Is learning by ear at speed in a session something that can be learned, or is it one of those things some people are better at and some people aren't? Or both? There was a very kind fiddler last night who had me sit next to him as he tried to show me how to learn tunes as they were being played, and he let me have a good look at his left hand, pared the tune down to just the outline notes, told me the main notes---it really was very cool and interesting---but I was pretty hopeless at it. At one point I was trying to pick up this very simple hornpipe and was totally perplexed until he happened to mentioned the name of it and I realized I knew that tune, and then I could play it---but I hadn't recognized it before when I was so focused on just the notes. It was weird! I wish I were better at this, because I know it's such a great opportunity when you have someone sitting right there trying to show you how, but I can't seem to get the hang of it. I learn by ear fine at home when I can listen to phrases repeatedly, but in a live situation it's a different story. Will it come eventually if I keep trying? Anyone have any thoughts about how this works?
It will come eventually, You'll develop a wider collection of tune-bits in your ears and fingers, and you'll recognize them faster. , and your on-the-spot memory of how the new tune is put together will improve. Give it time
Really needs time and lots of listening. Even though every tune is different, there are some structures and such they all have in common. You will come to a point where you know the outline of a tune after one time, can lilt the melody after two times and play it after three times. I have seen people doing this, and I can do it, too, at least with easier tunes. A year ago I didn't even dare to hope to be able to do things like that somewhen. Lots of listening and practising is the key.
I have to listen to the tune over and over to get it in my head before I can learn a tune by ear. I don't think I could learn a tune just by hearing it played once. Lots of tunes I've learned by listening to my sister and dad play before I could read sheet music.
To pick up tunes on the fly, you need two things: (1) "mastery" of your instrument, and (2) total intimacy with the genre of music.
By mastery here I mean no hesitation in playing the notes you hear in your head. Your body and the instrument work as one to instantly make the sounds you want to make. This can be really frustrating for people fairly new to an instrument--it takes some years to develop, and it goes beyond the more basic kinesthetic or muscle memory approach of "putting a finger here to make this note." Realize that if you're concentrating hard just to play tunes you actually know at session speed, it won't be easy at all to pick up an unfamiliar tune at the same speed.
The second part is easier to acquire--just listen to a lot of this music. Most people are already good at learning by ear, on the fly. Think about it--using our own voices, we all learned to sing along to Happy Birthday, national anthems, holiday songs, and the Top 40 off the radio. In fact, most of us have learned hundreds of tunes and songs this way without paying much attention to how we did it.
When listening to Irish trad music with the goal of improving your ear learning skills, don't just let the whole tune go by all at once. Try to hear it unfold one phrase at a time. Listen to the intervals of the notes--how they relate to their immediate neighbors, and also how they relate back to the dominant or home note of the tune.
Also listen for repeated phrases and bits that sound similar but just occur in different ranges of the scale. Take the jig, Lilting Banshee for an easy example. It starts with EAA EAA.... and later goes eAA eAA. That's the same phrase, with the "E" played an octave higher. That sort of thing is super common in this music, and the more you keep your ears open, the more you'll find repeated, inverted, key/mode shifting motifs like this.
Of course, the more tunes you know, the more building blocks of this music you'll have already under your fingers, so it gets easier over time.
Kennedy, do keep sitting next to that fiddler--it can help a lot if someone can tell you the key/mode, starting note, etc., and you'll soon be sussing these things out on your own. It doesn't hurt to glance at another player's fingers to figure out some of the same information. But ultimately, picking up tunes on the fly is all about trusting your ears. Our local session has several players who are exceptionally good at this, and it's a kick to play with them.
Ok, Heres an exercise. The idea is to relate the notes you hear to the mechanics of putting your fingers down. Of course this is best learnt by copying the sounds of a tune bar by bar, by ear. the trad method with a teacher.
So try and picture in your mind the phrases of a tune on your instrument, slightly moving your fingers. this is without the instrument. sing to yourself a phrase and picture the positions of your fingers in your mind.
If you can do this from say a tape made of a tune you know, bar by bar, you will start to train yourself to recognise the sound/phrases in your minds eye, and fingers.
You are joining the sounds you hear, to your fingers. eventually you will recognise patterns by ear and be able to picture them as notes on your instrument. start with one note at a time perhaps, hear a note, find it on the instrument, picture this position in your minds eye.
sorry a scrappy attempt at describing this. hope you can make some sense from it.
Like Kess, I've picked up a handful of marches and airs in real time. I've figured out some jigs by osmosis (a few months ago, I had a tune in my head, so I picked up the fiddle and transcribed it. I looked it up, and found it pretty quickly: Tripping Up the Stairs.) I can't learn reels at 120 bpm, but that's not surprising, because I can't *play* reels at 120 bpm. (Well, not entirely true: there are a handful that I can get through at that speed. But they sound immeasurably better when I slow them down to 90 bpm or so.) I have, however, picked up some faster tunes in real time - over the course of several weeks or months of hearing them every other week or so, or more.
The way I see it, there are two components governing our facility in learning by ear: familiarity with music in general and with The Music in particular, and familiarity with our instruments. I'm reasonably solid on the former compared to others who've been playing only as long as I have (though I'm learning more every day, and I have so far to go), but I feel like I've just started getting acquainted with my fiddle and bow.
Knowing about music, I think, is half of what allows more experienced players to pick up tunes after hearing them through a few times: even if they haven't played some particular tune before, or even if they've never heard it, they're familiar with the patterns in the tunes. People are picking up *music* in real time - they're not picking up random sequences of notes in real time. There are only so many endings of skippy Dmaj jigs, for instance, and if an experienced listener has just heard the first 7 bars of a new skippy Dmaj jig, they don't need to expend much mental energy figuring out what the 8th sounds like. If they've already got a few hundred tunes in their repertoire, that 8th bar is probably even inscribed somewhere in muscle memory, so they can play it without thinking, too, leaving the cerebral cortex free to fill in the off-beats and get the rest of the tune. That's where familiarity with the instrument comes in: a few months on the fiddle (after 8-10 years of listening to ITM) I could often lilt a session tune that wasn't yet in my repertoire, but my fingers and bow couldn't move fast enough for me to play it at speed on my first attempt. A year and change later, I'm slightly closer to that goal.
The fiddler who gave you the outline notes had the right idea, but I find that I tend to get more confused when someone's giving me information in that form, and that when I figure out outline notes and patterns on my own, I can hold onto the tune better. (Sometimes my teacher will tell me the fingering for a tricky phrase, and I'll ask him to just play it through a few times until I have it. That way I'm translating music into fingerings, rather than the other way around - which means that I'm thinking about music.) I think you identified the cause of your confusion, kennedy, when you said that being too focused on the notes was what got in the way of learning the tune. As you know, you have a lot of freedom to vary notes in this kind of music while still preserving the identity of the tune, which is both why I love ITM and why I find it so frustrating at times. It's a matter of figuring out what bits of the tune are essential to its identity.
When I try to figure out a tune at a session (and I never get it, not in long-term memory anyway, after just hearing it through three times), the first thing I'll do is make a note of the time signature, which isn't hard. Next, I'll figure out the key, which is slightly harder but still not that difficult. I don't have perfect pitch (though my ear is good enough that my imperfect intonation on fiddle is driving me batty - but that's another post), but very few different keys come up very often. If a tune's in a major key, I'll try D, and if that doesn't work, I'll test out G, and finally I'll check out A. If it's none of those, I'll give up on that tune for the time being, because I'm just not that experienced playing in other keys, so I don't think I'll be able to pick one up very well. The key gives a pretty good idea of which notes are going to come up most often. It's a pretty safe bet that a Dmaj tune won't have any Cnat's in it, save accidentals, which tend to stick out. Even more usefully for picking out melodies at speed: I can't always tell the difference between an F# and a G (or even a major third and a perfect fourth) at 90+bpm, but if I'm in Dmaj, F#'s are a lot more likely than G's to fall on the beats, which narrows down my guesses of notes and speeds up the process of finding the outline notes.
