I have read several comments in this forum that learning to play without sheet music and memorizing tunes by singing them is the only way to become adapt at playing by ear. I would like to have some follow up in where one can find tunes that are easy to learn by listening and where does one get singing versions of popular ITM tunes. Most ITM music does not have words to sing so perhaps there is another interpretation of singing.
I am in a series of six classes of learning tunes by ear with Sean Murphy here on Cape Cod.
We learn the tune by listening to Sean play a measure (bar) at a time on his flute - first one repeated numerous times, then on to the second bar and third and so forth until the tune is completely played through.
Sean tells us the notes he is playing but no music or ABC sheet is given out until the end of the one hour lesson.
As a background guitar player I find it a very difficult process but the fiddle and whistle players are doing quite well after three weeks of lessons.
Bill, “singing” the tunes is more commonly known as litling--mouthing syllables for the melody: “Dee-eiddely diddle um diddle-eee oh.” Etc.
You can do this with any tune. Just listen to it over and over until the melody is stuck in your head. Then lilt it. Just like how you learned to hum along to Happy Birthday or Danny Boy.
Will is right on the money.
Not some much singing but vocalizing.
I find it also helps when you are learning to do the dee-diddly-dahs to a metronome so that you don’t inadvertantly get creative with the tune before actually committing the correct version to memory.
What you vocalize first usually is what sticks and can be a hard to change/relearn.
I agree that it’s important that you don’t inadvertantly get “creative” with a tune before actually committing the correct version to memory. But I fail to see where a metronome would help?
it helps you get the head bobble right while you’re lilting? I’d think a dashboard hula girl on top of the speaker would be just as effective
For the love of God, don’t mention metronomes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Step away from the cliff’s edge while you still can!!!!!!!!!!!!
Comhaltas Ceoltori Eireann’s Foinn Seisiun CDs are not lilted, but are good to learn from by ear. Also, if you could find a teacher or fellow player to lilt or play tunes for you so that you can record it on a tape recorder or something and come back to it later, that’s really helpful. Good luck!
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get a clockwork metronome. Watching the swinging arm, even out of the corner of your eye, really helps.
# Posted on April 8th 2007 by llig leahcim
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If find doing what zippydw suggest really helpful, and I remembered llig’s post because I was doing it a lot in April. I tend to walk around stamping my feet at the same time. That transfers to walking steadilly up hill and lilting in time. The funny looks I get then brings on a need to lilt in my head, which is where it needs to be.
Context david, it’s important.
“One problem to watch out for though, is if you are in the habit of slowing down certain phrases, the metronome will make you speed up the next phrase, to get your self back in time. This just makes it twice as bad”
I think the thing about watching it is that you get a sense of where within the beet you are. It’s easier to feel the pulse of it and even to swing either side of it a little. Just the tick tock is too rigid.
For the vast majority of people, I think that practising with a metronome would be detrimental. It’s certainly detrimental to being in the slightest bit musical. However, I have come across those who are so bad, my advice would be to go home, lock your instrument in its case, and listen to nothing but a metronome for a month.
However, I still fail to see where a metronome would help you learning tunes? In the 1 to 20 mins or so it takes to get the basics of a tune, you’ll often find the odd bit a little harder to internalise than other bits. Within those 1 to 20 mins, I’d usually run those bits a little slower.
I dont care if I’m far from home,
As long as I’ve got my metronome,
ticking on the dashboard of my car……
OK llig , I started off including your whole post then edited it down for brevity, but I think my following post picked up some of your context (swinging legs rather that metronome arms) and was more relevant to the subject.
Also the original context was about playing like a robot where your observation about speeding to catch up was relevant. But in playing with other people or, I assume for dancers, getting back on beat might be appreciated. Missing a bit rather than compounding the error would be better I suppose, but the beats goes on.
I think you must mean “for the vast majority of people” who play reasonably competently in sessions. You were grumbling a few weeks ago about a banjo player who seemed to be timing his arm movement rather than the sound as the pick released the string. When I started playing mandolin either a book or a friend suggested that I should spend time playing patterns to a metronome until I could no longer hear the attack of the on-beat note seperate from the click of the metronome; not music, just building up neuromuscular skills (and as zippydw said, no danger of getting creative with a real tune).
