Learning Tunes by Ear

Whistle
21

Egads, it’s nice to see this being discussed in a civil way for a change. The last time I saw this conversation (on Facebook) I ended up having to butt heads with people who were militantly anti-dots. FWIW, I learn the same way as the OP and have been since I started in… hmmm, 2006 or so. It’s always worked great for me, and I’ve found that I’ve gotten better over the years at more quickly picking up by ear the differences between the dots and what’s actually being played at the session, and converting those changes to my fingers. I say keep doing what you’re doing, and it’ll undoubtedly start coming to you more easily as it’s been doing with me.

And to Mr. Gumby: totally agree! I can’t count how many times I sit down to learn one tune and end up with a different one finding it’s way to me instead. :slight_smile:

22

Think of the guy who thought he could navigate his local area by using just one of his senses his eyes in this scenario. To insure his sight got supplied all the required navigation information about the area using his eyesight only he intentionally blocked up his ear canals with waxed cotton wool.

He wasn’t out an about long before he got knocked over by a bus, sure he seen the signs but didn’t hear the bus approaching while he was admiring the pretty bird perched on the rails in the bus stop the moral of the story is learn the task by any and all means available to you don’t handicap yourself. Learning by ear is one form of learning and was very necessary at a time when there wasn’t available notation or persons capable of creating and teaching the music notation for a music tradition that was only taught aurally. Now we have INTERNET with so many at hand media resources. ABC Tabliture for whistle and Tabliture for guitar and drums are fine examples of learning tools that have filled a gap replacing proper music notation and are popular, lots of folk use these Tools that’s all they are…tools to help you learn

Need for learning tools never went away and not everyone is able to learn by ear only learning what is most important is that you give yourself time to enjoy and learn about music, and whilst you’re tramping through the learning mud having fun, lots of good stuff is going to stick and the more resources you have available to you (wellies, waders, widders, wellingtons) the longer you can stay in the mud enjoying the fun.

23

Audio CD selected with the ear and the opposite page selected with the eye :slight_smile: so you also read music or do you use the same method some folk pick their bets for the “Grand National Horse Race”, i.e. “the name of that one looks good” :smiley:

Well that’s good to hear I’ve been doing the same which means I’ve skipped some tunes and I know it was because I didn’t really take to them. I will still occasionally go back and listen to the skipped stuff to see if time in practice changes my perspective of those tunes and it has :smiley:

24

FWIW, I find reading the whistle forum just as much interference with my ear training time as trying to learn to read the dots.

But I got to have it all! :thumbsup:

25

the moral of the story is learn the task by any and all means available to you don’t handicap yourself

Which is ofcourse assuming learning by ear is indeed to be taken as a handicap. I don’t think it is, or needs to be.

My wife had to bring her mother somewhere last year. Driving her mother’s car the sat nav sent them on a wild goose chase with a twenty mile detour. The map didn’t tell them which street that had a one way traffic system in place, so that wasn’t much help. Her local knowledge got them to their destination in no time at all. True story but it seems somehow fitting.

To go back to ear-learning. You can use it for different purposes. For one, it will give you insights in stylistic elements that, in most cases, will be wholly absent from notation. Which is really indispensable if you’re out to learn music (as opposed to merely lifting a single tune) so there’s immense benefit there. Which is not trying to make a point against notation but rather one in favour of using your ears more.

In fact, just now, while writing, I was listening to a few recordings from the seventies of old, now long dead, Clare whistle players. They gave me a lot more than notes. They gave me music.

26

Think of the guy who lives in an area with no streetlights. One heavily overcast winters night, after the mate who had given him a lift to a session had dropped him off at the end of the lane, he discovered he had forgotten his torch. He noticed the sound of the stream just before the bend, the wind in the tree at the junction, how the sound of his feet changed as he came alongside a wall rather than a hedge. Things he would not normally have paid much attention to.

27

The ear-learning thing was something I had to acquire when I started playing ITM seriously, and especially when I started attending sessions.

I came from the Highland pipe scene, where it’s all about written music. “What book is that in?” is the common phrase a Highland piper will say when he hears a tune he likes. Some Highland pipe albums have the source book of each tune notated in the track listing.

Pipe bands learn their new tunes by sitting around a table with their practice chanters, passing out sheet music, and going over the music slowly and labouriously (sometimes phrase by phrase, or even bar by bar). Of course when pipe bands play there’s no sheet music so the goal is to “have the tunes off” as quickly as possible; but it all starts with sheet music. It may take weeks to get the tunes up to speed on the practice chanters, more weeks to get the tunes “up on the pipes” without sheet music.

So it was amazing when I started going to ITM sessions and heard musicians, when hearing a tune they had never heard before, be playing it up to speed by the session group’s 2nd or 3rd playing of it.

I eventually got to that point myself. The breakthrough was when I realized that traditional Irish reels and jigs aren’t through-composed but are assembled from stock traditional motifs or phrases, building blocks one might call them, sort of like DNA.