Last month, I finally finished figuring out a reel that I'd started to pick up back in May. When I heard it at my session, I had an idea in my head of what it sounded like, so I recorded myself playing it (at 70 bpm or so, and it still sounded rushed and horrible) just so I'd have it on hand. When I finally got the "right" version (that is, the one that everyone at the session plays!), I transcribed my initial attempt and my corrected version, just to compare. *Not a single bar* in the "right" version matched the corresponding one in the old one, but my initial attempt was recognizable as a variation. And some of the corrections were ones that I figured out, not by actively listening to the tune, but just by assimiliating what I'd learned about Irish music. My initial version, for instance, contained the bars [B4 B2 C2 | B4], which I later correctly refined to [BE 3(EEE) BE CE| BE 3(EEE)], even though I couldn't hear those triplets at the session. That refinement wasn't something I was able to pick up at speed; it was an inference I was able to make based on what I knew of Irish music. Were I more experienced with my fiddle, I might have been able to insert those triplets into the tune straightaway, at speed.
I can play little bits of tunes by ear on the fly, so I do that in hopes it'll help my ear learn. So I'll sit through a tune, my fingers at the ready for the little parts I can play.
This is a good question and I've been pondering what the secret to it is. It's obvious it takes mastery but I do suspect there's something else as well. But I'm not able to articulate it and even less capable of doing it. I have to be happy to be mediocre.
sbhikes, take heart--there is no "secret" that some people have and others don't. If you can hear, then you can learn tunes by ear, and eventually learn to do it on the fly, even at session speeds.
And I can prove that you already learn music by ear just fine. (Pardon me for people who've read this next bit before, but it works.)
If I type, "Oh Mandy, you came and you gave without taking," my guess is that you suddenly have a particular melody running through your mind's stereo system. Similarly, if I type "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas," another melody appears (hopefully drowning out "Oh Mandy").
So listen to enough Irish music, and sooner or later the same thing happens--your mind plays tunes all the time. And get completely acquainted with your instrument, and those tunes will spill out on it.
At some point, you'll know enough toonage and musical building blocks, and you'll be so adept at your instrument, you'll be able to pick up tunes on the fly. It really isn't any more complicated or magical than that. But it does take time and attentive listening and practice.
Regarding learning by ear being a learnable skill, and not some magical talent that some people are born with and that others will never acquire: I like to point out that every single person, save the 0.1% who are well and truly tone-deaf, learns to *sing* by ear. Even my classically-trained friends, whose technical abilities on their instruments far surpass mine, do not pick up most songs by sheet music (though some are quite adept at that as well). Even people with no voice training, people who sing only in showers (or not even) tend to feel comfortable enough with their voices that they don't need a visual representation of songs, or even slowed-down versions of them, in order to be able to hum or sing them passably. So I don't think that I'm being overly ambitious, as I hope only to eventually get as well acquainted with my fiddle as your average shower-singer is with his or her voice.
Mastery of the instrument—it figures it’s something like that. I’m a long way off from mastery! I’m starting to think that the speed issue is the big problem. It’s very true that it’s hard enough for me to play tunes I know at speed, let alone the ones I haven’t learned yet. Still, it would be nice to just pick up the outline of the tune, but maybe even that is too hard at this point.
Jig, I tried your exercise of mental playing, but got stuck right at the beginning because I didn’t have an opening note. I can hear lots of tunes in perfect detail in my head, but couldn’t ever tell you the starting note. Maybe that explains the difficulty with what you were saying about the mechanics of hearing the note and then putting your fingers down on the instrument to play---how do you know where to put your fingers if you don’t know what note you need? I have excellent relative pitch, can hear intervals easily, but my mental stereo plays at any key that happens to be running through my head at that moment. It’s kind of like a singer who starts a song and then brings it down a third because they started out too high. The only way I know what key anything is in is the way the notes fall on the fingerboard, not by the sound of the actual pitches. Does that make sense?
Maybe it's because I came to fiddling after being a singer, but after a year of playing it's really clear to me that if I can't lilt the tune, there's no way I'm going to be able to play it. I'm lucky enough to play in a very forgiving session, so I do have some room to noodle When a tune comes along I'm not familiar with (that would be most of them at this point...), or even one that I think I might recognize but haven't learned yet, I listen the first time through, try to lilt some bits softly the second time through, and if I feel like I've kind of got it, AND if it's being played at a speed it's conceivable I could join in at, I may try to play at least small parts of it the third time through. A year ago I was totally lost, now I can generally get a fair amount of a tune that's simple, slow and predictable. I also practice the lilting part in the car when I'm listening to music. I really agree that there are at least two distinct parts-one is getting the tune in my head, and the other is having enough mastery (and I use that term, at least in my case, very loosely) to translate the tune into motor planning, finding the notes on the fiddle, figuring out a bowing pattern, getting the tempo right, getting the rhythm right, blending with the instruments around me....or I just go back to softly lilting in the corner...
"The only way I know what key anything is in is the way the notes fall on the fingerboard, not by the sound of the actual pitches. Does that make sense?"
I've recently started trying to figure out keys of tunes without my instrument, by singing the tonic. I know my vocal range pretty well, and although I can't tell you instantaneously if a note played is a D or a G, but it feels different to me to sing a D versus a G. I'm getting better at it...I guess I'm developing a slow version of absolute pitch. (I can identify pitches, but it takes me a few seconds.)
Something that's helped me get keys faster: many, many tunes go down exactly to the open D. (Blimey whistlers, limiting us fiddlers that way.) A major key tune that ends on its lowest note is often in D, a minor key tune that dips right below its tonic tend to be in Emin, and a major key tune that goes a fair ways, but not nearly an octave, below its root is often in G, though not infrequently in A (but the A tunes often go only as low as the E on the D string).
Bear in mind that there's nothing wrong with working on learning tunes on the fly while you gradually learn to play your instrument. That's exactly what you should be doing. Just don't expect it to get easy until you're more at ease on your instrument.
Kennedy, in contrast to Jig's exercise, I usually walk my students through the opposite sequence--play a note on your fiddle and really listen to it. Because of the way a fiddle is built, and the way notes are played on it, every note sounds different. So listen deeply to those differences--how does the low A on the G string sound different from the low B on the same string? How does that A sound different from the open A string, or the A above that on the e string? How does the open A sound different from the A on the D string?
Also listen to how tunes in A tend to sound brighter than tunes in G, or D, and how tunes in F, Bb, and C are somehow "quieter." Part of what you'll hear is how the open strings and the fiddle itself resonate more in certain keys than others. With practice, you can learn to discern one key/mode from another within the first bar of a tune (until the tune wanders into some other key/mode).
In short, I think it's important to "burn" the sounds of your instrument into your brain to the point where then you *can* do what Jig suggests above. But most people need to hear the reference points (notes) on their instrument first, and often, and deeply.
yeah, we come to finding keys, or tone centers. I think my description was even poorer than i first thought!
Still, the idea is to start with identifying notes, identify the sound and where you find it on your instrument. Just like will says, learn to identify the tone from ear.
There are only a few keys generally, DG Am Em then A and Bm. but start with D major. parts of a tune you know, picture them in your mind .
Yes, you need to have the notes in your mind from experiance on the instrument. As in any aspect of this there is no short cut, it takes time. and practice, focused practice. It bears repeating here that this means every day, hopefully hours. seperated in to different sections, areas. new tunes, old tunes, scales, arpeggio, etc etc.
The best way to pick up tunes by ear is starting slowly, bar by bar. Attempting to run befor you can walk.... need i say more.