Now, (and getting back on topic) I am using the metronome again with the flute. Sometimes. Partially as ‘temporal target practice’ for the attack of the note, as on the mandolin, but more because after decades of talking and a bit of singing my ability to be creative with the rhythm, tempo and supposed musical expression in order to get a breath in is well developed. I’ll worry about swinging a bit either side of the beat when I can hit it reliably under a wide range of circumstances. Or when playing along with a version of the tune (record or in head) that does it. .
Which, is why I am supporting zippydw’s suggestion. People have to breath whilst lilting.
The other context of that thread was the title, “How to stop sounding like a machine when using a metronome”. So the advice not to use one at all still stands. But if you do, look at the swing of the arm.
You have to be able to internalise where you are accross the beat at all times. Not just syncronise your down beats with the click. If you try to do that, you may end up aticipating the click coming.
You don’t have to have the metronome play every subdivision for you - that *would* make someone sound terrible. Just have it play, oh, twice in the measure of a reel, or twice for a jig, and that will provide enough room to play the rest of the measure right and learn to not speed up.
I’m having trouble with that last paragraph Llig. I find that walking is better for knowing where I am in time than a series of clicks. You are saying that looking is better that hearing clicks. But are you also saying that it is not possible to interpolate the time within a series of clicks ? That would include anticipating when the next one was coming.
In order to make anything sound as if it happens at a particular time (on the beat or otherwise) you have to somehow , not conciously, anticipate when that time will be - e.g. the banjo players wrist movement to hit and releasing a string.
How, in the context of learning and practicing tunes, does the metronome differ from playing with dance band drummer keeping a steady beat ? (that’s not rhetorical)
(sorry billcampbell, we are off your topic. But I find what Will suggests is working for me)
FWIW I find what llig is concerned about really obvious when Shetlanders play in 3/4. Even one click per bar has me thinking ‘good heavens, is that happening then’.
I think I’m saying that you have to interpolate the time within a series of beats/clicks. That’s the whole point of it. Yes, walking is a good way of knowing where you are. It’s the whole analogue thing, about appreciating the flow of it, rather than the subdivisions.
Continuing my FWIW , which may have been ambiguous, what really brought home to me the problem with dots was laboriously learning this https://thesession.org/tunes/5020
from this
https://thesession.org/recordings/2103
having fun following the rhythm whilst walking and then trying to put it into ABC. One day maybe I will get my head round the swing in reels.
I hate metronomes and have never gotten along with them ever since a piano teacher tried to make me use a metronome when I was nine. I had my last piano lesson with this woman on the day when I picked up the metronome and tried to throw it out the window.
Was the window shut at the time? 🙂
I quite understand. The correct use for a metronome, as far as I am concerned, is not to play along with it but to use it to set a tempo. This is how my piano teacher used it: I’d be learning a Bach fugue, for example, and she’d set the metronome at 44 for the first run-through, and then turn it off as soon as I started playing. At the end she’d switch it on again to show whether my speed had changed during the fugue. Next week, she’d repeat the process, but at a slightly higher speed.
david h
Even though it is off topic the thread is still providing some useful info, however I still await more suggestions as to where I could find easily learned tunes being played by an accomplished tune fiddler, if I can use that term to describe those who do play well.
As for metronomes, I purchased one recently even though my wife thought I was throwing my money away ( she was right) and damned if I can make it keep time with me. My rythmn seems to go off in different beats when I get into that ITM stuff regardless of what the metronome tells me.
I knew I would raise some people’s ire with the metronome comment. My teacher, as well as some fellow musicians might smirk at hearing me recommend that.
But for learning the tune it works. Ususally, there is a point once one the instrument, that the metronome can be dropped off (no jokes about cliffs etc) and the work to make the tune sound less mechanical can be done.
I find I can do it while driving which makes for a nice use of drive time now that the Republicans have taken over NPR and made it an affiliate of Fox News.
My teacher is 45 mile from my home so coming back I can play his CD of the day’s lesson a couple of times, and start to do the ‘diddley-dee’ version and no one is there to tell me how bad a singing voice I have.
But usually when I get home I can start translating the tune onto the box which for me at least is a running start.
Yes, lazyhound, the window was shut and it was wintertime.
