I have a question for those of you who believe it is best to learn to play by ear instead of music notation…Don’t you end
up learning the song incorrectly because the person you copied has copied someone else
and they have copied someone else??? I learned my first few tunes this way, and now when I run into them in that big yellow
O’Neill book, I see that I play them WRONG,
as I have not heard correctly, or the person that I copied has not played it correctly.
I think it is fine after you KNOW the tune
to hear another play it so that the grace notes can be added in an attractive place,
but just to try to copy Kesh jig even, has
not worked out well for me.
So, justify your reasons, please! Thanks,
Lolly
There are a few things I have to say on this. The first one is that for those who think that it is best to read music you always need to check your sources. If you are getting music from an annonymous internet source, you have no assurance of quality. In any situation. These sources will give you the same troubles as learning by ear.
But something much more important that you should realize is that these are traditional pieces, which means that even the most generally accepted and approved of versions of songs may not actually be what was intended by the author. So you didn’t really learn it “wrong” you just learned a different (and maybe less accepted) arrangement of it. When you play traditional music you are often confronted with differented versions of pieces and you just have to decide which you like better.
My two cents,
Seth
[ This Message was edited by: Seth on 2002-05-06 14:47 ]
Seth got it. There is no right or wrong version, mainly popular versions. O’Neill’s has been criticized for having “mistakes.” I’ve been known to mix and match bits of tune versions to suit myself, so beware if you learn anything from me. Sometimes, I use different versions to add variation on the repeat. And if the notes go below the bottom note of the whistle, well, I’ll just play what pleases me. hmph. 
Tony
Hi, Those were both real good answers, and I was hoping Tony would be one to reply.
It also makes me feel a bit better.
When my band-boss plays something on the fiddle or the harp and expects me to learn the song, it is so often not the correct
way, and I have such trouble with knowing
which harp note is the actual tune; so I really try to find a printed version to at
least give me a clue in the places that he
blobs together or plays so softly that I haven’t a chance to get the tune, ha ha
So, now, even if it isn’t “correct” at least
I can say, like Tony does, that I did it that
way on purpose. (ha ha)
Lolly
…and How to you think O’Neil"s was written? The Cheif would go around Chicago with his nephew to hear different Irish musicians and his nephew would transcribe the tunes they hear. So all of O’Neil’s is music learnt by ear.
Joe
I’ve had this very thought myself about ‘ear learning’. While I agree with some of the answers here (to parahprase: no right or wrong versions, only different versions which have split due to the ‘folk tradiiton’ nature), there’s another side to that question.
Ponder this: What happens when your source for a tune happens to be someone who plays it badly? I’ve run into the specific situation where a musician has brought tunes to session, but being somewhat of a newbie, whole sections of the tune were mangled. While we can be polite or politically correct and say these are “uncommon variations”, I think it’d be more accurate to say that they just were incorrect, or had mistakes. I think it was StevieJ (my apologies if it wasn’t) who caused a bit of controversy by stating that clips and snips was not the place for one to go to LEARN tunes…and while there are some real gems on that site, there are also some real dogs. As a practicing, comparitive, and community tool, I think it’s great..I wouldn’t necessarily use it indiscriminately as a learning tool, however (though, as I said, there are some submissiosn there that are certainly worthy of careful consideration).
When I’ve run into that kind of situation: where I doubt my source (be it printed or by ear), then I turn to more than one source. I have some luxuries, such as many tune/song books and CDs. But I also use the internet a great deal. I try to find some kind of ‘weight of consensus’..how many musicians play a tune a certain way, for instance.
I’ve taken several martial arts classes in my life, and I always pretend to be a ‘newbie’ when signing up, because I want to experience the class without bias. While shopping around, I’ve heard seveal times “There is no best martial art..only different arts and artists”. While this is certainly true in a philosophical sense, there are certainly BAD martial arts classes out there. And just like with bad martial arts classes, if you think you’re getting a stinker version of a tune, you’ll have to do a little digging to find one more agreeable.
Greg
Disclaimer: This by no means that every tune on my archive has been painstakenly pored over, though I have done exactly that with some of them.. There’s currently over 600 there, and even if I only spent a day per tune, it’d take the better part of 2 years to do that. I only hope I end up being one of a multitude of useful resources out there for musicians.
Any Story/tune, passed on orally or aurally will change…that in my opinion is one of the great strengths of traditional music, it becomes personal to each individual…good or not so good, it’s a reflection of that persons developement.
