Help - I have been learning mandolin for about 6 years now but still find it really hard to learn a tune off by heart. This could be because of my classical upbringing and I am very good at sight reading, so it's easy for me to just read the music. However I am aware that I am the only person in a session with music notation.
Well, when I decided that I wanted to be free from the 'bondage of written music' I made a vow not to look at ANY notation for a year. I began to learn tunes that I'd taped. It wasn't an easy transition at first - but sooooo worth it in the end. But I really had to commit to it because it is quite seductive to go back to the comfortable crutch of the written note. Now I am free. It is great and I finally feel like more of a 'real musician' rather than a musical version of a typist who sees something and repeats what is seen.
Have you ever tried to simply play a tune you can hum or sing to yourself in your head, on the mandolin?
Take simple songs, Twinkle Twinkle, etc. Just start slowly, and try to pick it out on your mando straight from your head.
This is the basics of how it works. If I can hum or lilt the tune, then I can play it from memory, so start with common, little tunes. Start with anything you know by heart in your head already, popular songs, rock songs, whatever you already know. The important thing is to begin to associate sounds in your head with the movements of your hands on your instrument, not dots on a page.
The first step is to remove the sheet music from the scene. If you don't, then you will always refer back to it because it's there and you have know that you can read through it.
Some people learn the tune phrase by phrase, stop/rewind/play kind of learning method. It works for some but not so much for me.
I use a two-step method for learning tunes outside of the session. In step one, I saturate myself, listening to the tune repeatedly until I can *sing* it. Yes - get to the point where you can vocalize the tune all by yourself. You don't need a good voice but you should try to be accurate in your pitches to make sure you know what notes are being played. It may take 10 minutes or 10 days of listening but when I can sing the tune, only then I can say that I know it. I still don't know how to play it though. Actually that's not entirely true. By now I can visualize where the notes live on the fretboard and already jump into step 2 but it's not necessary in the early stages.
Step 2 is easier. Sit down with your instrument and find the notes on the fretboard. You already know the tune so there is no distraction. You transfer what you know to the instrument. Once you've found out where the tune "lives" on the mandolin, then you can work on speed, ornamentation and other musical aspects of playing
This may sound odd or even embarrassing but it has been SO effective for me. There are many people who never vocalize tunes and miss the opportunity to connect with it and absorb it more deeply.
I'm a classical musician, too, and had to re-think a lot of things when I began going to sessions. There have been many discussions on this site about using music notation in sessions, often shedding more heat than light. This is an aural tradition, and the tunes are best passed along by listening. The inflections and articulations are very different than what you will have learned in your classical training, and will not be represented accurately in notation.
But as a classical musician you will naturally revert to reading the music, as I do. This is what works for me; I have a look at the music, then sing it over and over, without my instrument, many times. The tunes are simple in their form, and you will soon have it memorized.
But that's only the beginning, since so much depends on hearing the tune in recordings, in sound files on this site and on the internet, and live in sessions.
Unless you've played jazz in your training, as a classical musician you are used to precise reproducing of the printed notation. You assume that the music is as the composer intended, without error, and you play with the expression appropriate to the style. That's why we can sightread in all keys and clefs.
In ITM, however, you will almost never find one exact rendition of a tune. Any notation you see will be a compromise, and most of what the tune really sounds like can't be captured on paper. If you play reels and jigs without a clear idea of what this music really sounds like, they will sound like etudes. That's why the aural component is essential.
I use standard music (I can sight-read fairly well) to give me a couple of tips -- whether i start on an up or down stroke, for instance, to keep the DUDUD pattern so I'm 'down' on the downbeat more often than not, and to check the key signature, but I found that I actually knew the music much better than I thought I had after playing it from sheetmusic for two or three years.
Oriley's suggestion to put the music down for a year is an excellent one, but if you just want to test yourself, sit down with your mando and either a recording of something you know, or an accompanist if you have one (my husband and I play together) and just play along stuff you're familiar with without the music. Eyes closed if you have to. Don't worry about mistakes. It might take a couple of tries, but the more you do it, the better. your left hand will remember even if you don't think you know a tune. Take your mando outside and annoy the neighbors if you want.