Someone to sit with you and teach you tunes, bar/phrase by bar/phrase.
like the folk above say, there are common motifs, certain triplets etc that once you have will stand you in good stead in learning other tunes. Building up 1 tune at a time.
> If I type, "Oh Mandy, you came and you gave without taking," my guess is that you suddenly have a particular melody running through your mind's stereo system. Similarly, if I type "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas," another melody appears (hopefully drowning out "Oh Mandy").
Yes, I do hear a tune and can possibly sing it in a barely musical manner, but I probably could not play it on my flute.
I know it's not hopeless, though because the other day someone requested Joy to the World and the thought popped into my head immediately to start on G (I didn't think G and then start, I just plunked my fingers down on G and out came the tune.)
That's exactly what I do on the box. The high A 'sticks out' to my ear, and gets used a lot as an emphasised note so is easy to spot.
Picking up the standard arpeggios helps as well.
But the bottom line is keep playing - as many tunes and as many different types (don't forget the marches and waltzes) as possible. There will come a time when you suddenly surprise yourself by doing something you never thought you would.
There is talk of finding, hearing and recognising paticular notes by their tonal qualities rather that their pitch. I undersatnd that this can be helpful. Pipers, in particular, use this. Each note on the pipes really does have a very different sound. A terriffic piper freind has a way of describing it as a map of the notes. And once you have memorized that map, all the tunes are merely walk around the map.
But I'm not a fan of this and I'll tell you why: I think that to relate the notes you hear to the mechanics of putting your fingers down is in the long run counterproductive.
IT IS ACTUALLY ABOUT INTERVALS. Not static notes,
Will mentioned the point about bypassing any thinking about hearing a note and transfereing it to your fingers. This is important, it should automatically go from your ears straight to your fingers, bypassing any thinking about it. But if you can concentrate on heaing an interval rather than a specific note, then you are really hearing melody rather than sequences of notes.
With dance music I believe there is a tendency to constantly return to the tonal center ~ or home note ~ the 'key'
& I believe you can build the rhythm on that tendency towards repetition. You find the intervals relative the home note? (excepting modulations)
I don't know just my 2cents.
& of course listening to the intervals you hear the major ~ relative minor ~ modality . . .
Oh Mandy you came and you gave without taking.
Now how do you get a tune "out" of your head?
I have a hard time hearing the intervals. Sometimes the next note up sounds like a 3rd to me. Sometimes an interval of more than a third is completely lost on me. Maybe I'm partially tone deaf.
Yeah, it really is all about hearing intervals, strings of intervals, and not just the interval of one note to the next, but also back to the home note.
sbhikes, I'll bet you can learn to tell one interval from another with attentive practice. There's actually a web site for practicing this (google "good ear"), but it's better to just learn it on your own instrument.
If just playing tunes isn't helping you learn to hear intervals well enough, try this. Play a home note, then a whole step up, then the home note again, then two whole steps up, home note again, and so on. You can do this exercise for each of the common Irish trad scales (major, aeolian, dorian, mixolydian), for each of the most common keys. Remember to play steps below the home note, too.
For many people raised on western music, the easiest intervals to hear are octaves, 7ths, and 5ths. Once these come easy to you, you can concentrate on the others. Seconds and 3rds aren't too tricky, so that just leaves 4ths and 6ths.
You can also learn to hear pentatonic tunes as distinct from full-scale tunes.
(Of course, lots of tunes do just this in a pretty ovbvious way--think of the Shetland Fiddler or Gravel Walks. So you might as well be learning tunes, instead of just hammering out practice drills.)
I think it's also important to note that you can practice learning how to listen.
When most people listen to music, they tend to just let it wash over them, and sit back and enjoy it. To be able to listen well enough to pick up a tune and play it takes practice (and the aforementioned proficiency with your instrument).
But the first instrument we all learn how to play is our own voice. We learn how to speak by ear, not by written word. You're much more proficient with your voice than you are your musical instrument, no matter how good of a player you are.
So practice your listening skills by trying to regurgitate what you hear by singing (or better yet, lilting) it. Practice it actively, in your car, listening to your iPod, in the shower, whatever. Practice singing the A part the second time through, even though you've only heard it once.
As Will mentioned, the more familiar you are with this music, the better you will get at this. After a while, you can practice lilting tunes while they're playing on the stereo *the FIRST time through, without ever having heard them before!* You can get better at that with practice, because you will start to be able to predict where the tune is going based on the key, and based on the fact that it is Irish. You won't get it right the first time, but even if you only get 1 out of 3 notes of it right, you then have a lot less to pay attention to. And then you'll get better at paying attention to where the tunes deviate from the expected, instead of having to pay attention to every single note.
The other thing I will suggest is to stop worrying about individual notes, and start paying attention to the shape of the tune. If you know the key, and know the shape of the tune, your fingers will know where to go without knowing what specific notes are in the tune.
But most of all, practice these things actively! Don't just practice playing tunes, practice listening to them, practice playing along at speed even when you don't know the tune (do this in the privacy of your own home, and not in a session where you might have a negative impact on what's going on, of course).
Learning tunes on the fly is great and everything, but unless the session you go to is established as a learning session and noodling is accepted, I would avoid attempting it unless your practically idiot savant at it when you visit sessions at large. Out of the people I know who claim to be able to pick up tunes on the fly only about 2% can actually do it. I've given them the benefit of the doubt and listened closely, but unless the tune is dead simple and very predictable they'll be going up when the melody's going down and miss the interesting and unpredictable passages. This can be extremely annoying to people who are actually playing the tune and usually just contributes to the cacophony rather than the music.
Now, I’m not saying you can’t learn tunes at sessions; I’ve learned many of the tunes I know at sessions, but the way I do it starts with just sitting and listening without trying to pick it up on the fly. After a while, and after hearing the tune many times, I’ll know where the tune goes and will hear it in my head when I’m not even at the session. When it’s in my head like that I can actually begin to start picking it up at the session, but I would never attempt this on the first hearing of a tune… or even the first few hearings. It takes time – there’s no getting around it unless you’re on of the few with extraordinary talent.
Having said that, as I said, I do know a very small number of people who amaze me with their skills at picking up tunes right away and up to tempo without interfering with the flow of the music or the enjoyment of the other players. But these people are usually very gifted and experienced players with extraordinary abilities. By the way, I am not one of them.
I learned long ago that when tunes I don’t know come up I enjoy myself a lot more just listening to the music and not worrying about trying to learn the tune on the spot. Back in the early days when I had convinced myself I could pick tunes up on the fly I would just become frustrated and I found myself missing much of the music. Besides that I wasn’t winning many friends among the better players by noodling incessantly next to them. My time was much better spent listening and absorbing the tune instead and I felt more comfortable knowing I wasn’t putting any of my fellow musicians off. I also discovered that I actually learned the tune more efficiently with my listen-first approach.
So anyway… sorry to be the contrary voice on this thread, but that’s just my 2 cents. Carry on with the noodle-talk.
Just to comment that Will, Michael and others have made similar suggestions in previous discussions (Will has used the phrases "minds ear " and "think whistle") and trying that approach has moved me on much further than the "mechanics of putting your fingers down" thing which many tutor books seem to concentrate on.
But trying to play White Christmas from memory on a keyless flute was a pretty frustrating exercise !
This is a trick that was taught to me. There are certain songs that have instantly identifiable intervals as opening notes. (the NBC logo is a major 6th, Somewhere Over the Rainbow is a full octave, lets not forget "Do, a Deer, a couple of major 2eds, Morrison's jig, major 5th, and you can find others). I find it useful to try to sing ( in the privacy of my own company) the tunes when I learn them by ear.
Somebody mentioned aquiring a larger collection of "tune-bits" and that speaks directly to my theory of how Irish dance music is often structured, out of little stock melodic motifs which are recombined in an infinite number of ways.
