This is a survey to help me gauge phobia in the trad/Mustard community.
question: do you have a bias one way or the other about learning tunes?
My answer: I do my best to use each according to which works best for me depending on my expectations.
Tunes by ear: I usually have errors
Tunes by ABC: usually not natural enough
Tunes with a bit of both:usually good
O.K. Maybe this really is a survey.
Thank you, Baine.
;)
I play some tunes I’ve learnt purely by ear and am quite happy with them. I would be much more uncomfortable learning entirely from a piece of written music. Unless it was something very standard I would be afraid I had misinterpreted it.
No phobias: much less likely to carry around great folders of sheet music than I was in the past: just a few tune scores in my iPad. Just slowly but surely adding to those I have learned - mainly from scores - but then by continuing repetition over the last 15 years or so, I can now play by ear/take in any regional variations in how they are played, etc.
Much as you said in your OP, AB.
Thanks for the contributions thus far. I’m pleasantly surprised.
Personally I don’t care if anyone wants to discuss their phobias. I’m more interested in hearing about what you want to share.
Ben
Can read the dots at a slow speed, mostly learn by ear. Play from memory. Once it’s in my head, it’s mostly there to stay. Strongly prefer to learn by ear because there is so much there that is not available in the dots. Don’t care how people learned the tune initially, I only care how it sounds when I hear it, or when I have to play with the person.
Aaron, I appreciate your post. I hope and trust you are playing/learning lots of tunes.
Ben
I don’t like snakes, but I have no phobias. I play by ear because its the easiest way FOR ME, I have no objection to referring to the sheets if I have to, or about other people learning in whatever way they do. Spiders are cool!
No fears either way. I do find that if I take a peek at the sheet music after learning something by ear, it helps me to solidify the tune and fix any errors. I don’t use slow-down technology for ear learning.
EDIT: My bias would be relatively neutral at this point; I’m totally fine with learning either way.
I swing both ways. I learn tunes from other people by ear, but I also spend a lot of timer looking for obscure tunes that other people don’t play, and those have to come from paper. But I find I internalize tunes much faster by ear, so when I’m getting a tune from paper I’ll practice it through until I can play it cleanly, then record myself and then learn by ear from that recording.
One thing I’ve noticed is that once I know a tune, having dots in front of me is a hindrance not a help - anywhere that the score deviates from what I normally play is a stumbling block that is likely to trip me up.
Although I can read music, I can’t learn a tune from the dots unless I can already hear the tune in my head. Otherwise, I’m just playing a string of notes.
I prefer learning by ear and this is my main source of tune learning. It’s just easier, for me. I use ABC quite a lot too, as that is also very easy, but I like to improve my ear skills as much as possible. I’m not at the point where I can sit down at a session and pick up a tune I’ve never heard before and be playing it before the set is finished but that is the goal!
I use sheet music the odd time, mainly for non-folk related things. Stuff I like to play on the accordion, like Yann Tiersen or big epic Soviet marches. But it is my least preferred method, not because I think it’s any less valid but I’m just not as good at it. There have been times where I’ve tried to use sheet music for learning a tune but gave up and went back to ear learning in frustration. As minijackpot says I really need to hear the tune first before trying it on sheet music or else it’s just a string of notes. But if I’m already listening to a tune I might as well try work it out…
Ear/ABC/dots all have their own place and pros and cons. When it comes to trad, I think that ear learning is better. For classical and more conventional compositions (like pop songs or waltzes or whatever) I think sheet music is good, as it’s right to try imitate the composer’s original version as much as possible. ABC on the other hand is just useful. Very nice when you’re traveling around, hear a tune and need to just scribble it down in your notepad.
Reading pianoter’s post just reminded me that I ‘almost’ have a phobia with ABC’s . I just can’t take to it or make myself try. Whenever people communicate with it on here i just ignore it. For me it’s ears first, and then if I need it, notes, but NEVER ABC.
well, I ‘almost’ have a phobia with written music - I look at it and I ‘m reciting to myself Every Good Boy Deserves Favour , right so that one must be an E, then after a few minutes my mind starts to wander and I think of all the other things I could be doing - like actually playing tunes! Ok, learning anything requires application and effort, but somehow ’the dots’ never quite seemed worth the effort - crows perching on telephone wires.
Gobby, I’d recommend giving it a try. It’s easier than the dots, and useful when you want to transcribe on the go. I find I can have a simple Irish tune just about learned in 10 minutes if I use ABC! In fact, it’s probably *too* easy. There have been a few times I’ve been learning by ear, got lazy and ended up using the ABC listed here.