It's not necessarily a matter of confidence in yourself, it's a test to see if you can ignore perfection for a little while. Be willing to mess up a tune. That's one of the seductions of sheet music. All the notes are there where you can play them with everybody else: instant notational perfection. It's not what you want in the end. You want the music, right? The music doesn't go away when the paper is put away. Really.
By the way, my comments refer to someone who keeps one foot in the classical world, where your reading skills must remain sharp, and the other in the session scene.
What you have to do is not just practise playing the tunes but practise memorising them. When a tune repeats the A part and then the B part, glance at the dots when you start and then look away on the repeat. Then do it without looking at the notation at all. Try to remember a tune without even opening the book and then obsessively carry on trying to remember it all day without looking, and eventually a fragment of the tune will come - hold on to it and construct the rest of the tune, and when you've got it, it sticks. With some tunes it's a fragment of the B part that you can always remember, and you have to reconstruct it from there. I remember 5-part tunes by memorising the first note of each part. Once I go to the right first note the rest just follows. Sometime you know a tune by heart and you play it in a reflex kind of way, and sometime you have to learn it in a more deliberate way., especially if you have a tendency to take a wrong turn into a similar tune.
I can read music, although I'm not 'classically trained' and I found learning by ear very difficult at first. I suppose my tip would be 'Don't try and learn any tune that you can't already hear in your mind.' Then, at least when you are trying to play from memory, you will instantly know when you have gone wrong and can do something about it. Well it helped me....
all good suggestions so far. This is how I weaned myself off the page - play the tune from music, then turn the page over and play it again. Keep repeating this process. I found that just like singers "read" the words on the inside of their eyelids, I was imagining the printed page.
After a while your image of the shape of the tune is a picture of it written out on the page but the more you keep away from the page the more the fingers start to remember it by themselves by the process of repetition.
The next time you pick up your instrument, try and remember it without the page but refer back to it if you can't remember one or two sections. Just keep doing this till it's memorised. Eventually the process becomes quicker.
Anyway, some soloists in classical music learn pieces and then play without written music in front of them, so it's not necessarily a classical problem, just a crutch problem.
I think they key is getting the tune in your head.
I can sight read fairly well, at least the rhythm, and do tend to learn songs this way.
But once I have figured out how to play the song i.e. where to put your fingers and when, I then try to memorise the tune, not necessarily by playing it but even by singing it in my head.
Once the tune is memorised, playing it without sheet music becomes much easier.
Then comes the process of repeated practice so I can play it well, and add my own twists such as ornamentation, etc.
Thanks everyone - there's certainly some really good tips here. Not sure that I will be brave enough not to look at any music for one year but I may try it for 2 weeks and hum a lot.
I am a 'paper trained' musician late into ITM. But I played with a group of what Americans call 'Folkies' for 30 years so did my share of by ear and improv.
I tried the listen/rewind/listen ad infinitum method with ok experience. But My box teacher got me started on the 'sing the song along with a metronome and then learn it on the instrument' method. I find I am much more confident doing that, and it helps my normally challenged sense of timing.
Another thing that may help you is to stop thinking about a tune as a group of specific notes, and start thinking about the contour and flow of the tune. The individual notes don't really matter that much (except the ones that do, of course... ) You can listen to two different players play the same tune, and often times, 15-20% of the notes will differ between the two settings, sometimes more. But you can still easily recognize it as the same tune.
When you let go of the actual notes, it opens up a lot of possibilities for you. The music stops being rigid. You can express the melodic ideas in different ways, you get more apt to do rhythmic and melodic variation. And maybe most importantly of all, you have a lot less information to remember. You remember the shape of the tune, instead of having to remember all the individual notes. So that makes it easier to play the tune with someone else who might play it differently than you, and it allows you to do things like play it in a different key more easily.