First, realise that I'm coming from flute/whistle/pipes and that my method may not work on other instruments.
But on wind instruments the easiest thing to pick up when hearing a new tune for the first time is the rolls, because the melody "parks" on a static note for three notes. In a jig the roll occupies an entire beat but in a reel it can be note>roll or roll>note so next my hear identifies the entire beat of the reel that the roll occupies 3/4 of.
Since on wind instruments many tunes are mostly composed of rolls and a few linking notes in between that is often all one needs to have the tune.
Examples:
(jig) low E roll > B roll > low E roll (first three beats of Morrison's jig)
(reel) low F# roll > low F# roll > low F# roll (first impression leading to
A+low F# roll > A+ low F# roll > bottom D + low F# roll (first three beats of The Green Mountain)
Next easiest perhaps are arpeggios: DF#A, GBD, etc etc. I think of them in terms of the chord: D major is DF#A. So:
D maj arp > inverted D maj arp > D maj arp > E minor arp (the first phrase of the last part of "Cherish the Ladies" which written out is
DF#A dAF# DF#A BGE
There can be sizable stretches of Irish tunes consisting of nothing but arpeggios.
Then there's scalar runs, but be careful, as many Irish tunes are "gap scale" tunes in which certain notes are not present in the tune, for example The Kesh Jig has no C's. It drives me CRAZY when I hear people fumbling around a tune they're trying to learn playing notes that aren't even in the scale that the tune is it! Don't play a "C" when you're trying to figure out The Kesh Jig- there just can't be a C in that tune! So it helps to understand the key a tune is in, but also to undertand the SCALE the tune is in. (Many tunes are like that- Amazing Grace, in the key of G, likewise has no C's, and I could name many others.)
Then there's the "rocking phrase" present in many Irish reels, for examples:
G2BG dGBG
G2dG eGdG
A2F#A DAF#A
E2GE BEGE
B2eB f#BeB
B2gB aBgB
etc etc.
In jigs it would be:
AF#F# dF#F# AF#F# etc.
All of these things, awareness of the key and scale, listening for rolls, arpeggios, scales, and other stock melodic bits, will help learning tunes. It's faster to actually be able to watch a person play the same type of instrument you are playing, but I learn tunes at home by just putting on the CD and blasting away.
How about carrying around one of those Olympus WS -300s or 310 or 320s, all the same with varying memory. Record the tune. They have a setting for playback at half speed. You can even download to the computer and then CD, but I am not sure if you can transfer it to the machine at 1/2 speed.
You can just playback off the Olympus, not great quality but you will learn the tune.
Or... record with whatever and bring into Audacity (you'll have to convert to a wav or mp3 file that Audacity will accept, it will not read the WMA files off the Olympus for example. Things are easily converted in ITunes, free download. Then in Audacity you have a setting where you can change speed without changing pitch. Save it that way and burn to CD to practice.
I should take my own advice, LOL, think I will get an Olympus for Christmas... I play by ear too, and bad memory! On guitar... I have once again creating a whole new setting of a tune by accident. Funny thing is people liked it and some wanted to learn it I recorded a tune wrong like that, Part B of Blast Of Wind... people ask where I got the nice setting. I just say bad memory.
I learned to play in "the old days", ragtime guitar, as an 11 year old, listening to Dave Van Ronk and Pat Sky, who were great rag and blues players. The old needle drop method someone described above, though it was hard to locate where you last left off. Learned a little at a time... much to the dismay of my opera loving mother. The guitar was not even a choice, it was just there, it was my neighbor's and she didn't use it. Where I got the rag and blues LPs, who knows! And Pat Sky went on to become the Uillean piper we all know now. Oddly ragtime is very adaptable to switching over to ITM tune playing and guitar backing. It is not easy, and as intense a discipline as playing classical guitar.
The thing about learning by ear and being self taught, is that I find, and other find too, that though you may try to learn to read music, you always revert back to ear. My solution lately is to learn to slowly read for whistle if I want to get parts of tunes right. Then remember it in my head and play it by ear as a guitar tune. Reading for whistle is the easiest for me, just one note at a time rather than trying to play multiple strings.
LOL, david h, I didn't mean to necessarily try those particular tunes!
They're just examples of melodies most of us have in our heads (whether or not we wan them there). Learn to do the same with the music you want to learn.
Lilting is an excellent way to pick up tunes whenever you're listening to this music--it's a bit like putting words to a melody--makes the melody easier to remember.
As a fiddler, I find it also helps to recognize the chords behind the melody line you're playing. Then you can start thinking of some common fiddle fingerings as partial chord shapes (e.g., the 2nd string index finger B and 3rd string ring finger G make a G major" chord", even if it isn't a full triad}. Any way of associating notes with the chord progression is a good tool for adding those associations to your mental image of the melody itself, which makes it easier to suss out and remember.
In the olden days, I honed my learning-on-the-hoof skills by dotting tunes out from radio programmes I had taped. First writing down a bar or two at a time and working up to being able to write down 4 bar phrases. Obviously, you can either write tunes down, or play them back in phrases.
Once you can memorise 4 bars at a time, you are well on the way to learning on the hoof. Some tunes will stick in the mind the next day, others will have vanished - concentrate on the "sticky" tunes.
I agree knowing the instrument and knowing the music. I learn most of my music in sessions only occasionally working out from written notes and sometimes from CD's but only enough to know the tune. I usually don't know the point at which I know a tune well enough to play in a session, but will occasionally spot that I haven't played it before! It will be one I've heard a number of times - by the third time through for polkas, they are a good start. As soon as the tune is broken down or over-analised I struggle to play it in the same way that you do as a beginner. I work from hearing the whole tune, in the same way that a painter will take in the whole scene first then go into detail after. The same with the spoken language, you learn the overall meaning of a sentence then break down the grammar or individual words as necessary. You build the structure of the building then fill in the rest.
Try sitting in (i.e. playing) with a ceili band playing for set dancers when you're not familiar with that particular band's tunes. The pressure is on you and it really does work. The downside was that I couldn't remember those tunes the next day. You need to repeat the process several times to get those tunes - as you would anyway when learning tunes from sessions.
learning by ear in real-time
learning by ear in real-time
Is learning by ear at speed in a session something that can be learned, or is it one of those things some people are better at and some people aren't? Or both? There was a very kind fiddler last night who had me sit next to him as he tried to show me how to learn tunes as they were being played, and he let me have a good look at his left hand, pared the tune down to just the outline notes, told me the main notes---it really was very cool and interesting---but I was pretty hopeless at it. At one point I was trying to pick up this very simple hornpipe and was totally perplexed until he happened to mentioned the name of it and I realized I knew that tune, and then I could play it---but I hadn't recognized it before when I was so focused on just the notes. It was weird! I wish I were better at this, because I know it's such a great opportunity when you have someone sitting right there trying to show you how, but I can't seem to get the hang of it. I learn by ear fine at home when I can listen to phrases repeatedly, but in a live situation it's a different story. Will it come eventually if I keep trying? Anyone have any thoughts about how this works?
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by kennedy
Re: learning by ear in real-time
i find i can do it for easy tunes like marches, polkas and stuff like that, however fast reels are another matter,
ive done it a couple of times if the tune is quite catchy, but I think i could probably get better at it if i practiced it all the time.
to state the obvious if its a tune you recognise its easier dude.
Good Luck
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by Kess
Re: learning by ear in real-time
It will come eventually, You'll develop a wider collection of tune-bits in your ears and fingers, and you'll recognize them faster. , and your on-the-spot memory of how the new tune is put together will improve. Give it time
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by reenactor
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Really needs time and lots of listening. Even though every tune is different, there are some structures and such they all have in common. You will come to a point where you know the outline of a tune after one time, can lilt the melody after two times and play it after three times. I have seen people doing this, and I can do it, too, at least with easier tunes. A year ago I didn't even dare to hope to be able to do things like that somewhen. Lots of listening and practising is the key.