Hey, hey, we’re back to this again.. 😉
I started off playing by ear as everybody does, even although they don’t know it. Some people study music from a very early age that they don’t realise or forget that they have this natural skill….
These days, I use both listening techniques and the dots to learn. Quite often in combination with each other. Playing along with a recording while looking at the dots can be a good way I think. Of course, there may be subtle differences but with experience you can handle that.
I don’t need to do this with simple tunes but it does help with some marches, strathspeys etc where there is a lot of dotted rhythms. If I stick to the sheet music alone, I invariably get these back to front if I don’t concentrate sufficiently.
As for ABC, I use it a lot but I don’t like learning or playing tunes from it directly. I’ll usually transpose it into standard musical notation either by hand or a computer programme/app for this purpose.
I’ve always found that there seems to be a lack of standardisation in its use especially when transcribed by hand by musicians in sessions, workshops etc although I’m fairly “au fait” with the Steve Mansfield version with which most of us here are probbaly familiar.
I’m possibly wrong but I get the impression that “ABC” is used more often in a casual manner, i.e. jotting down the tunes and playing directly from same by players of Irish traditional music as oppposed to Scottish or other players?
I once went to a harp course with Michelle Mulcahy who taught us tunes with the aid of her version of “ABC”. She was the perfect tutor and musician in every other respect but I found it more helpful to transpose what she gave us into standard notation and, of course, I also used my ears.
Learning by ear
Comfort (pluses) - I prefer to listen to tunes rather than read them, saves my eyes, portable, no problem without my glasses.
Fear (negatives) - going deaf, slow down & loop gets stuck.
Learning from sheet music
Comfort (pluses) - I like the biggy curly thingy at the start of the music, handy for when I go deaf, makes you look smart.
Fear (negatives) - don’t like the dots with tails (but the horizontal rules are cool), 3/4, 4/4, 6/8 etc. is that some kind of tune grading? hashtags? too complicated, loosing glasses.
By a narrow margin I prefer to learn by ear
Learn by ear -
Comfort - feel the tune
Fear - miss a subtle but beautiful part of the tune
Learn by dots -
Comfort - technical information available immediately
Fear - wrong version- unpopular key on the session
It doesn’t matter what you learn or how you learn, but that you learn.
I don’t care either way but for me dots tends to be less hassle to learn a new tune.
No phobias about either. I do both imperfectly. Ears are always the dominant element and the only one for the rhythm. Dots, via ABC, are mainly a way of making ‘notes’ for if I partially forget a tune, or forget it even exists until someone starts it .
No issues either way. I will say that a well crafted score is very good at conveying the feel of a tune, including the rhythm. Not all scores are well crafted. Likewise, hearing a tune played well is equally good. Not all tunes are played well. There is no universal guarantee either way of learning a tune well and I fail to understand how one way or another is best for retaining a tune. I’d argue that if you can’t remember a tune, you didn’t really learn it (allowing for the difference between “learning” and “recognizing” a tune, they are different). I think I’ve mentioned this before, one thing about a score is that it keeps me from making things up when I lose a part of a tune.
I am resolutely with Ailin. By ear or by score, the important thing is to learn the tune!
Learning by ear is not one of my strong suits, and I admire those who have the ability to do so. Honestly, I don’t have the patience for it and it takes me far too long. I’m only one year into playing the whistle, and I want to collect many tunes in my repertoire. When I hear a tune I want to learn, I will hunt down the sheet music and play it over and over again. Once I have played it several times, I am able to do so without looking at the sheet music and add my own style to it. I say take whatever route you desire to achieve the end result you seek.
I often learn from sheet music because I can read it well and can immediately play the tune. But the problem with this approach is it doesn’t even slightly commit itself to memory, whereas learning it by ear quickly burns it into the memory, both short term and long term.
Learning by ear:
Comfort—it gets immediately committed to memory, and I get the feel of it naturally ingrained.
Fear—Am I missing some complexity, or over simplifying things? Do I trust the source I’m learning it from?
Learning by dots:
Comfort—Reading music is easy for me.
Fear—Am I remembering correctly how “so and so” plays it, and can I figure out which parts are played differently? Is this a common version or an uncommon one? Am I getting the phrasing/pulse/feeling right?
Thanks, everybody. I like all the contributions in this discussion. Lot of different perspectives.
I don’t have any relevant comments at the moment, just checking in. If anyone hasn’t posted yet
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Cheers!
I just reread Johnny Jay’s post about being in a workshop with Michelle Mulcahy, which must have been nothing short of grand. I know this is off topic but, Johnny Jay, if you want to post anything about what
you learnt during the workshop I for one would like to give you free reign to post another paragraph or two.