Reverend - you made a very interesting and important point.
I distinctly remember asking our session's most experienced and respected player about this when I started playing in sessions. I wanted to understand if he "expected" (or wished) us to all play the exact same notes. I could hear the music being played like that but was "bad form" or ok? Tom is from Ireland and been playing this music for probably 50 years. He said that to him two things were important. One was that the music have the right feel. The second was that we hit the key notes and phrases.
Pretty similar to what you just said. For me that was a profound revelation although with freedom comes responsibility.... I say this because the next logical question would be - ok so what other notes could I play?...and this leads into the aesthetics of variations - improvised or not - a tricky discussion at best.
Although this notion is enormously freeing, I don't think it absolves us from learning certain version of tunes. I find it best to start off constrained and then gradually explore in various directions. The high level benefit is exactly as you stated - the music becomes a wave-like shape, and the individual pixels (notes) have no independent purpose any longer, other than to serve the greater idea.
I won't look at the sheet music once I can remember a tune in my head. But I'll admit to finding it a lot easier to get started on a tune with the sheet music, especially if I don't have any way to listen over and over again.
I've been attending an old-time jam with my mountain dulcimer. The old-time jam is much more tolerant of beginners learning tunes on the fly than the Irish session. The old-time tunes seem much simpler to me, too. So I practice my ear training there and am finding that it's helping me with the Irish music.
Yeah, Avi, in re-reading my post, it almost looks like I'm advocating not learning any particular setting of a tune, but that's not the case at all! You have to have something that you consider to be the "base" setting of the tune before you can "vary" it, of course. And the ideas of variation and expressing melodic ideas differently are things that take years to develop (a process which I am only in the beginning stages of, myself).
But I find that learning the shape of the tune is a great way to learn how it goes. With a little practice, it's much easier (for me, at least) than learning every note. The method lets you feel the intervals, so you can just sense if a note you played was the wrong interval, and adjust it, without having to remember "that's a C sharp" or "that's an F natural", etc.
And at the same time, it sets the stage for opening up the music to all the other wonderful stuff I've mentioned
This is one of the most helpful discussions I've read at The Session. Thank you to all who have posted suggestions. I agree with the usefulness of knowing the melody in your head in order to get away from depending on sight reading. It works for me too.
Didn't see anyone suggest learning a tune by transcribing it. The trick is that you are satisfying your desire for sheet music whilst educating your ear. Hopefully by the time you have transcribed the tune you will virtually know it without having to refer back to what you wrote down.
Forgot to add that your fingers need to learn the tune too. I found it was a big breakthrough when my fingers could just play a tune, without me having to think of the names of the notes. I mean I stopped thinking g g a b c b or whatever it was all the time when I was playing.
I put aside the sheet music a year ago - and it was incredibly slow (learning phrase by phrase from another fiddler) at first - but it's gotten much faster....and is the best thing I ever did.
The WONDERFUL thing is that the tunes I learn by ear are seemingly embedded in my fingers and in my head - and once memorised - they stick....I've now got about 20 tunes memorised and the process keeps speeding up.
Similarly to what Donough said, another great way to learn a tune really well is to teach it to someone else in person. That really helps solidify it in my memory.
I whistle.
Some hum (some drum).
Some sing (some hambone)
I whistle. I forget this fact. From time to time I remember. Oh yeah. I hear a tune & instantly start whistling. Did this years before being taught how to read for piano. Can you hum, whistle, or sing a tune? That may get you picking up your instrument before reaching for the tunebook.
The other thing ~ listen in session. (probably without whistling). Sometimes this helps me more than 'trying' to play. I do & begin hearing the tonal center, phrases, modulation . . . I have gone home from session & then continued playing. It amazes me how much I retain of tunes I did not play along with but did listen.
Be brave.
Great pointers from Reverend!
I took the pledge for a year and just didn't use music except when I couldn't find a recording of a tune that I wanted to learn. I will never be a star at learning by ear, but I'm better than I was before my year of the pledge.