Once one has all these building blocks under one’s fingers, when hearing a new tune it’s not as if you have to remember a unique string of notes, but only remember which of the familiar building blocks to use, and in what order. This makes learning tunes far faster and easier.

When I hear a new reel or jig the first thing my ear grabs is where the rolls are, which is where the melody parks on a note for a bit. Then I’ll hear the arpeggios, scalar runs, the “rocking” phrases, and the stepladder things (I don’t have a name for them, things where the tune goes CABGAF# and so forth). Those things, pretty much, constitute the sum total of most traditional reels and jigs.

So say I’m hearing a jig for the first time. In the first part I hear a roll on E, then a roll on B, then a roll on E, then a downward arpeggio. I’ve only had to recognize the placement of three rolls and one arpeggio to learn the first phrase of the jig! Rather than having to learn twelve individual notes, as I would if I imagined the jig as being a through-composed string of eighthnotes.

-roll on low E
-roll on B
-roll on low E
-descending D Major arpeggio A F# D

and Bob’s your Uncle, the first phrase of the jig, only four elements.

28

and Bob’s your Uncle, the first phrase of the jig,

I suppose we could argue about whether you have two bar or a whole musical phrase there and that would probably touch on something I referred to above.

My own suggestion would be to break up a tune into it’s (musical) phrases rather than the more mechanistic approach of thinking in ‘arpeggios and runs’. But I realise that is probably a discussion beyond the scope of the present thread so let’s leave it there for now.


Just for the sake of argument I put a little recording below. It’s a recording from the nineteen sixties or early seventies from a man who lived just over a mile down the road from where I am writing this, Mickey Cleary. Like many of the older Irish players he was a quite shy man and rarely played in public but he had a drawer full of old C whistles and loved to play a few of the old tunes. He died six years ago.

There’s quite a lot in this recording that wouldn’t come out if you went to a notation of the tunes played (The Green Mountain and Speed the Plough (or O’Keeffe’s Plough, to distinguish it from the Scottish Speed the Plough)) and learned the tune from that.


Two reels on whistle

29

As a new player I read with interest many of the comments on this thread. I agree with many and disagree with others. @Bogman (Peter?), I use slow down software - it is a huge help when learning tunes by ear when you’re a new player. It’s hard to figure out, at speed, just what people are doing - slow down software helps big style. I’ve learnt many Peatbog tunes that way (but I can’t play them perfectly…I’m too new). But, I will agree that playing along to music and learning by ear is the best way to learn.

I play guitar, have done for 30 years, and I cannot read music and find tab a pain in the butt!!! Same with whistle tab and sheet music (which I’m now starting to pick up and learn!!! :open_mouth: ). Reading the sheet stuff gives one and idea of the melody, but then when I listen to the tune and hear the intricacies I often wonder what the relation is between the sheet and what is being played (I don’t go to sessions - I’m talking recorded music here). But maybe that’s because I’m so new to whistles.

What I will say, from a noobie’s point of view, is that Sheet, Tab and Slow down all help in the learning process. But, what I am finding is that as I get better (if I AM getting better) is that playing by ear is best.

Rich

30

In my opinion thinking of Irish reels and jigs as being cobbled together from traditional motifs isn’t “mechanistic” but simply the obvious reality.

I would guess that most people, when learning a jig or reel on the fly at full speed, are doing the same thing whether they realize it or not.

If a tune goes G B d the fingers and ear immediately recognizes this as a package, an entity, whether or not the person has the verbiage “rising G Major triad” in their vocabulary. A triad it is! Whether or not you happen to know the word, your ear and fingers know the concept.

And the point is that your fingers and ear will immediately be able to copy the G B d phrase, far faster than if your brain had to remember each note as an individual isolated note (“first it’s a G… then it’s a B… then it’s a d…”) At a session you don’t have time for this labourious note-by-note approach.

So if a jig goes D F# A, D F# A, E G B, E G B your brain only has to recognize two elements, each repeated, not twelve isolated individual notes. Quicker for the ear to pick up two things than twelve! But I’m just stating the obvious. (I would hear the chords, the triads, D Major then E minor… but whether or not you have that verbiage the ear knows it.)

The ear and brain and fingers are continuously recognizing familiar patterns and these speed the learning process.

It’s the same way we hear speech. We might think that we hear every individual word but many studies have shown that we only hear around half of the words being said… the speech we perceive is largely created in our brain, which recognizes patterns (grammar) and our implied intention of the speaker, and fills in all the missing bits.

31

I suspect there some ‘fatigue’ regarding giving advice on this subject since it comes up so often.
There is more in this discussion https://forums.chiffandfipple.com/t/learning-by-ear/83265/1

I am not an expert and don’t have anything constructive to say other than what I said then

I see what pancelticpiper is saying, but I think’s its applicability depends on where one is starting. When I started I wouldn’t have recognised an arpeggio unless it had a label on it. I used those simple tunes to ‘find my way around’ the whistle. Pentatonic tunes, then filling the gaps in the scale with single octave tunes, some tunes that used the same notes but came ‘home’ to different notes etc.