You don’t have to, it being off subject and all. By the way I’m fluent in abc shorthand so if you have a copy of anything she gave to you let me know. Like I don’t have enough tunes to learn now. Did you record the class?
;)
O, tidings of comfort and fear …..
At this point, I don’t learn new tunes for the sake of learning new tunes - I already have too many that I can’t play right …..
For many years, I avoided sheet music in the vain hope of improving my ear. Well, it might have helped; the jury’s still out. So here’s what I’ve taken to doing lately: if I do decide to learn a new tune, I listen to it enough - if I haven’t already heard it enough - to ‘know’ it roughly in my head, then I’ll dig up sheet music if I can, and I’ll ‘learn’ it from that, which usually takes no more than about 15 min. Which certainly doesn’t mean I have it mastered that quickly, but that I know what the notes are supposed to be, and don’t need the sheet music any more. Of course, once in a while I might go back and check something, but not often, and only after I’ve really tried and really failed to dig what I’m missing out of my cranium. I do think it helps to exercise those memory muscles, and the temptation to go back to the sheet music is better resisted.
Hi AB,
I’ll have a look and see what I have. It was a couple of years ago now. I did record bits and pieces but I’ll have to find them amongst everything. I’m sure she played most of the tunes for us beforehand. I’ve also got music for the tunes which I prepared myself and, probably, some of the ABC.
Of course, it’s arranged for the harp and will be slightly different but the melody line will be much the same I’d imagine.
Michelle is a very friendly and approachable person and, as I say, a great tutor in every other way. As you will know, she’s also a great flute player, accordionist, and fiddler although she only played the harp while she was Edinburgh that time.
I learn almost entirely by ear - listen to the tune any number of times first, then sometimes play along with the recording, which tends to send it to memory fairly quickly. Always works for me. You have to recognise that you don’t always play in the conventional key when learning from youtube footage / recordings though - something which only comes to light when playing the said tune in a session.
I couldn’t even begin to tell you what chords I play on the bass side of the accordion. It’s just what comes naturally to the tune.
I haven’t learned a tune straight from the music in years, although I could read it well back then, when I learned the violin and piano as a child. You do forget though, and I have to think about it too much, so rarely bother. After all, the aim is to play nice tunes, not to make it hard for myself.
I don’t even know what learning by ABC is. I’m assuming you’re writing the notes themselves as letters? Or something else?
I’m a both. I have no phobias about learning one way or the other; there are tunes that are harder for me to sort out by ear on flute because of ease of access to the notes. For those I may need to use a different instrument or pick up the sheets. I do remember my childhood struggle with learning to read music and being able to play things by ear more easily than reading complex music but a couple of decades of playing music changes things and for the most part I can read most clefs and my limitations are wholly unexpected patterns.
There is a group I play with focused on learning new tunes where we usually start with sheet music but someone always knows the tunes. Parts of that group are more sensitive to ‘that’s not on the page’ when anyone plays a different version of a tune but for the most part it’s ignored unless there’s major dissonance. Half the group has actually learned the tunes and the other half digs for the pages but we enjoy being together and we don’t call it a session.
Comments in this thread, and in others make me think many people misunderstand the purpose of ABC-notation. You’re not actually supposed to read the music directly from the ABC-notation, although some people can and do, do so, but you are supposed to feed it as the input to software that transforms it into sheet music, most often as a pdf file.
I am not sure you are ‘supposed’ to do anything. A form of ABC is used instead of a score at times in Ireland (look at the blackboards in videos of workshops).
I think some people look upon the score as if it was as mysterious as hieroglyphics and so ABC, or a form of ‘Tab’ for their instrument, is more accessible. Others read the score as fluently as they do their native language and seem to regard ABC as a pointless compromise for the illiterate.
Most of us are somewhere in between and use it as it best suites us. And leave the extremes to get on with it.
If I want to learn a tune, I learn it no matter which way it’s thrown at me. Via sheet music, ABC, recordings, phrase by phrase, sessions… However, I only get the “big picture”/“story” from hearing the actual tune. And that is very helpful for personal interpretation, phrasing, variations…
question: do you have a bias one way or the other about learning tunes?
No.
“My sister plays fiddle completely by ear”
“That’s nothing, last night I caught me brother fiddling with his willy”
I learn by ear - and then cross reference what I think I’ve learned by listening to other versions of it.