I used pretty much all of the pointers in this thread to help me learn tunes, BTW, and continue to do so.
Although workshops are a very important way of learning, and one might say essential if you want to get deep into the details of a style - a good tutor will explain the nuances in a way that could otherwise take years to pick up on - I still it more difficult learning tunes from workshops than by any other method. I'm not sure why this is, even though I thoroughly enjoy workshops and wouldn't be without them.
Probably because I've come from a lifetime classical background on other instruments, it took a good two years before I could learn tunes aurally, but I now learn tunes best from sessions, sometimes picking up the fine detail later from the dots, although I'm just as likely to put my own spin on the tune. In some cases, like the English session I go to, I've learnt the tunes entirely from the session and have never seen the dots.
I've never really got into or liked learning tunes from CDs because I feel I'm being forced into learning someone else's individual and detailed interpretation.
I prefer to learn from a real live player rather than a recording.
The only thing is I have few opportunities to hear any uilleann pipers. I play flute & whistle though I love what a good piper can do with a tune. That is where I pull out the CDs.
Learning a tune off by heart
Learning a tune off by heart
Help - I have been learning mandolin for about 6 years now but still find it really hard to learn a tune off by heart. This could be because of my classical upbringing and I am very good at sight reading, so it's easy for me to just read the music. However I am aware that I am the only person in a session with music notation.
Anyone any good tips?
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by Mando Deb
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
Well, when I decided that I wanted to be free from the 'bondage of written music' I made a vow not to look at ANY notation for a year. I began to learn tunes that I'd taped. It wasn't an easy transition at first - but sooooo worth it in the end. But I really had to commit to it because it is quite seductive to go back to the comfortable crutch of the written note. Now I am free. It is great and I finally feel like more of a 'real musician' rather than a musical version of a typist who sees something and repeats what is seen.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by oriley
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
Have you ever tried to simply play a tune you can hum or sing to yourself in your head, on the mandolin?
Take simple songs, Twinkle Twinkle, etc. Just start slowly, and try to pick it out on your mando straight from your head.
This is the basics of how it works. If I can hum or lilt the tune, then I can play it from memory, so start with common, little tunes. Start with anything you know by heart in your head already, popular songs, rock songs, whatever you already know. The important thing is to begin to associate sounds in your head with the movements of your hands on your instrument, not dots on a page.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by SWFL Fiddler
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
The first step is to remove the sheet music from the scene. If you don't, then you will always refer back to it because it's there and you have know that you can read through it.
Some people learn the tune phrase by phrase, stop/rewind/play kind of learning method. It works for some but not so much for me.
I use a two-step method for learning tunes outside of the session. In step one, I saturate myself, listening to the tune repeatedly until I can *sing* it. Yes - get to the point where you can vocalize the tune all by yourself. You don't need a good voice but you should try to be accurate in your pitches to make sure you know what notes are being played. It may take 10 minutes or 10 days of listening but when I can sing the tune, only then I can say that I know it. I still don't know how to play it though. Actually that's not entirely true. By now I can visualize where the notes live on the fretboard and already jump into step 2 but it's not necessary in the early stages.
Step 2 is easier. Sit down with your instrument and find the notes on the fretboard. You already know the tune so there is no distraction. You transfer what you know to the instrument. Once you've found out where the tune "lives" on the mandolin, then you can work on speed, ornamentation and other musical aspects of playing
This may sound odd or even embarrassing but it has been SO effective for me. There are many people who never vocalize tunes and miss the opportunity to connect with it and absorb it more deeply.
Best of luck in shedding an attachment
Avi
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by improziv
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
SWFL Fiddler - we posted almost simultaneously
Avi
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by improziv
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
I'm a classical musician, too, and had to re-think a lot of things when I began going to sessions. There have been many discussions on this site about using music notation in sessions, often shedding more heat than light. This is an aural tradition, and the tunes are best passed along by listening. The inflections and articulations are very different than what you will have learned in your classical training, and will not be represented accurately in notation.
