Learning tunes by ear

Whistle
1

( i’m very sorry for starting a 35476-th thread with such title on this board )


The only right way to learn new tunes is learning by ear. Full stop. Learning tunes by ear is the only way of “getting the idea” if irish music for a newbie. Full stop. If you want to be able to learn tunes by ear, start learning them by ear. Full stop. That’s how it is usually written in numerous tutors, books, webpages, posts on messageboards… I’m sure that’s all true. But I can’t do that.

Moreover. My playing is like “OK, I move my fingers this way, and if I blow into that hole at the same time, there will be some sort of tune”. That’s wrong, that’s terribly wrong. I don’t want it to be like that.

I’m not sure what is the best way to change that, but some people say learning by ear can help.

I tried doing that few times, but failed. I either do not get the tune, or get it completely wrong. I can’t lilt tunes also (no matter if I can play them or not), neither I can sing songs. “I can’t” means I can lilt the rhythm of the tune, but not the pitch of the notes.

That sucks.

I’m playing tinwhistle (and recorder before it) for 1.5 years already, and I suppose it’s time to start changing. Any ideas on what to start from? I mean, I’ve heard a “start from easy tunes, move on to more complicated ones” answer many times, but it seems I need a bit more specific advice :slight_smile:


Will be very grateful for your answers.

2

If it helps you a bit, I’ll tell you that I’ve been playing for a bit less than a year, and I practically learn everything with sheet music. I don’t consider myself a “BAD” player (although I don’t consider myself a GOOD player either). At least I think I can play music with the whistle, and some people enjoy it.

What I like to do is, when I hear a tune that I want to learn, look for the sheet music (I’m not a great reader, but I can more or less play a simple jig or a reel in less than a hour at the most) and after that, search as many versions of that tune as I can.
For example, if I wanted to learn “Cooley’s reel”, I looked for the sheet music on TheSession and on TinWhistler (for comparing different versions), then, I went to YouTube, Clips & Snips, and heard almost every version I found.
So, I really learn the notes from sheet music, but I also hear a lot of music, and I try to pick up the rhythm, feeling and variations that I like, by ear. I know it’s not the same picking up a whole tune by ear, that only a few variations, but, at least, I think that it works fine on me.
Of course I’d be happy of having an excellent ear and being able to pick up whole tunes by ear easily, but I can’t (yet).
I’m being a bit lazy and I don’t try to do it. Instead, I learn the tune which I want in ~15 minutes having the sheet music.
Despite of that, I don’t consider that my playing is like a machine, and I can play with quite a good rhythm, etc.
Maybe someday, when I have more time, I’ll try to “improve my ear” even more.

Cheers,
Martin

3

Well, THERE’s your problem. Quite a lot of unproductive affirmations don’t you think?

It is a skill. It is not easy. It is possible. The reward for success is greater than the difficulty in achieving success.

Did you learn to speak by reading first, or by asking for a cookie? The technique is inate but you are essentially leaning another language here. It takes practice.

Trying it a couple of times and “failing” doesn’t fly. It is like going out and sitting in a car for 20 minutes with out turning it on and then getting out and complaining that cars don’t work in getting you to your destination.

Tell you what… don’t learn another tune by using sheet music for the next 3 years but try every day for only 10 minutes a day to learn new tunes by ear.

Then lets see where you are.

4

Scott,

So I’m not going to learn that great march I’ve heard at Deanta’s CD recently, am I? Same about that jig from Bothy Band’s CD?

5

Well, you yourself more or less acknowledge that if you’re learning only from the dots, you’re not really learning. So … :wink:

6

If you say so.

Strange to make that decision. Not really much advise that will help you if that is your conviction.

Try it like this instead…

So I am going to learn that great march I’ve heard at Deanta’s CD recently. Same about that jig from Bothy Band’s CD!

(this also gets the “if you say so” comment)

7

In the first years of playing, i learned the same way as Bothrops has described.
However now, i find myself not using sheet music much. It’s only when i get really stuck on a complicated piece that i need to read the notes.
It seems the more i learn, the more i have played by ear.
When i listen to a new tune now, i can hear how it is played, not just how it sounds, i couldn’t have done this in the early days.

8

You can educate your ears. Yes, it sucks and its slow. No, its not impossible. People who really do have a tin ear can’t tell “Ave Maria” from “Pop goes the Weasel”. If you can, your problem is software, not hardware.

