Last year I joined a low-key Irish band, and have recently decided to purchase an Irish flute.
I was quite impressed with the mandolin and concertina player- after deciding on a set of 3 reels, they’ll have them all memorized after about two weeks. I’ve played tin whistle for 12-ish years, but have never been able to successfully memorize more than “The Butterfly”. That being said, I would like to know if there is a certain method I can adopt with the Irish flute to aid in memorization?
FWIW, I put my sheet music into a program ‘MuseScore’, and can slow it down/speed it up. I’ll normally play jigs very slowly until I fail to mess up any notes, then slowly ramp up the BPMs. I’ve tried just repeating measures over and over again then move on, but usually by the last repeat I’ve forgotten how the tune starts!
Have you tried learning by ear? Use a slow down program (such as the great slow downer) and listen and play sections over and over until you’ve got it? That’s a great way to learn tunes, and maybe that’d work better for you.
Also listening to the tune over and over, until you can’t get it out of your head even when it’s not playing really aides in learning - with music or by ear.
Tunes have to be a part of you to really know them well.
The ‘ideal’ is to have such command of your instrument that as you ‘hear’ the tune you can execute the notes. Traditionally the tunes were taught on a one-on-one basis. The teacher would play the first phrase, and the student would attempt to play the phrase back. And so it would go.’ Another way, for the ‘paper-trained’, will be to play the tune over and over along with slowdowner software, occasionally glancing away from the paper. Good Luck.
I second Jayhawk’s advice, which is advice that I have heard many trad musicians give over the years: The best way to learn a tune is to have it in your head–be able to hum the tune–before ever picking up the instrument. For example, find a recording of the tune you want to learn, and then listen to it over and over again (in your car, as you are walking to work, as you are exercising, etc.) until you have it in your head. Then pick up your whistle and try to connect what you already know (i.e. the tune) with your fingers. John Skelton, for example, frequently emphasizes this and I have found that it works well for me.
A sort of corollary to that suggestion is that with this music, the more you listen to the music (and it doesn’t need to be recordings of players of the instrument you play), the better off you are going to be in terms of progress. Tunes will find a way of working themselves into your head, whether or not you are consciously trying to learn them; and if you decide to learn one of those tunes at some point, you will be ahead of the game.
If you struggle to memorise tunes it’s probably because they’re not in your head, as others have said you should be able the play them in your head or you don’t actually know them at all. A good idea is to get two or three recordings by respected players of each tune, either from your CD collection or buy them from itunes (or wherever), put them in a digital playlist or compile a CD , and them listen to it whenever you’re travelling on whenever you’ve got otherwise wasted time. If you try and listen closely you’ll find they’ll start to stick in your head. Searching for common tunes by name in itunes, for example, will usually come up with quite a few matches. You obviously get the bonus of whatever tunes are in each set.
I have found that if I listen to a tune over and over again in the background, pieces of the tune will stick in my head very well. What won’t stick is what order those pieces go in. In interesting tunes, a motive may come back several times, but not always in the same place, and not always in the same form. To memorize these tunes, I find I have to produce the tune (playing it or singing it to myself) slowly and correctly, over and over. It’s easier with a song, because a song is more interesting to sing to yourself.
Another approach I’ve found useful is to consciously look for the patterns in the tune.
Typically there will be phrases repeated, either directly or with minor changes, within the tune. This cuts down on the total “volume” that needs to be learned.
A second aspect is that there are a number of sub-patterns that show up across many tunes (e.g. the A-B-c-A or D-E-F-D series or chordal arpeggios). A friend refers to these as the Lego blocks of Irish music. As you become more familiar with the genre, these blocks and patterns begin to jump out and the vast amount of twiddly-diddly-dees begin to resolve into easily recognizable (and remembered) chunks. It does get easier over time.
If you can figure out the logical structure of the tune, that reduces the size of the memorization problem dramatically. For example, a lot of tune have an A part and a B part. When the tune is played it might involve playing the A part twice and then the B part twice. Trying to memorize the entire tune as a sequence is twice as hard as learning just the A part and B part. And initially, you can just focus on the A part until you have it.
Players often introduce some minor variations when they repeat a part, but if you can recognize these as examples of common substitutions of small patterns of notes, all of which are legitimate alternatives, you can see that it still is the A part even if its played slightly differently the second time through.
There is actually lots of structure in these tunes when you look for it, and I think that is one of the secrets to learning them, and this is true regardless of whether they are learned by ear or from paper. I strongly favor learning by ear, but as I’m learning a tune I often write it out too, because this helps me to recognize and understand the structure.
The key or mode of a tune is another way of cutting down the complexity. It lets you know which notes are legitimate candidates. There are occasional exceptions, of course, but these are often few and far between and easy to remember.
I don’t think any of this advice contradicts the statements above about needing to get the tune firmly embedded in your head. In fact, adding understanding of the structure makes it easier to keep it in your head and to recognize different variations of the same tune.
Wow, you guys have overwhelmed me with your responses! Thank you so very much. I will take each and every suggestion to heart, and look forward to updating you once my newly purchased flute arrives.
Rather than phrase-by-phrase, I learn tunes best by hearing an entire part repeatedly and playing along with it.
I can learn by listening to the entire tune repeatedly, but I seem to learn faster by learning one part at a time.