But as a classical musician you will naturally revert to reading the music, as I do. This is what works for me; I have a look at the music, then sing it over and over, without my instrument, many times. The tunes are simple in their form, and you will soon have it memorized.
But that's only the beginning, since so much depends on hearing the tune in recordings, in sound files on this site and on the internet, and live in sessions.
Unless you've played jazz in your training, as a classical musician you are used to precise reproducing of the printed notation. You assume that the music is as the composer intended, without error, and you play with the expression appropriate to the style. That's why we can sightread in all keys and clefs.
In ITM, however, you will almost never find one exact rendition of a tune. Any notation you see will be a compromise, and most of what the tune really sounds like can't be captured on paper. If you play reels and jigs without a clear idea of what this music really sounds like, they will sound like etudes. That's why the aural component is essential.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by Greg the Piano Tuner
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
I use standard music (I can sight-read fairly well) to give me a couple of tips -- whether i start on an up or down stroke, for instance, to keep the DUDUD pattern so I'm 'down' on the downbeat more often than not, and to check the key signature, but I found that I actually knew the music much better than I thought I had after playing it from sheetmusic for two or three years.
Oriley's suggestion to put the music down for a year is an excellent one, but if you just want to test yourself, sit down with your mando and either a recording of something you know, or an accompanist if you have one (my husband and I play together) and just play along stuff you're familiar with without the music. Eyes closed if you have to. Don't worry about mistakes. It might take a couple of tries, but the more you do it, the better. your left hand will remember even if you don't think you know a tune. Take your mando outside and annoy the neighbors if you want.
It's not necessarily a matter of confidence in yourself, it's a test to see if you can ignore perfection for a little while. Be willing to mess up a tune. That's one of the seductions of sheet music. All the notes are there where you can play them with everybody else: instant notational perfection. It's not what you want in the end. You want the music, right? The music doesn't go away when the paper is put away. Really.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by Mandogal
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
By the way, my comments refer to someone who keeps one foot in the classical world, where your reading skills must remain sharp, and the other in the session scene.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by Greg the Piano Tuner
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
What you have to do is not just practise playing the tunes but practise memorising them. When a tune repeats the A part and then the B part, glance at the dots when you start and then look away on the repeat. Then do it without looking at the notation at all. Try to remember a tune without even opening the book and then obsessively carry on trying to remember it all day without looking, and eventually a fragment of the tune will come - hold on to it and construct the rest of the tune, and when you've got it, it sticks. With some tunes it's a fragment of the B part that you can always remember, and you have to reconstruct it from there. I remember 5-part tunes by memorising the first note of each part. Once I go to the right first note the rest just follows. Sometime you know a tune by heart and you play it in a reflex kind of way, and sometime you have to learn it in a more deliberate way., especially if you have a tendency to take a wrong turn into a similar tune.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by RichardB
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
I can read music, although I'm not 'classically trained' and I found learning by ear very difficult at first. I suppose my tip would be 'Don't try and learn any tune that you can't already hear in your mind.' Then, at least when you are trying to play from memory, you will instantly know when you have gone wrong and can do something about it. Well it helped me....
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by mehere
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
all good suggestions so far. This is how I weaned myself off the page - play the tune from music, then turn the page over and play it again. Keep repeating this process. I found that just like singers "read" the words on the inside of their eyelids, I was imagining the printed page.
After a while your image of the shape of the tune is a picture of it written out on the page but the more you keep away from the page the more the fingers start to remember it by themselves by the process of repetition.
The next time you pick up your instrument, try and remember it without the page but refer back to it if you can't remember one or two sections. Just keep doing this till it's memorised. Eventually the process becomes quicker.
Anyway, some soloists in classical music learn pieces and then play without written music in front of them, so it's not necessarily a classical problem, just a crutch problem.