I pick up some tunes on the fly but mostly go to the music, learn off that , then adjust to the people I’m playing with. I’ve never been taught music so
With ceilidh bands, I just fill in now and then and they might have learned/written new sets/tunes since I last played. Some venues, it’s too noisy onstage to hear in detail what’s going on , or hear myself properly, and I don’t get much sitdown rehearsal time with them. Well, none.
So I go to the music, then next time I play with them I adjust to the way they play, notice the ornamentations and stuff and work out whether I’m best to play strict unison or something else. Sometimes they’ll send me notation of new tunes. Sometimes the bride or groom want particular tunes.
But I really take John’s point - everybody plays by ear, even if they don’t.
Not sure if this will answer your question, Ben, but I always learn a tune from someone’s playing, usually a recording. I almost always write it out in both ABC and staff notation, but that is to ‘archive’ it. I play it from memory. Over a long period of time I make tunes that I like more my own in the sense that I deviate from the model I learned from. This is not intentional; it just happens and is not always for the best since my models are usually players better than I am. One thing I’m very curious about and don’t have an answer for is why some tunes can be learned almost instantly and others take much longer. And the tunes can be very similar: I learned Trip to Birmingham very quickly but after much work still don’t have Father O‘Grady’s Visit to Bocca down. Vincent Broderick’s, The New Broom came quickly, but I still don’t have The Holly Bush (reel) (these aren’t similar of course, but I started learning them about the same time). I don’t have any ’fear’ of using notation or memory, but I played classical music for many year (using notation) and flamenco guitar for just as many (using ear alone).
Cheers, cac
Your response is grand. If Johnny Jay hadn’t mentioned his experience with Michelle Mulcahy it might have been the best one yet. I do appreciate the depth of your response &, if it is not obvious, I also appreciate Ms. Mulcahy.
I learn by ear.
I did start to learn Braille music as a teen, but not being able to read and play at the same time made it seem pointless for me.
I would like to learn to read ABC, because:
1. I would find it useful for looking at small sections of tunes that I have real trouble with when learning by ear.
2. It is easy to read on a Braille Display.
3. I don’t think I need to learn a new Braille Code to read ABC.
But always learning by ear would be my first choice 🙂
I like to learn a tune from the dots and later play it without looking at them. One problem I have (is it really a problem) is that when playing for dancing without the dots, I simply make up the measures I don’t remember.
Eyes and ears are both tools. I have a friend who learned a new jig from the dots. It was note perfect but totally dead because the triplets were all written equally. I showed her how to play with proper emphasis on the different notes and it came alive.
Sylvia Miskoe Concord NH USA
Sometimes I learn by listening to a tune over and over and then teaching it to myself from memory. But sometimes my memory is wrong and I learn the tune wrong. Then I will probably be corrected with some stern looks and a bit of self-correction later.
My “instinctive” way to learn a tune is by sheet music, as that’s the way I was taught to do so in school. It’s what I default to.
However, as I’ve been participating in the Quebecois session community in the Seattle area as well as actively taking fiddle lessons and attending trad music workshops when I can get to them, I’m getting more practice at learning by ear. Which is, in turn, improving my ability to pick up stuff by ear in an actual session. I’m not where I want to be yet, but active study is helping.
And so in that active study, like a bunch of the folks further up the thread, I wind up using both methods as necessary. If I’m just trying to get a basic idea of how a tune works, I will often just read it off the sheet music. Then I’ll work on dressing it up, adding ornamentation to try to better match how we play it in session, and such--if on my flutes and whistles, anyway. I’m not to a point yet where I can actually deal with ornamentation on a fiddle. ;D
Ear learning has an immediacy that sheet music lacks, in my opinion. So I might hear a really great new tune and just go ‘I’m learning that!’ and play the track a few more times and pick up the fiddle. Or I might have a tune going round and around in my head and when I get a free moment, again, I just pick up the fiddle.
You have to find out the name and go looking for the sheet music and then check that it’s not another tune with the same name, and then learn it, and then come back and listen to the track or other musicians so you can adjust it if you’re using the dots.
But yes, sometimes there’s just a bit that you can’t get your head around and you have to go and find out exactly which notes they are. Or I’m in a hurry to learn something, even just the rough outline of the tune. Then sheet music comes in to its own.
“even just the rough outline of the tune”
Yeah. Even written music/a tune picked up from a recording/an ABC transcription/etc can be a rough outline. If it’s written down (in whatever form) it’s still no guarantee that it’s “accurate”. (It may even be “too” accurate so there’s no room for interpretation.)
Even if I (think) I know a tune inside-out, every time I play it, I get another piece of the puzzle. Sometimes it’s thanks to fellow musicians, sometimes I hear something new on the same old recording…