I pick out the patterns. The first thing I grab onto are the long rolls, because a roll means that the melody parks on a note for an entire beat in a jig and 3/4 of a beat in a reel.
Also picked out early are arpeggios and scalar runs (a scalar run can be in a diatonic scale or a “gap” scale).
It saves much time, in picking out a tune by ear, if you right away identify 1) the scale that’s used and 2) the chord changes which are implied.
I’ve seen people play impossibly wrong notes as they try to pick out a tune, notes that aren’t present in the scale the entire tune is in, for example.
For many tunes, once I have the long rolls, the arpeggios, and the scalar runs down I have all or nearly all of the tune, the only things missing being linking notes here and there. These linking notes might vary from player to player (who are otherwise playing the tune the same) or be left out altogether when a fluteplayer takes a breath.
If you think about it, it’s far easier to memorise a couple dozen patterns than a string of hundreds of notes. Once you have a number of traditional patterns under your fingers, you can pick out and learn tunes much more quickly.
I grew up with dots playing various instruments, mostly classical and in band. I find it easy enough to play something by ear that I know really well, but I find it really tough to learn a song line by line from ear on the fly. For the most part, I deliberately avoid dots for learning ITM now, though I will sometimes cheat a bit to get the skeleton of a tune. For me the best way is to separate the learning of the tune from the playing of the tune…
I pick a version of the tune I like and put it into my listening rotation.
When I can hum/whistle the entire tune and separate ornamentation from the skeleton, then I start learning it on flute or whistle
I picked up a small Moleskine pocket book with music staff and then transcribe out the tune, starting at the back of the book and moving forward. When I can hear the tune, whistle the tune, play the tune, and write the tune, then I have it in my head…
I find notating the music is useful for writing down alternative parts, putting in breathing locations etc.
I have an table of contents at the front of the book, with the song name and version, and the first bar or two scribbled down. I find this helpful to remember the connection between the tune, the version, and how to start the pesky thing!
The hardest part in the whole process is remembering the link between the name and the tune so I can start it off…
As others have said, slowdowner software is a powerful tool, especially when one is trying to sort out specific ornamentation.
I had this problem at first. Here’s a few observations I’ve made. Sorry if this is repeating what others have said. When many say the same thing, that might be worth noting.
Learning from sheet music seems to develop your skills in a different part of the brain. A part that relies on the visual too much. Having that sheet music in front of you is like trying to learn how to swim in a pool while constantly holding on to the side of the pool. You’ll only get so far. I’d recommend you get away from sheet music as quickly as you can. Some people like to use it at first, when they first are learning a tune. But you want to move to another way of storing that tune in your head. You’ll find that when you start to get it, it will come from a different place in your head. And then you’ll know that you are by-passing that visual crutch.
I’ve found a tremendous help is to learn the hum a tune. For me, if I can’t hum it, I can’t play it well on an instrument (flute, anything else).
The more you do this, the easier it will get. People used to tell me this all the time, and for several years, I didn’t believe them. Then it happened. It WILL get easier for you as you do it.
Whenever I’ve taught whistle I’ve always insisted that students learn to lilt or hum a tune in its entirety before beginning to play it on the whistle. Once it’s in the head/heart it’s pretty simple to transfer it over to the whistle.
I don’t, really, but if I did I would have to disagree with your approach above, because to me long rolls ARE the skeleton, or a large part of it, anyhow. Long rolls are the first bones I pick out, and much of the later stuff in put on them.
I’ve given this very simple example in the past, but here goes.
I hear the first part of a jig for the first time. My immediate awareness is of the rolls:
Agreed, I think I’ve been getting stuck on trying to play as similar to the recording as possible (the great slowdowner worked perfect). As I’ve been playing by ‘ear’, I’ve been trying to focus on getting the key elements down, like the above arpeggios and scales, then trying to get the rolls. Rolls seem to be my downfall.
*edit - I just wanted to say that I spent the last 3 days listening to the same song and humming as much as possible. (Also, did you know you can slow down tunes right in YouTube now?) So tonight I just sat down with my whistle and started playing the tune as far as I could remember it, peeked at the music for the first 3 bars but then was able to recall the whole thing from memory after that.
So thank you guys SOO Much for the help and encouragement, I think i’ll be using this method from now on!
I would forget everything that’s been said here, until:
You can play one tune by ear- something silly like Happy Birthday, Three Blind Mice, or My Bonnie, Twinkle Twinkle…
You can play tunes that are in your head without recourse to the tadpoles.
Then pick a simple tune you have to learn and memorize the first phrase. Just a bar or two. Then go on to the next phrase, after you have the first phrase in your head, and then put the two together, and so on. Play slowly and deliberately.
Focus your learning to get a little bit at a time. That’s how the best players do it.
Stop messing around with programs on the net and designing learning tools. It’s a waste of time.
There is no shortcut, and no substitute for time on the instrument.
Slow downers are great.
(BTW: do you know the difference between a “song” and a “tune?”)
Apparently indiechixor, it would seem that there is no " right " or " wrong " way to memorizing tunes. Only the method which helps you best as an individual, and from the look of things there are plenty of them to select from. This has been an insightful and interesting thread. It looks as though the ways in which we process and retain information are as varied as we are. I’m pleased you popped the question, and I’m sure you’ll tailor one to fit your needs.