And if you want to play traditional music, this is an issue you can’t work around. The only route from here to there goes through, not around, ear training.

And as in most other such skills, the solution is drill. Shrink the task down to manageable proportions, and sweat out learning tune after tune until you can do it.

By ‘manageable’, I mean things like having a friend to record for you tunes that, say, stay within an octave and have no accidentals, and are in a key you know.

If you’re able to find a way to record how you’re doing, you’ll find that regular practice makes for slow but real progress, which will help a LOT in overcoming the “I’m getting nowhere; this is hopeless!” feeling or what someone above called ‘negative affirmations’. By ‘record’ I mean something similar to counting reps in an exercise program, etc., not an audio recording.

~~

I work in a field in which kids with autism have to learn skills that they have no affinity or talent for; which can be things like learning to read faces or social cues, even as simple as verbal communication using language. (Autism consists of deficits in these areas). What those kids can learn, you can too.

And the therapy that works goes (in part) the way I’ve outlined above: breaking the tasks into their simplest constituents and practicing them recording your progress until they’re mastered, and then going on to the next skill. It’s a bore, especially if you’re used to relying on your sharp intellect for acquiring new skills, but it works. This is an area you can’t think, reason, or read your way through.

9

I’m in about the same boat as Bothrops - I use sheet music but I’m getting better and better at learning by ear. Looking back, I did three things in a sort of haphazard way that helped.

First, I listened to a lot of music. I have an iPod in my truck and listen to the tunes I’m working on as I drive to work. I didn’t start doing this until I’d been playing the whistle for over a year and wish now I had started before I ever picked up a whistle. When you hear a tune for the hundredth time, you start to notice the structure, phrasing, ornaments and other things that make the tune easier to learn.

The second thing I did was learn tunes I liked, the ones that got stuck in my head. If I like a tune, I can hum hum it after relatively few listenings. Tunes I don’t like take a looooong time to get stuck in my head. There’s also the motivation of learning a tune I really like. I practice longer and concentrate harder because I want to play that tune.

Third, I learned tunes from sheet music but memorized each tune after I had it under my fingers. (This part wasn’t an effort to learn by ear, it was an effort to reach a daydream of standing in a park somewhere, playing tune after tune for the passersby.) At first, I memorized the sheet music - I literally had a picture of the sheet music in my head and I played from that. Needless to say, memorizing a whole page of dots took a long time. After a while, without really realizing what I was doing, I started memorizing the sounds. I could hear the tune in my head and make my fingers go where they needed to go to match that sound. I still learn most tunes by looking at the sheet music but now, rather than practicing the tune over and over with the sheet music, I look at the sheet music for the overall structure and the notes in the first few bars then look away and play as much as I can recall then look back at the sheet music, look away and play, etc. A few weeks ago, I learned “The Red-Haired Boy” in about ten minutes. I couldn’t play it well in ten minutes but I didn’t need the sheet music anymore after ten mintutes. This tune was a landmark in my journey!

I guess where I’m going with all this is that there are many things you can do to train your ear and most of them are fun: listening to music, practicing tunes you like. Don’t beat yourself up over not being able to learn by ear right now. Use the sheet music and enjoy playing tunes. Reading sheet music is a valuable skill in its own right, so there’s nothing wrong with learning that. If you have fast Net connection (I do not, so I don’t do this next one as much as I’d like) watch videos of whistle players. Watch their fingers and figure out the notes from that.

There are no doubt people in the world who have picked up a whistle, noodled for a few minutes then played the next tune they heard. They are out there, all three of them. Other people who “learn by ear” did so with lots of help from listening, watching, getting hints from a teacher. If you don’t have excellent whistle players standing on every street corner in your town, come up with substitutes - iPod, videos, sheet music, Chiff & Fipple (for mentoring), by going to concerts, listening and watching. You’ll get there soon enough. The important thing is to enjoy the trip, whichever route you take.

10

breqwas,

Since this is a folk art, I’m not so certain that there is a “right way” or “wrong way.” Ear training is important, but laborious, as noted already. My repertoire is pretty shallow in the ITrad department, so I’ll leave that for someone better qualified.

My own experience: I grew up playing cornet for four years in school band, and performed a lot of vocal music, also. I’d been pretty thorougly trained to learn from sheet music. Challenge is, I’m pretty auditory in my learning style, so I just thought I was a weak musician. I can look at a sheet of music and tell you all kinds of things about it, except what it is supposed to sound like.