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by s.g.
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Sounds like you have a good 'partner in crime'
I'd say sit by him every chance you get. ;)
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by Ben Steen
Re: learning by ear in real-time
I have to listen to the tune over and over to get it in my head before I can learn a tune by ear. I don't think I could learn a tune just by hearing it played once. Lots of tunes I've learned by listening to my sister and dad play before I could read sheet music.
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by Chloë
Re: learning by ear in real-time
To pick up tunes on the fly, you need two things: (1) "mastery" of your instrument, and (2) total intimacy with the genre of music.
By mastery here I mean no hesitation in playing the notes you hear in your head. Your body and the instrument work as one to instantly make the sounds you want to make. This can be really frustrating for people fairly new to an instrument--it takes some years to develop, and it goes beyond the more basic kinesthetic or muscle memory approach of "putting a finger here to make this note." Realize that if you're concentrating hard just to play tunes you actually know at session speed, it won't be easy at all to pick up an unfamiliar tune at the same speed.
The second part is easier to acquire--just listen to a lot of this music. Most people are already good at learning by ear, on the fly. Think about it--using our own voices, we all learned to sing along to Happy Birthday, national anthems, holiday songs, and the Top 40 off the radio. In fact, most of us have learned hundreds of tunes and songs this way without paying much attention to how we did it.
When listening to Irish trad music with the goal of improving your ear learning skills, don't just let the whole tune go by all at once. Try to hear it unfold one phrase at a time. Listen to the intervals of the notes--how they relate to their immediate neighbors, and also how they relate back to the dominant or home note of the tune.
Also listen for repeated phrases and bits that sound similar but just occur in different ranges of the scale. Take the jig, Lilting Banshee for an easy example. It starts with EAA EAA.... and later goes eAA eAA. That's the same phrase, with the "E" played an octave higher. That sort of thing is super common in this music, and the more you keep your ears open, the more you'll find repeated, inverted, key/mode shifting motifs like this.
Of course, the more tunes you know, the more building blocks of this music you'll have already under your fingers, so it gets easier over time.
Kennedy, do keep sitting next to that fiddler--it can help a lot if someone can tell you the key/mode, starting note, etc., and you'll soon be sussing these things out on your own. It doesn't hurt to glance at another player's fingers to figure out some of the same information. But ultimately, picking up tunes on the fly is all about trusting your ears. Our local session has several players who are exceptionally good at this, and it's a kick to play with them.
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by Will Harmon
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Ok, Heres an exercise. The idea is to relate the notes you hear to the mechanics of putting your fingers down. Of course this is best learnt by copying the sounds of a tune bar by bar, by ear. the trad method with a teacher.
So try and picture in your mind the phrases of a tune on your instrument, slightly moving your fingers. this is without the instrument. sing to yourself a phrase and picture the positions of your fingers in your mind.
If you can do this from say a tape made of a tune you know, bar by bar, you will start to train yourself to recognise the sound/phrases in your minds eye, and fingers.
You are joining the sounds you hear, to your fingers. eventually you will recognise patterns by ear and be able to picture them as notes on your instrument. start with one note at a time perhaps, hear a note, find it on the instrument, picture this position in your minds eye.
sorry a scrappy attempt at describing this. hope you can make some sense from it.
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by piobagusfidil
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Like Kess, I've picked up a handful of marches and airs in real time. I've figured out some jigs by osmosis (a few months ago, I had a tune in my head, so I picked up the fiddle and transcribed it. I looked it up, and found it pretty quickly: Tripping Up the Stairs.) I can't learn reels at 120 bpm, but that's not surprising, because I can't *play* reels at 120 bpm. (Well, not entirely true: there are a handful that I can get through at that speed. But they sound immeasurably better when I slow them down to 90 bpm or so.) I have, however, picked up some faster tunes in real time - over the course of several weeks or months of hearing them every other week or so, or more.
The way I see it, there are two components governing our facility in learning by ear: familiarity with music in general and with The Music in particular, and familiarity with our instruments. I'm reasonably solid on the former compared to others who've been playing only as long as I have (though I'm learning more every day, and I have so far to go), but I feel like I've just started getting acquainted with my fiddle and bow.
Knowing about music, I think, is half of what allows more experienced players to pick up tunes after hearing them through a few times: even if they haven't played some particular tune before, or even if they've never heard it, they're familiar with the patterns in the tunes. People are picking up *music* in real time - they're not picking up random sequences of notes in real time. There are only so many endings of skippy Dmaj jigs, for instance, and if an experienced listener has just heard the first 7 bars of a new skippy Dmaj jig, they don't need to expend much mental energy figuring out what the 8th sounds like. If they've already got a few hundred tunes in their repertoire, that 8th bar is probably even inscribed somewhere in muscle memory, so they can play it without thinking, too, leaving the cerebral cortex free to fill in the off-beats and get the rest of the tune. That's where familiarity with the instrument comes in: a few months on the fiddle (after 8-10 years of listening to ITM) I could often lilt a session tune that wasn't yet in my repertoire, but my fingers and bow couldn't move fast enough for me to play it at speed on my first attempt. A year and change later, I'm slightly closer to that goal.
The fiddler who gave you the outline notes had the right idea, but I find that I tend to get more confused when someone's giving me information in that form, and that when I figure out outline notes and patterns on my own, I can hold onto the tune better. (Sometimes my teacher will tell me the fingering for a tricky phrase, and I'll ask him to just play it through a few times until I have it. That way I'm translating music into fingerings, rather than the other way around - which means that I'm thinking about music.) I think you identified the cause of your confusion, kennedy, when you said that being too focused on the notes was what got in the way of learning the tune. As you know, you have a lot of freedom to vary notes in this kind of music while still preserving the identity of the tune, which is both why I love ITM and why I find it so frustrating at times. It's a matter of figuring out what bits of the tune are essential to its identity.
When I try to figure out a tune at a session (and I never get it, not in long-term memory anyway, after just hearing it through three times), the first thing I'll do is make a note of the time signature, which isn't hard. Next, I'll figure out the key, which is slightly harder but still not that difficult. I don't have perfect pitch (though my ear is good enough that my imperfect intonation on fiddle is driving me batty - but that's another post), but very few different keys come up very often. If a tune's in a major key, I'll try D, and if that doesn't work, I'll test out G, and finally I'll check out A. If it's none of those, I'll give up on that tune for the time being, because I'm just not that experienced playing in other keys, so I don't think I'll be able to pick one up very well. The key gives a pretty good idea of which notes are going to come up most often. It's a pretty safe bet that a Dmaj tune won't have any Cnat's in it, save accidentals, which tend to stick out. Even more usefully for picking out melodies at speed: I can't always tell the difference between an F# and a G (or even a major third and a perfect fourth) at 90+bpm, but if I'm in Dmaj, F#'s are a lot more likely than G's to fall on the beats, which narrows down my guesses of notes and speeds up the process of finding the outline notes.
Last month, I finally finished figuring out a reel that I'd started to pick up back in May. When I heard it at my session, I had an idea in my head of what it sounded like, so I recorded myself playing it (at 70 bpm or so, and it still sounded rushed and horrible) just so I'd have it on hand. When I finally got the "right" version (that is, the one that everyone at the session plays!), I transcribed my initial attempt and my corrected version, just to compare. *Not a single bar* in the "right" version matched the corresponding one in the old one, but my initial attempt was recognizable as a variation. And some of the corrections were ones that I figured out, not by actively listening to the tune, but just by assimiliating what I'd learned about Irish music. My initial version, for instance, contained the bars [B4 B2 C2 | B4], which I later correctly refined to [BE 3(EEE) BE CE| BE 3(EEE)], even though I couldn't hear those triplets at the session. That refinement wasn't something I was able to pick up at speed; it was an inference I was able to make based on what I knew of Irish music. Were I more experienced with my fiddle, I might have been able to insert those triplets into the tune straightaway, at speed.
