exceeds most people’s allotment for practice time. Once you know (really know) a tune it does not need practicing continuously, in fact for me letting it rest seems to often help.
How many at a time - for me one maybe two is good, combined with working on tunes I already know - know as in all the notes are there, just getting to really know them, a process that is never really finished.
Chewing is part of the learning process. When you are not practicing, you should have the tune(s) playing in your head, working on the fingerings and articulation. There has been an observed phenomena where behaviorists can actually measure progress on learning a piece of music by walking away from playing it and just thinking about it as opposed to slavishly playing it over and over.