I started playing whistle in the band at church about 5 years after I got my first whistle. Usually, I just played the melody line, because that was all that I could find written out. And if there was some pretty descant, I still had to have the pianist play the tune so I could hear it.

I wanted to be able to play countermelodies and fills, but they are not usually written out, so I had to learn to trust my instinct and begin to improvise. It literally took me years to get comfortable with just picking up a whistle and starting to play, but I hardly touch sheet music now.

Downside: my weak sight-reading skills have gotten worse with lack of use.

Don’t know if that’s a tangent or not. I guess my point is that there are benefits and drawbacks to any single approach.

Mark

11

Since this is a folk art, I’m not so certain that there is a “right way” or “wrong way.”

Where does the notion it’s a free for all because ‘it’s a folk art’ come from and why does it keep popping up over and over again?

12

Peter, I’m not qualified to answer your question, because I can’t see where it says it’s a “free for all” in my post.

My point, simply stated, is that there is more than one way to learn, that different learning styles may benefit from different approaches, and that each approach has pro’s and con’s.

13

Free for All: You didn’t say that Mark. But the trend is that whenever things like learning, playing etc go the argument of ‘folk art’ (or similar terms) will come up with the implication that ‘anything goes’.

I agree with you that there are more ways of learning something, this has nothing to do however with notions of ‘folk art’. In fact ‘traditional’ in traditional music implies an oral/aural method of transmission, by definition.

14

By narrow definition, yes. Broader definitions take folk literacy, including musical literacy, into account.

15

I usually keep the definition of the International Folk Music Council in mind that Breandan Breathnach quotes in his work ‘The Use Notation in the Transmission Irish Folk music’:

…a product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are: (i) continuity which links the present to the past, (ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group and (iii) selection by the community, which determines the form or forms in which the music survives

I take for granted here the term ‘Traditional’ has now replaced ‘Folk’

16

There is indeed more than one way to learn.

If you’re into ITM you will want to play tunes, but I’m not sure that focussing on playing the tune is always the best way to start. To play a tune you need to have (at a minimum) both the melody and the rhythm in place. That’s a lot to ask of a learner. Getting the rhythm or ‘feel’ of a tune right is probably one of the hardest things to do.

Another way to start is to work on the sounds you want to make. Things like hitting notes cleanly at will, playing in different keys and modes, mastering cuts and other forms of ornamentation, experimenting with how breathing and leaving gaps can affect the music, varying the emotional quality of your playing (without going too mad or sentimental), and so on. Pretty soon you’ll be on to combinations of notes (what guitarists would call riffs), and it’s not very far from there to tunes. And having learned a lot about the instrument already, it’s not too far to go before you start playing tunes fairly well.

Everybody’s different, but I found that worked for me much better than plodding through tunes. I spent ages trying to copy little phrases played by Liam O’Floinn on the first Planxty album, and I got them down long before I could play a whole tune that sounded any good. In my experience, there are few things more tedious (for the player or the listener) than struggling though tunes.

Anyway, whichever way you choose, listen a lot to good players whenever you can, and keep at it!

17

Hello to every-one,
My humble opinion : I am not so long playing the whistle and find that first of all I have to “like” the tune land like walrii said; if you don’t like the tune its really hard to get it in! I try to find tunes I like and then get the written notes,learn the fingering and then practice, practice,practice. Playing from ear is for the best among us I think and takes longer then a few years. My problems are from a different nature. I learn the tune and still at some points in the tune suddenly my fingers refuse to do what the mind orders. I play the tune without guitar accompany and then I play it right. Trouble always starts at the same point and keep on accuring until I play the tune several times, after that;when I lay down the whistle lets say for the next few days, same problem accures. Do I still have to practice more ore are my fingers fed up and refuse to go on. I think my fingers have a certain lack of “memory” still! My teacher says that I have an auditive ear this means when he plays; I can play the notes after him, but to play by ear I have still a long way to go. Sometimes its rewarding when things go smooth but frustrating when a tune played lets say 40 times still isn’t quite right and keeps going wring at the same spot. I do think to take the whistle with me at sessions to try it out nevertheless to get aqainted with other players and take it in hand only if it is for one tune next to my Bodhran playing.
Am I an exeption or is this familiar. Best wishes,
Ron

18

I think this is because some phrases are harder to play than others. They just take more practice!