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by Tall, Dark, and Mysterious
Re: learning by ear in real-time
"To pick up tunes on the fly, you need two things: (1) "mastery" of your instrument, and (2) total intimacy with the genre of music."
Dammit! Will and I cross-posted! Well, we can't both be wrong.
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by Tall, Dark, and Mysterious
Re: learning by ear in real-time
I have neither number (1) nor number (2).
I can play little bits of tunes by ear on the fly, so I do that in hopes it'll help my ear learn. So I'll sit through a tune, my fingers at the ready for the little parts I can play.
This is a good question and I've been pondering what the secret to it is. It's obvious it takes mastery but I do suspect there's something else as well. But I'm not able to articulate it and even less capable of doing it. I have to be happy to be mediocre.
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by sbhikes
Re: learning by ear in real-time
sbhikes, take heart--there is no "secret" that some people have and others don't. If you can hear, then you can learn tunes by ear, and eventually learn to do it on the fly, even at session speeds.
And I can prove that you already learn music by ear just fine. (Pardon me for people who've read this next bit before, but it works.)
If I type, "Oh Mandy, you came and you gave without taking," my guess is that you suddenly have a particular melody running through your mind's stereo system. Similarly, if I type "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas," another melody appears (hopefully drowning out "Oh Mandy").
So listen to enough Irish music, and sooner or later the same thing happens--your mind plays tunes all the time. And get completely acquainted with your instrument, and those tunes will spill out on it.
At some point, you'll know enough toonage and musical building blocks, and you'll be so adept at your instrument, you'll be able to pick up tunes on the fly. It really isn't any more complicated or magical than that. But it does take time and attentive listening and practice.
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by Will Harmon
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Regarding learning by ear being a learnable skill, and not some magical talent that some people are born with and that others will never acquire: I like to point out that every single person, save the 0.1% who are well and truly tone-deaf, learns to *sing* by ear. Even my classically-trained friends, whose technical abilities on their instruments far surpass mine, do not pick up most songs by sheet music (though some are quite adept at that as well). Even people with no voice training, people who sing only in showers (or not even) tend to feel comfortable enough with their voices that they don't need a visual representation of songs, or even slowed-down versions of them, in order to be able to hum or sing them passably. So I don't think that I'm being overly ambitious, as I hope only to eventually get as well acquainted with my fiddle as your average shower-singer is with his or her voice.
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by Tall, Dark, and Mysterious
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Mastery of the instrument—it figures it’s something like that. I’m a long way off from mastery! I’m starting to think that the speed issue is the big problem. It’s very true that it’s hard enough for me to play tunes I know at speed, let alone the ones I haven’t learned yet. Still, it would be nice to just pick up the outline of the tune, but maybe even that is too hard at this point.
Jig, I tried your exercise of mental playing, but got stuck right at the beginning because I didn’t have an opening note. I can hear lots of tunes in perfect detail in my head, but couldn’t ever tell you the starting note. Maybe that explains the difficulty with what you were saying about the mechanics of hearing the note and then putting your fingers down on the instrument to play---how do you know where to put your fingers if you don’t know what note you need? I have excellent relative pitch, can hear intervals easily, but my mental stereo plays at any key that happens to be running through my head at that moment. It’s kind of like a singer who starts a song and then brings it down a third because they started out too high. The only way I know what key anything is in is the way the notes fall on the fingerboard, not by the sound of the actual pitches. Does that make sense?
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by kennedy
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Maybe it's because I came to fiddling after being a singer, but after a year of playing it's really clear to me that if I can't lilt the tune, there's no way I'm going to be able to play it. I'm lucky enough to play in a very forgiving session, so I do have some room to noodle When a tune comes along I'm not familiar with (that would be most of them at this point...), or even one that I think I might recognize but haven't learned yet, I listen the first time through, try to lilt some bits softly the second time through, and if I feel like I've kind of got it, AND if it's being played at a speed it's conceivable I could join in at, I may try to play at least small parts of it the third time through. A year ago I was totally lost, now I can generally get a fair amount of a tune that's simple, slow and predictable. I also practice the lilting part in the car when I'm listening to music. I really agree that there are at least two distinct parts-one is getting the tune in my head, and the other is having enough mastery (and I use that term, at least in my case, very loosely) to translate the tune into motor planning, finding the notes on the fiddle, figuring out a bowing pattern, getting the tempo right, getting the rhythm right, blending with the instruments around me....or I just go back to softly lilting in the corner...
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by aikifiddler
Re: learning by ear in real-time
"The only way I know what key anything is in is the way the notes fall on the fingerboard, not by the sound of the actual pitches. Does that make sense?"
I've recently started trying to figure out keys of tunes without my instrument, by singing the tonic. I know my vocal range pretty well, and although I can't tell you instantaneously if a note played is a D or a G, but it feels different to me to sing a D versus a G. I'm getting better at it...I guess I'm developing a slow version of absolute pitch. (I can identify pitches, but it takes me a few seconds.)
Something that's helped me get keys faster: many, many tunes go down exactly to the open D. (Blimey whistlers, limiting us fiddlers that way.) A major key tune that ends on its lowest note is often in D, a minor key tune that dips right below its tonic tend to be in Emin, and a major key tune that goes a fair ways, but not nearly an octave, below its root is often in G, though not infrequently in A (but the A tunes often go only as low as the E on the D string).
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by Tall, Dark, and Mysterious
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Bear in mind that there's nothing wrong with working on learning tunes on the fly while you gradually learn to play your instrument. That's exactly what you should be doing. Just don't expect it to get easy until you're more at ease on your instrument.
Kennedy, in contrast to Jig's exercise, I usually walk my students through the opposite sequence--play a note on your fiddle and really listen to it. Because of the way a fiddle is built, and the way notes are played on it, every note sounds different. So listen deeply to those differences--how does the low A on the G string sound different from the low B on the same string? How does that A sound different from the open A string, or the A above that on the e string? How does the open A sound different from the A on the D string?
Also listen to how tunes in A tend to sound brighter than tunes in G, or D, and how tunes in F, Bb, and C are somehow "quieter." Part of what you'll hear is how the open strings and the fiddle itself resonate more in certain keys than others. With practice, you can learn to discern one key/mode from another within the first bar of a tune (until the tune wanders into some other key/mode).
In short, I think it's important to "burn" the sounds of your instrument into your brain to the point where then you *can* do what Jig suggests above. But most people need to hear the reference points (notes) on their instrument first, and often, and deeply.
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by Will Harmon
Re: learning by ear in real-time
yeah, we come to finding keys, or tone centers. I think my description was even poorer than i first thought!
Still, the idea is to start with identifying notes, identify the sound and where you find it on your instrument. Just like will says, learn to identify the tone from ear.
There are only a few keys generally, DG Am Em then A and Bm. but start with D major. parts of a tune you know, picture them in your mind .
Yes, you need to have the notes in your mind from experiance on the instrument. As in any aspect of this there is no short cut, it takes time. and practice, focused practice. It bears repeating here that this means every day, hopefully hours. seperated in to different sections, areas. new tunes, old tunes, scales, arpeggio, etc etc.
The best way to pick up tunes by ear is starting slowly, bar by bar. Attempting to run befor you can walk.... need i say more.
Someone to sit with you and teach you tunes, bar/phrase by bar/phrase.
like the folk above say, there are common motifs, certain triplets etc that once you have will stand you in good stead in learning other tunes. Building up 1 tune at a time.
