Learning a new instrument, or returning to an old one: do you have “skelf” tunes?

I came back to the whistle after decades away from playing music, expecting to be terrible but unprepared for just how terrible. If you’d been a decent player, you’d think you’d retain at least some muscle memory, wouldn’t you? Well, apparently not.

One of the first tunes I reconstructed was the most leaden, joyless version of The Silver Spear ever, followed by a consistently fumbled Drowsy Maggie. Thing is, even after improving by a couple of orders of magnitude, I still mess up these two tunes. It drives me nuts.

Does anyone else learning or re-learning an instrument find there are tunes that, for no reason at all, they just can’t get on top of?

(A skelf, by the way, is an annoying splinter of wood stuck under your skin.)

I have tunes like this too and some much more recent.

It might be that when you first played some of these early tunes, your learning ability hadn’t developed fully and you had already moved on to other ones before they had really “sunk in”.
I’ve found myself that, on revisiting some tunes, I hadn’t learned them properly first time around but what I thought was correct was still stuck in my head. So, relearning can sometimes be trickier than starting form scratch? That’s a theory, anyway.

There are other tunes that don’t seem to have the right feel either. As I’ve said elsewhere, they are often on the “back burner” but most of them seem to “click” eventually. Sometimes, I maybe have just tried too hard with some tunes especially those which you feel under an obligation(Why?) to know.
However, as I’ve also mentioned before, most of my favourite tunes seem to find me rather than the other way around. That includes some of those which cause difficulty and they eventually “seek me out” when they are ready.

I was a decent harper, even played receptions solo and gigs in a harp quartet. Due to surgery and health issues I haven’t played in 15 years and have finally dusted off my harp. I was totally unprepared for how much skill I’ve lost. It definitely is NOT like riding a bicycle! I wasn’t able to get through even one simple tune. So frustrating. My solution has been to pretend I’ve never played before. Just pull out all the beginner books and start brand new, not get ahead of myself, work on the basics. It’s going much better. I long for the days I could just pull out a piece of music and learn it without too much frustration, then play it in public. But I’ll get there again. Be patient with yourself, WhistlingFionn.

It’s interesting that others have had the same experience.

I think my brain just marked them as tunes I found hard, and it wouldn’t have mattered at all how objectively difficult (or not) they were. The opposite was just as true: things that happened to go straight under my fingers went into the Confident category, even though I probably didn’t play them any better or worse than dozens of others I worked on in the first year or two. It’s interesting how much learning is affected by psychology and sheer chance, and I expect I’ll probably find other bogey tunes.

I came to much the same conclusion as Kathlene about re-learning the skill. In some ways it is a bit different, as I can only manage the bigger, lower pitched whistles that weren’t even around when I taught myself to play as a youngster. But the difference is I’ve now had a lifetime’s experience of listening to music, and it’s so much more frustrating when you have a clear picture of how you’d like it to sound!

Some of the “easy” ones are really hard for me and I can’t for the life of me figure out why they are considered standard beginner tunes. Sometimes when I put my violin away for a while I play it really well the day I come back to it. And then it all falls apart again and I put the damn thing away again.

I want to thank you all for these comments. I have come to playing music late in life at age 70. I started with the mandolin and then at 71 started on studying the piano with a teacher in order to learn music theory. There is rarely a tune I can play without making a mistake. But when I do get through one the way I think it should be, oh the joy. Reading the frustration that you have gone through gives me the heart to carrying on the work because the reward is more than the music at my age. While the echoes of my youthful ego are bruised, my arthritic fingers feel better, my mind is more alert and engaged, and I have the wonderful tunes in my head to displace news and current commercial radio.

I play viola and mandola. My first mandola had a significantly longer string length than my viola. I had lots of problems moving back and forth between the two. If I played a tune a lot on just one, then switched to the other, I often stumbled. I recently got a new mandola with a string length pretty close to the viola, and I have fewer (but not no) problems.

I basically stopped playing guitar, 5 string banjo and concertina during Covid. When sessions and gigs started up again I picked up the instruments once more.
I couldn’t believe how much I had forgotten not only with instrument arrangements but also words of songs. So here I am now still relearning so much.
Muscle memory - Pah!