Thats not to say I learn all tunes by ear (I find it difficult) but like Tony says even learning the dots leaves plenty of room to play your own thing.
Dave.
Edit…I must learn to spell!!
[ This Message was edited by: DaveAuty on 2002-05-06 18:29 ]
On 2002-05-06 17:50, Wandering_Whistler wrote:
I think it was StevieJ (my apologies if it wasn’t) who caused a bit of controversy by stating that clips and snips was not the place for one to go to LEARN tunes…
I did indeed say something very much like that Greg, and although I was commenting on someone recommending “Nate’s sounds of the Irish tinwhistle”, Clips and Snips got included too. But what bothered me was not so much the versions of tunes as the way they were played. My point was that if you want to learn an Irish traditional style, you can’t learn it from people who don’t have one.
You and others have made a lot of good points in this thread. I’d just add that, in addition to differentiating between good and not-so-good sources, over the years of listening and learning you gradually develop instincts for what is a good setting of a tune, and you become more and more confident of your own knowledge and tastes.
You come to recognize when people are straying beyond the bounds of the tradition - or maybe just beyond the bounds of your own taste - and refuse to follow. You find yourself saying, “Hmm, I don’t like that bit, I’m going to change it, or leave it aside”.
You might say: “I don’t feel that note belongs in this tune at all, and I’m not going to play it!” Or conversely “That player is taking outrageous liberties with that tune. But it’s magic, and I want to learn it.”
Regarding O’Neill’s - there are many settings in O’Neills that people consider faulty for various reasons, particularly because they differ from versions that are current today. But equally, many of these old “different/wrong” settings are great in their own right, and well worth resurrecting, or at least trying out.
When I was trying to find Si Beag Si Mor, I found several different versions, some of which were almost unrecognizable. I decided I liked the one one Greg’s site the best and went with that. I wondered why there were so many different ones; now I know; thanks everybody. And also thanks for the tip of using parts from different versions as variations.
~Kendra~ fly away with me on my whistle's wings
[ This Message was edited by: Kendra on 2002-05-06 21:52 ]
To add a little to the martial arts motif, I have found that learning tunes from the books is a really good way for me to practice technique.
In Aikido, we practice certain techniques/moves with the assumption that we’ll later forget them. (Or, more accurately, interalize them to such a degree that they cease to be an exact carbon copy of that particular move, and becomes a kind of natural movement.) The technique/move is used to teach a principle, a means to an end.
Seems to work the same way with the whistle, from my limited experience. Eventually, you internalize the cuts, taps, rolls, slurs and all that other nifty Irish-sounding whistle-lingo, and whamo, suddenly you can follow what some other whistle player is doing. So if you’re still new to the whistle, and don’t know anyone else, you can always improve by trying out tunes in a book. Or maybe not. I’m the new guy. I’ll be quiet now.
There are few tunes in the ABC tunefinder that don’t have about 10 variations, all of which sound okay. The two bottom lines are: (1) Do YOU like what you’re playing? I’ve altered a note or two in some tunes to suit my abilities and tastes and (2) Is what you’re playing in the ballpark for session purposes? If what you’re playing is so heavily morphed that noone recognizes it, or cannot play along, the purpose if lost in a session. Other than that…go for it!!!
At the Sunday Porterhouse session we had up to five fiddles playing at any time, and rarely were any two playing a tune exactly the same.
I like the way the fiddles, flutes and whistles weave in and out and create a tapestry of the tune rather than a thread.
Whether they do this by previous agreement, accident, or by musician’s telepathy, or what, I have yet to discover, but it sounds wonderful.
I’m told that session musicians basically play what they know, and listen to the other musicians, and on the repeats take bits from what other musicians did, so when it’s working really well they’ll converge towards a common tune (or at least change notes in the setting so they harmonize rather than clash) …
In addition to the notes, of course, there’s the ornaments and phrasing, adding more layers of divergence/commonality… and you could easily have one player on a dotted quarter, one player on a long roll, and one player on three eighth notes and have it still sound good.
Of course, some-times the tune doesn’t converge, but maybe sounds good anyway, or maybe just never quite comes together, or maybe it comes together on the first run and then ornaments and phrasing get shuffled around as the tune is ‘played with’ as well as ‘played’ …
I’m pretty much repeating what I’ve heard better musicians than me say, but I can kinda hear these dynamics when I’m listening in. (I’m not really ready to sit in on sessions yet, unless you count slow sessions and kitchen sessions 
)
–Chris