# Posted on December 19th 2007 by piobagusfidil
Re: learning by ear in real-time
> If I type, "Oh Mandy, you came and you gave without taking," my guess is that you suddenly have a particular melody running through your mind's stereo system. Similarly, if I type "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas," another melody appears (hopefully drowning out "Oh Mandy").
Yes, I do hear a tune and can possibly sing it in a barely musical manner, but I probably could not play it on my flute.
I know it's not hopeless, though because the other day someone requested Joy to the World and the thought popped into my head immediately to start on G (I didn't think G and then start, I just plunked my fingers down on G and out came the tune.)
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by sbhikes
Re: learning by ear in real-time
That's exactly what I do on the box. The high A 'sticks out' to my ear, and gets used a lot as an emphasised note so is easy to spot.
Picking up the standard arpeggios helps as well.
But the bottom line is keep playing - as many tunes and as many different types (don't forget the marches and waltzes) as possible. There will come a time when you suddenly surprise yourself by doing something you never thought you would.
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by bc_box_player
Re: learning by ear in real-time
This is an important discussion.
There is talk of finding, hearing and recognising paticular notes by their tonal qualities rather that their pitch. I undersatnd that this can be helpful. Pipers, in particular, use this. Each note on the pipes really does have a very different sound. A terriffic piper freind has a way of describing it as a map of the notes. And once you have memorized that map, all the tunes are merely walk around the map.
But I'm not a fan of this and I'll tell you why: I think that to relate the notes you hear to the mechanics of putting your fingers down is in the long run counterproductive.
IT IS ACTUALLY ABOUT INTERVALS. Not static notes,
Will mentioned the point about bypassing any thinking about hearing a note and transfereing it to your fingers. This is important, it should automatically go from your ears straight to your fingers, bypassing any thinking about it. But if you can concentrate on heaing an interval rather than a specific note, then you are really hearing melody rather than sequences of notes.
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by llig leahcim
Re: learning by ear in real-time
With dance music I believe there is a tendency to constantly return to the tonal center ~ or home note ~ the 'key'
& I believe you can build the rhythm on that tendency towards repetition. You find the intervals relative the home note? (excepting modulations)
I don't know just my 2cents.
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by Ben Steen
Re: learning by ear in real-time
& of course listening to the intervals you hear the major ~ relative minor ~ modality . . .
Oh Mandy you came and you gave without taking.
Now how do you get a tune "out" of your head?
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by Ben Steen
Re: learning by ear in real-time
I have a hard time hearing the intervals. Sometimes the next note up sounds like a 3rd to me. Sometimes an interval of more than a third is completely lost on me. Maybe I'm partially tone deaf.
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by sbhikes
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Yeah, it really is all about hearing intervals, strings of intervals, and not just the interval of one note to the next, but also back to the home note.
sbhikes, I'll bet you can learn to tell one interval from another with attentive practice. There's actually a web site for practicing this (google "good ear"), but it's better to just learn it on your own instrument.
If just playing tunes isn't helping you learn to hear intervals well enough, try this. Play a home note, then a whole step up, then the home note again, then two whole steps up, home note again, and so on. You can do this exercise for each of the common Irish trad scales (major, aeolian, dorian, mixolydian), for each of the most common keys. Remember to play steps below the home note, too.
For many people raised on western music, the easiest intervals to hear are octaves, 7ths, and 5ths. Once these come easy to you, you can concentrate on the others. Seconds and 3rds aren't too tricky, so that just leaves 4ths and 6ths.
You can also learn to hear pentatonic tunes as distinct from full-scale tunes.
(Of course, lots of tunes do just this in a pretty ovbvious way--think of the Shetland Fiddler or Gravel Walks. So you might as well be learning tunes, instead of just hammering out practice drills.)
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by Will Harmon
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Here's the ear training site: http://www.good-ear.com/
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by Will Harmon
Re: learning by ear in real-time
I think it's also important to note that you can practice learning how to listen.
When most people listen to music, they tend to just let it wash over them, and sit back and enjoy it. To be able to listen well enough to pick up a tune and play it takes practice (and the aforementioned proficiency with your instrument).
But the first instrument we all learn how to play is our own voice. We learn how to speak by ear, not by written word. You're much more proficient with your voice than you are your musical instrument, no matter how good of a player you are.
So practice your listening skills by trying to regurgitate what you hear by singing (or better yet, lilting) it. Practice it actively, in your car, listening to your iPod, in the shower, whatever. Practice singing the A part the second time through, even though you've only heard it once.
As Will mentioned, the more familiar you are with this music, the better you will get at this. After a while, you can practice lilting tunes while they're playing on the stereo *the FIRST time through, without ever having heard them before!* You can get better at that with practice, because you will start to be able to predict where the tune is going based on the key, and based on the fact that it is Irish. You won't get it right the first time, but even if you only get 1 out of 3 notes of it right, you then have a lot less to pay attention to. And then you'll get better at paying attention to where the tunes deviate from the expected, instead of having to pay attention to every single note.
The other thing I will suggest is to stop worrying about individual notes, and start paying attention to the shape of the tune. If you know the key, and know the shape of the tune, your fingers will know where to go without knowing what specific notes are in the tune.
But most of all, practice these things actively! Don't just practice playing tunes, practice listening to them, practice playing along at speed even when you don't know the tune (do this in the privacy of your own home, and not in a session where you might have a negative impact on what's going on, of course).
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by Reverend
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Hmmm... I thought I smelled noodles...
Learning tunes on the fly is great and everything, but unless the session you go to is established as a learning session and noodling is accepted, I would avoid attempting it unless your practically idiot savant at it when you visit sessions at large. Out of the people I know who claim to be able to pick up tunes on the fly only about 2% can actually do it. I've given them the benefit of the doubt and listened closely, but unless the tune is dead simple and very predictable they'll be going up when the melody's going down and miss the interesting and unpredictable passages. This can be extremely annoying to people who are actually playing the tune and usually just contributes to the cacophony rather than the music.
Now, I’m not saying you can’t learn tunes at sessions; I’ve learned many of the tunes I know at sessions, but the way I do it starts with just sitting and listening without trying to pick it up on the fly. After a while, and after hearing the tune many times, I’ll know where the tune goes and will hear it in my head when I’m not even at the session. When it’s in my head like that I can actually begin to start picking it up at the session, but I would never attempt this on the first hearing of a tune… or even the first few hearings. It takes time – there’s no getting around it unless you’re on of the few with extraordinary talent.
Having said that, as I said, I do know a very small number of people who amaze me with their skills at picking up tunes right away and up to tempo without interfering with the flow of the music or the enjoyment of the other players. But these people are usually very gifted and experienced players with extraordinary abilities. By the way, I am not one of them.
I learned long ago that when tunes I don’t know come up I enjoy myself a lot more just listening to the music and not worrying about trying to learn the tune on the spot. Back in the early days when I had convinced myself I could pick tunes up on the fly I would just become frustrated and I found myself missing much of the music. Besides that I wasn’t winning many friends among the better players by noodling incessantly next to them. My time was much better spent listening and absorbing the tune instead and I felt more comfortable knowing I wasn’t putting any of my fellow musicians off. I also discovered that I actually learned the tune more efficiently with my listen-first approach.
So anyway… sorry to be the contrary voice on this thread, but that’s just my 2 cents. Carry on with the noodle-talk.
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by Phantom Button
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Just to comment that Will, Michael and others have made similar suggestions in previous discussions (Will has used the phrases "minds ear " and "think whistle") and trying that approach has moved me on much further than the "mechanics of putting your fingers down" thing which many tutor books seem to concentrate on.
But trying to play White Christmas from memory on a keyless flute was a pretty frustrating exercise !
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by David50
Re: learning by ear in real-time
This is a trick that was taught to me. There are certain songs that have instantly identifiable intervals as opening notes. (the NBC logo is a major 6th, Somewhere Over the Rainbow is a full octave, lets not forget "Do, a Deer, a couple of major 2eds, Morrison's jig, major 5th, and you can find others). I find it useful to try to sing ( in the privacy of my own company) the tunes when I learn them by ear.