If I had known and recognized arpeggios etc would it have been like hearing a phrase in a foreign language and repeating it back using components from my own language that I though I recognized but was not used to using in that combination ?

32

In my opinion thinking of Irish reels and jigs as being cobbled together from traditional motifs isn’t “mechanistic” but simply the obvious reality.

I would guess that most people, when learning a jig or reel on the fly at full speed, are doing the same thing whether they realize it or not.

And the point is that your fingers and ear will immediately be able to copy the G B d phrase, far faster than if your brain had to remember each note as an individual isolated note (“first it’s a G… then it’s a B… then it’s a d…”) At a session you don’t have time for this labourious note-by-note approach.

So if a jig goes D F# A, D F# A, E G B, E G B your brain only has tIf a tune goes G B d the fingers and ear immediately recognizes this as a package, an entity, whether or not the person has the verbiage “rising G Major triad” in their vocabulary. A triad it is! Whether or not you happen to know the word, your ear and fingers know the concept.o recognize two elements, each repeated, not twelve isolated individual notes.

Quicker for the ear to pick up two things than twelve! But I’m just stating the obvious. (I would hear the chords, the triads, D Major then E minor… but whether or not you have that verbiage the ear knows it.)

Well, I think our opinions differ here.


I can fully understand your way of thinking but I think there are pitfalls there that distract anyone approaching tunes that way from the phrase structure of the tunes.

I know how my own thinking developed from playing say, the Lark in the Morning as moving through D and G chords AFA AFA BGB BdB. Listening to good players though made me realise that was not what they were doing their bulding blocks were somehow different and my own playing not quite right. They went AFA A FA BGB B for their first phrase (which itself is made up of two smaller ‘blocks’) with their second phrase starting dB …etc.

Which works a lot nicer. Séamus Ennis’ talk and demonstration at the first Willie week, where he first played the Munster Buttermilk as d2 e fdB d2 e fd, and called it rolling off the tune, like a good typist typing and then demonstrating ‘how the tune really does it’ : d2 e f dB d2 e f … solidified for me that way of thinking for me.

But again, I think this is a bit outside the remit of this conversation and it’s too nice a day to pursue this line much further.

33

I have not been to chiff and fipple in a long time. Our Irish session disappeared (or perhaps became less open) so I have been playing American old-time instead (on the fiddle.) I only play my whistle alone (and my flute almost never) and usually only old-time music now since I never have any Irish music in my head anymore.

Anyway, it has been through old-time that I have learned how to learn by ear. Since I couldn’t really play the fiddle anyway, and since in my mind the fiddle doesn’t have any notes on it anyway, it had to be all by ear or nothing. Thankfully, American old-time is easy for me probably like how Irish is probably easy for the Irish. I mean, the music is familiar even if I have never heard the tune before in my life. Predictable. I know how it’s probably going to go even before I’ve heard the whole tune. Heck, half the time I can predict the B part before I’ve heard it. There aren’t as many notes as Irish, either, which really helps. Further what really helps is that the culture of the jam that I play in is that you are expected to pick tunes up on the fly, beginners and experts alike. There’s no concept of noodling. Nobody looks at you harshly when you are trying to figure out a new tune in the jam. If anything, I’ve gotten the most grief when I’ve sat out tunes I couldn’t figure out. It’s been amazing and wonderful.

Oh, another thing is I will hear the tunes at the jam and I can go home and even without a recording I can often work them out and get the tricky parts just from memory. It’s like my memory works a lot better now that I have learned how to learn by ear. It used to be that sure I could memorize a tune and hear it in my memory but if I tried to play it, the tune would vanish out of my head. Now I can hear it, remember it and learn it from my memory now.

I only wish I could play my whistle in the group (a few people like it but a few people think only strings should be allowed.)

Anyway, I forget if there was a question or something in this thread, but I would offer that perhaps another genre of music would be easier to learn to learn by ear. I feel now that I could probably learn Irish by ear so much easier than in the past. I just need to hear more Irish and get the tunes in my head.

34

I have run into the “string players only” when it comes to old-time American a number of times. Fifty years ago I was at the Weiser, Idaho Old-Time Fiddler’s Festival as a banjo player. One old fiddler there had some photos of bands he had played in in the early 1900’s. Besides the usual banjos, fiddles and guitars there were flute and concertina players in the photos. He said any instrument that could play the music was welcome in the old days. He remembered the flute player in one band also used to play whistle at times as well. The flute player was from Ireland, but couldn’t find other ITM musicians so he took up playing for dances using the music of his new home. I have sat in a number of times in square dance bands and other old-time groups with low and high whistles and because I knew the tunes, I could play most of what was being played. Most liked it. Particularly bluegrass players think American music is all string band stuff. Historically this is just not true. One hot fiddler thought he would throw me a curve and started playing Col. Frazier. I had just worked on that tune and could keep up with his blistering pace. He was floored because he was sure I couldn’t play it or keep up with him.