Put me down as someone who can’t use a metronome, including the type you plug into your ear. Speed and timing are not really a problem for me if I have sheet music and the tune is not too difficult. What I CANNOT do is sit and listen to a session, or to a single player and have any idea of the acutal notes being played unless I can see the hands of the player. Acoustically alone, I cannot, for instance, distinguish a “D,” let’s say, (i.e., 5th fret, 2 nd string on a tenor banjo) from the “B” below it or the “F#” above it on the next string.) Recording, such as the Comhaltas CD’s mentioned by jasonb don’t help. What’s a middle aged banjo player with a slight hearing loss going to do?
After 18 months or so of slow progress at learning and playing by ear, there seem some distinct skills. One is to do with the instrument, my fingers knowing where to go without me having to think, a bit like touch typing. I suspect not being able to see my fingers on flute helps (the mirror tends to mess it up) Another is finding a starting note so that the intervals work out. Getting better but often have to start at the end then into the repeat. A third, as sfarrell says, is hearing the tune properly. Being a third out, particularly on un-stressed notes. When trying to lilt it can be mixing fifths and octaves.
Getting back to metronomes, after sfarrell’s comment. Presumably fauxcelt and lazyhound were learning from
the dots. I wonder if visible divisions of time help with the real ones.
Sure, I was learning that Bach fugue from the dots! You’ve got to be up there with the likes of Mozart to be able to learn something as complex as that by ear!
This music teacher did use sheet music. I didn’t take lessons with her long enough to find out whether or not she also did ear training.
Since then, I have learned to appreciate the importance of listening and ear training.
There are no easy tunes to learn by ear - what I mean by that is that when you first start out it is all hard, but once you’ve been doing it for awhile then it becomes easier and easier - there are a few tunes that you wouldnt want to start out on….like 4 or 5 parter tunes or ones in strange keys. But really - just start with some of the basics, Silver Spear, The Kesh, Bird in the Bush, The Clare jig….and just practise and it’ll come. I have no idea why people are suggesting metronomes - very strange indeed.
Some people have to use metronomes because they have a lousy sense of rhythm and timing.
Really? If someone has a problem with rhythm and timing then they should be practising lots. I had probs with speeding up, but now I dont….. Cause I practise and listen heaps and tap my foot. You cant play trad with a metronome *because* what happens when you want to bend the note a little more…like all the greats do (if you listen carefully) If you play like a metronome then you cant allow for these little stylistic things like that. Lengthening some notes etc.
I find pentatonic tunes easier to learn by ear. Bigger intervals. Less notes to chose from.
I do practise sometimes with a metronome, and I think it can be very beneficial so long as you don’t rely on it too much. It encourages you to experiment with syncopation, slurring across the beat, switching the stress to the offbeat etc that the really tasty players can do. You can lengthen notes like bb says but wherever you lengthen you have to contract to join up with the beat again, otherwise you’ll end up in a different place to the other players. and you might fall into the error of thinking it’s everybody else’s fault! I don’t think you need a metronome just to keep to a simple beat - if that’s the case, take up a different “hobby”! The metronome I’ve got came from an antique stall - a vintage French one. Just needed a bit of clock oil and it works a treat, with a bell that sounds in different timings too if you want. It’s too lovely not to use it occasionally.
I envy my son’s ability. He can learn a tune in one hearing, without playing along. He just remembers it and recalls it later when he’s ready to play it. Damnedest thing…
fauxclet - “Some people have to use metronomes because they have a lousy sense of rhythm and timing.”
I’d rephrase that as “lots of people don’t have an innate sense of the rhythms of Irish music because they’ve spent most of their lives listening to something else”. That way, you could then suggest that maybe some focussed practice with the old metronome might do them some good. It’s the ones that think they don’t need it that are usually the problem.
Bob Yourself: I envy your son’s ability too.
Before I started studying music in college, I already had a good sense of timing and rhythm from listening to and playing ragtime piano music for many years. Earning a bachelor’s degree in music helped sharpen and improve my sense of rhythm and timing considerably.
What I found most helpful was having to accompany voice majors during their lessons because I had to play some rather complex and difficult music over and over again exactly the same way each time. Some of these voice majors were too lazy to practice on their own.
I graduated from college in 1990 and I didn’t start playing Irish music until someone elses started a session here in 1995.