Playing by ear isn’t a magical art available only to the elite - it’s how we all learn to talk. It does help if you can ‘hear’ well, but that’s mostly about being able to listen with a sensitive ear, which is a skill most people can learn. Playing by ear depends a lot on how well trained your fingers are as well. The more music you can play, the more memories your fingers will have to draw on, and the better you’ll be able to sense what sounds right before you play it. That’s really all playing ‘by ear’ is.

19

I’ve been playing for 10 months now. I’ve had a whistler teacher for 8 of those months. Initially I started learning tunes from the music but in the last couple of months I’m starting to learn tunes by ear.

The way this happens is the teacher picks a tune and plays it a speed. Next he plays the first phrase slowly and I repeat (or try to). Following that we work on the next phrase and then tie it together with the previous phrases(s).

It can be torture but we manage to get through one of the parts by the end of the 30 minute lesson.

It’s a slow process but I can see in a few years developing the skill to a reasonable level.

Michael

20

I think the goal should be to to pick up tunes by ear. Straight into the “right brain” skipping the “left brain” and then when you play, having mastered the motor skills to make desired sounds at will, they come straight back out from the “right brain”.

(What’s with all the brain talk? From Wiki - "Linear reasoning and language functions such as grammar and vocabulary often are lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain. Dyscalculia is a neurological syndrome associated with damage to the left temporo-parietal junction.[3] This syndrome is associated with poor numeric manipulation, poor mental arithmetic skill, and the inability to either understand or apply mathematical concepts.[4]

In contrast, holistic reasoning language functions, such as intonation and accentuation, often are lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain. Functions such as the transduction of visual and musical stimuli, spatial manipulation, facial perception, and artistic ability seem to be functions of the right hemisphere.")

Now, there are absolutes, but this explains my experience and observations to my satisfaction, so I’m sticking to it until someone supplies a better explanation.

Many of us who have gone through what I recognize as the “normal” education system here in the western world have been trained to use our linear processing abilites. Recite the alphabet. Read this page. Memorize this poem. Spit back the multiplication tables. No surprise we are good at processing lists.

Starting to learn tunes it’s natural to use the skills you have perfected for 20 or 50 years. Read the notes, memorize the list, repeat the list. It sounds like you are repeating a list when most people play at first. Because most people are.

I can tell the difference when I play tunes that I learned by ear vs the ones I memorized from the dots. It feels different to play them. And I bet it sound different to listeners too. This difference slowly goes away, maybe because the right brain learns from listening to the left brain play them.

If your “ears”, which includes the associated hardware and software (thanks s1m0n), need practice before you can learn “by ear” then by all means make the effort. But go ahead and do what you must while you are at it. You have to allow the fun to be had where ever you can.

The best is to have an experienced player teach you the tunes. (Thank you Ian.) Best if they play a fiddle or box so you can’t peek at their fingers. You can use a recording and/or ABC, but later, once you have the ears working a little. It’s too distracting to mess with the keyboard and mouse while you are trying to learn to listen and hear. Which is what it is. Have the person play a phrase and you play it back. Didn’t get it? They will play it slower or a smaller section of it. Whatever it takes. The point being you can concetrate on hearing, not playing with the computer or recording device.

Once you have got to some point which I can’t express, you will be able to hear what is on those recordings with the slow-downer. Then without the slowdowner. Then you will be able to snatch some prases while you are at a session, and only need help for some parts you just can’t hear. And it will keep getting better and better the more you work at it. But it will take time.

Is ITM what it is because it has been passed along aurally, or is it passed along aurally becasue it is what it is? Both I think. Straight into and out of the right brain has got to result in something different than if the stodgy ol’ left brain gets a chance to mess things up. (He ducks.)

I think something that is preserved and passed along by writing will take a different shape from something that is passed along by experience. (Leap of faith here, shoot me if you must.) Look at how people get different things from e-mails or (gasp!) forum posts vs a face-to-face conversation (over a pint is best.) The inflection is missing or missed.

I think ITM suits the aural style, and the aural style suits ITM. Repeat things often (AABBAABBAABB) make little changes to keep the interest up (variations surprise you and keep you listening but the core tune is there to be learned.) So ITM and oral/aural traditions suit each other.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.