It's difficult at first but gets much easier.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by boxedup
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
I just realised that I've repeated what RichardB said, so I'm going back to lurk mode.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by boxedup
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
I think they key is getting the tune in your head.
I can sight read fairly well, at least the rhythm, and do tend to learn songs this way.
But once I have figured out how to play the song i.e. where to put your fingers and when, I then try to memorise the tune, not necessarily by playing it but even by singing it in my head.
Once the tune is memorised, playing it without sheet music becomes much easier.
Then comes the process of repeated practice so I can play it well, and add my own twists such as ornamentation, etc.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by Njal
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
Thanks everyone - there's certainly some really good tips here. Not sure that I will be brave enough not to look at any music for one year but I may try it for 2 weeks and hum a lot.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by Mando Deb
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
SWFL has a point
I am a 'paper trained' musician late into ITM. But I played with a group of what Americans call 'Folkies' for 30 years so did my share of by ear and improv.
I tried the listen/rewind/listen ad infinitum method with ok experience. But My box teacher got me started on the 'sing the song along with a metronome and then learn it on the instrument' method. I find I am much more confident doing that, and it helps my normally challenged sense of timing.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by zippydw
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
Another thing that may help you is to stop thinking about a tune as a group of specific notes, and start thinking about the contour and flow of the tune. The individual notes don't really matter that much (except the ones that do, of course...
) You can listen to two different players play the same tune, and often times, 15-20% of the notes will differ between the two settings, sometimes more. But you can still easily recognize it as the same tune.
When you let go of the actual notes, it opens up a lot of possibilities for you. The music stops being rigid. You can express the melodic ideas in different ways, you get more apt to do rhythmic and melodic variation. And maybe most importantly of all, you have a lot less information to remember. You remember the shape of the tune, instead of having to remember all the individual notes. So that makes it easier to play the tune with someone else who might play it differently than you, and it allows you to do things like play it in a different key more easily.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by Reverend
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
Play it about 1 million times. you will remember it.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by t4kne
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
Reverend - you made a very interesting and important point.
I distinctly remember asking our session's most experienced and respected player about this when I started playing in sessions. I wanted to understand if he "expected" (or wished) us to all play the exact same notes. I could hear the music being played like that but was "bad form" or ok? Tom is from Ireland and been playing this music for probably 50 years. He said that to him two things were important. One was that the music have the right feel. The second was that we hit the key notes and phrases.
Pretty similar to what you just said. For me that was a profound revelation although with freedom comes responsibility.... I say this because the next logical question would be - ok so what other notes could I play?...and this leads into the aesthetics of variations - improvised or not - a tricky discussion at best.
Although this notion is enormously freeing, I don't think it absolves us from learning certain version of tunes. I find it best to start off constrained and then gradually explore in various directions. The high level benefit is exactly as you stated - the music becomes a wave-like shape, and the individual pixels (notes) have no independent purpose any longer, other than to serve the greater idea.
Thank you for making this observation
Avi
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by improziv
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
t4kne: You've got the cart before the horse.
It's actually: "Listen to it about 1 million times, you will be able to play it."
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by browndog
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
I won't look at the sheet music once I can remember a tune in my head. But I'll admit to finding it a lot easier to get started on a tune with the sheet music, especially if I don't have any way to listen over and over again.
I've been attending an old-time jam with my mountain dulcimer. The old-time jam is much more tolerant of beginners learning tunes on the fly than the Irish session. The old-time tunes seem much simpler to me, too. So I practice my ear training there and am finding that it's helping me with the Irish music.
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by sbhikes
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
Yeah, Avi, in re-reading my post, it almost looks like I'm advocating not learning any particular setting of a tune, but that's not the case at all! You have to have something that you consider to be the "base" setting of the tune before you can "vary" it, of course. And the ideas of variation and expressing melodic ideas differently are things that take years to develop (a process which I am only in the beginning stages of, myself).