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by toumi
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Somebody mentioned aquiring a larger collection of "tune-bits" and that speaks directly to my theory of how Irish dance music is often structured, out of little stock melodic motifs which are recombined in an infinite number of ways.
First, realise that I'm coming from flute/whistle/pipes and that my method may not work on other instruments.
But on wind instruments the easiest thing to pick up when hearing a new tune for the first time is the rolls, because the melody "parks" on a static note for three notes. In a jig the roll occupies an entire beat but in a reel it can be note>roll or roll>note so next my hear identifies the entire beat of the reel that the roll occupies 3/4 of.
Since on wind instruments many tunes are mostly composed of rolls and a few linking notes in between that is often all one needs to have the tune.
Examples:
(jig) low E roll > B roll > low E roll (first three beats of Morrison's jig)
(reel) low F# roll > low F# roll > low F# roll (first impression leading to
A+low F# roll > A+ low F# roll > bottom D + low F# roll (first three beats of The Green Mountain)
Next easiest perhaps are arpeggios: DF#A, GBD, etc etc. I think of them in terms of the chord: D major is DF#A. So:
D maj arp > inverted D maj arp > D maj arp > E minor arp (the first phrase of the last part of "Cherish the Ladies" which written out is
DF#A dAF# DF#A BGE
There can be sizable stretches of Irish tunes consisting of nothing but arpeggios.
Then there's scalar runs, but be careful, as many Irish tunes are "gap scale" tunes in which certain notes are not present in the tune, for example The Kesh Jig has no C's. It drives me CRAZY when I hear people fumbling around a tune they're trying to learn playing notes that aren't even in the scale that the tune is it! Don't play a "C" when you're trying to figure out The Kesh Jig- there just can't be a C in that tune! So it helps to understand the key a tune is in, but also to undertand the SCALE the tune is in. (Many tunes are like that- Amazing Grace, in the key of G, likewise has no C's, and I could name many others.)
Then there's the "rocking phrase" present in many Irish reels, for examples:
G2BG dGBG
G2dG eGdG
A2F#A DAF#A
E2GE BEGE
B2eB f#BeB
B2gB aBgB
etc etc.
In jigs it would be:
AF#F# dF#F# AF#F# etc.
All of these things, awareness of the key and scale, listening for rolls, arpeggios, scales, and other stock melodic bits, will help learning tunes. It's faster to actually be able to watch a person play the same type of instrument you are playing, but I learn tunes at home by just putting on the CD and blasting away.
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by Richard D Cook
Re: learning by ear in real-time
by the way I didn't intend for those faces to appear, they just do when you follow : with )
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by Richard D Cook
Re: learning by ear in real-time
How about carrying around one of those Olympus WS -300s or 310 or 320s, all the same with varying memory. Record the tune. They have a setting for playback at half speed. You can even download to the computer and then CD, but I am not sure if you can transfer it to the machine at 1/2 speed.
I recorded a tune wrong like that, Part B of Blast Of Wind... people ask where I got the nice setting. I just say bad memory.
You can just playback off the Olympus, not great quality but you will learn the tune.
Or... record with whatever and bring into Audacity (you'll have to convert to a wav or mp3 file that Audacity will accept, it will not read the WMA files off the Olympus for example. Things are easily converted in ITunes, free download. Then in Audacity you have a setting where you can change speed without changing pitch. Save it that way and burn to CD to practice.
I should take my own advice, LOL, think I will get an Olympus for Christmas... I play by ear too, and bad memory! On guitar... I have once again creating a whole new setting of a tune by accident. Funny thing is people liked it and some wanted to learn it
I learned to play in "the old days", ragtime guitar, as an 11 year old, listening to Dave Van Ronk and Pat Sky, who were great rag and blues players. The old needle drop method someone described above, though it was hard to locate where you last left off. Learned a little at a time... much to the dismay of my opera loving mother. The guitar was not even a choice, it was just there, it was my neighbor's and she didn't use it. Where I got the rag and blues LPs, who knows! And Pat Sky went on to become the Uillean piper we all know now. Oddly ragtime is very adaptable to switching over to ITM tune playing and guitar backing. It is not easy, and as intense a discipline as playing classical guitar.
The thing about learning by ear and being self taught, is that I find, and other find too, that though you may try to learn to read music, you always revert back to ear. My solution lately is to learn to slowly read for whistle if I want to get parts of tunes right. Then remember it in my head and play it by ear as a guitar tune. Reading for whistle is the easiest for me, just one note at a time rather than trying to play multiple strings.
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by irisnevins
Re: learning by ear in real-time
LOL, david h, I didn't mean to necessarily try those particular tunes!
They're just examples of melodies most of us have in our heads (whether or not we wan them there). Learn to do the same with the music you want to learn.
Lilting is an excellent way to pick up tunes whenever you're listening to this music--it's a bit like putting words to a melody--makes the melody easier to remember.
As a fiddler, I find it also helps to recognize the chords behind the melody line you're playing. Then you can start thinking of some common fiddle fingerings as partial chord shapes (e.g., the 2nd string index finger B and 3rd string ring finger G make a G major" chord", even if it isn't a full triad}. Any way of associating notes with the chord progression is a good tool for adding those associations to your mental image of the melody itself, which makes it easier to suss out and remember.
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by Will Harmon
Re: learning by ear in real-time
If you've got perfect pitch it's very easy! If you haven't got it then i can't imagine what it's like trying to learn tunes at realtime speed!!
i'm just oneof those lucky devils!
# Posted on December 20th 2007 by D.J.F.
Re: learning year in no-time
well as i know wertyu i do not
# Posted on December 21st 2007 by Kheelch
Re: learning by ear in real-time
oops that was my kid again. can't leave this screen
up and walk away.
# Posted on December 21st 2007 by Kheelch
Re: learning by ear in real-time
In the olden days, I honed my learning-on-the-hoof skills by dotting tunes out from radio programmes I had taped. First writing down a bar or two at a time and working up to being able to write down 4 bar phrases. Obviously, you can either write tunes down, or play them back in phrases.
Once you can memorise 4 bars at a time, you are well on the way to learning on the hoof. Some tunes will stick in the mind the next day, others will have vanished - concentrate on the "sticky" tunes.
# Posted on December 21st 2007 by geoffwright
Re: learning by ear in real-time
An' Dan F is about to get piccolo-shoving. Grr.
lol
# Posted on December 22nd 2007 by Pádraig
Re: learning by ear in real-time
^Please don't hurt me......please!
# Posted on December 22nd 2007 by D.J.F.
Re: learning by ear in real-time
I agree knowing the instrument and knowing the music. I learn most of my music in sessions only occasionally working out from written notes and sometimes from CD's but only enough to know the tune. I usually don't know the point at which I know a tune well enough to play in a session, but will occasionally spot that I haven't played it before! It will be one I've heard a number of times - by the third time through for polkas, they are a good start. As soon as the tune is broken down or over-analised I struggle to play it in the same way that you do as a beginner. I work from hearing the whole tune, in the same way that a painter will take in the whole scene first then go into detail after. The same with the spoken language, you learn the overall meaning of a sentence then break down the grammar or individual words as necessary. You build the structure of the building then fill in the rest.
# Posted on December 24th 2007 by Torgwen
Re: learning by ear in real-time
Try sitting in (i.e. playing) with a ceili band playing for set dancers when you're not familiar with that particular band's tunes. The pressure is on you and it really does work. The downside was that I couldn't remember those tunes the next day. You need to repeat the process several times to get those tunes - as you would anyway when learning tunes from sessions.
# Posted on December 25th 2007 by Trevor Jennings