But I find that learning the shape of the tune is a great way to learn how it goes. With a little practice, it's much easier (for me, at least) than learning every note. The method lets you feel the intervals, so you can just sense if a note you played was the wrong interval, and adjust it, without having to remember "that's a C sharp" or "that's an F natural", etc.
And at the same time, it sets the stage for opening up the music to all the other wonderful stuff I've mentioned
# Posted on August 22nd 2008 by Reverend
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
This is one of the most helpful discussions I've read at The Session. Thank you to all who have posted suggestions. I agree with the usefulness of knowing the melody in your head in order to get away from depending on sight reading. It works for me too.
# Posted on August 23rd 2008 by mjct
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
Didn't see anyone suggest learning a tune by transcribing it. The trick is that you are satisfying your desire for sheet music whilst educating your ear. Hopefully by the time you have transcribed the tune you will virtually know it without having to refer back to what you wrote down.
# Posted on August 23rd 2008 by Donough
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
Forgot to add that your fingers need to learn the tune too. I found it was a big breakthrough when my fingers could just play a tune, without me having to think of the names of the notes. I mean I stopped thinking g g a b c b or whatever it was all the time when I was playing.
# Posted on August 23rd 2008 by mehere
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
I put aside the sheet music a year ago - and it was incredibly slow (learning phrase by phrase from another fiddler) at first - but it's gotten much faster....and is the best thing I ever did.
The WONDERFUL thing is that the tunes I learn by ear are seemingly embedded in my fingers and in my head - and once memorised - they stick....I've now got about 20 tunes memorised and the process keeps speeding up.
# Posted on August 23rd 2008 by ShariFiddles
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
Exactly what I found and the tunes (or fingering) stay there so much better.
# Posted on August 23rd 2008 by mehere
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
Similarly to what Donough said, another great way to learn a tune really well is to teach it to someone else in person. That really helps solidify it in my memory.
# Posted on August 23rd 2008 by Reverend
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
I whistle.
Some hum (some drum).
Some sing (some hambone)
I whistle. I forget this fact. From time to time I remember. Oh yeah. I hear a tune & instantly start whistling. Did this years before being taught how to read for piano. Can you hum, whistle, or sing a tune? That may get you picking up your instrument before reaching for the tunebook.
The other thing ~ listen in session. (probably without whistling). Sometimes this helps me more than 'trying' to play. I do & begin hearing the tonal center, phrases, modulation . . . I have gone home from session & then continued playing. It amazes me how much I retain of tunes I did not play along with but did listen.
Be brave.
Great pointers from Reverend!
# Posted on August 24th 2008 by Random_notes
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
I took the pledge for a year and just didn't use music except when I couldn't find a recording of a tune that I wanted to learn. I will never be a star at learning by ear, but I'm better than I was before my year of the pledge.
I used pretty much all of the pointers in this thread to help me learn tunes, BTW, and continue to do so.
# Posted on August 25th 2008 by cathrynb
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
Although workshops are a very important way of learning, and one might say essential if you want to get deep into the details of a style - a good tutor will explain the nuances in a way that could otherwise take years to pick up on - I still it more difficult learning tunes from workshops than by any other method. I'm not sure why this is, even though I thoroughly enjoy workshops and wouldn't be without them.
Probably because I've come from a lifetime classical background on other instruments, it took a good two years before I could learn tunes aurally, but I now learn tunes best from sessions, sometimes picking up the fine detail later from the dots, although I'm just as likely to put my own spin on the tune. In some cases, like the English session I go to, I've learnt the tunes entirely from the session and have never seen the dots.
I've never really got into or liked learning tunes from CDs because I feel I'm being forced into learning someone else's individual and detailed interpretation.
# Posted on August 25th 2008 by lazyhound
Re: Learning a tune off by heart
I prefer to learn from a real live player rather than a recording.
The only thing is I have few opportunities to hear any uilleann pipers. I play flute & whistle though I love what a good piper can do with a tune. That is where I pull out the CDs.
# Posted on August 25th 2008 by Random_notes