The Snowy Path

I'd like to express my deep gratitude to a member of the Columbus slow sessions email list who directed my attention to the Riley School of Irish Music tunes page, where I found a slow recording of the beautiful slip jig The Snowy Path. The slow recording makes the tune almost trivial to pick up by ear; just start on F# and play in D major and if you know the tune at all you'll have it in no time.

This tune was composed by Mark Kelly of Altan; you can hear it on their album Harvest Storm, including a gorgeous flute solo by Frankie Kennedy. Click the Amazon ad on the right to hear a short sample of Altan's recording of this tune.

Technique: Ear Learning

The other day I got the Jig of Slurs stuck in my head and I wanted to try and work it out by ear. Now I find two general things challenging in the area of ear learning. One is learning the tune well enough that I don't get confused about it when I make mistakes trying to play it. The second is figuring out where to start.

The second problem generally involves a good bit of trial and error for me, but this time I realized the solution was easy. The Jig of Slurs is a pipe tune, so it has to be in A mixolydian, since that's the only key the GHBs can play! This is a pretty useful shortcut if, like me, you haven't yet learned how to reliably distinguish all of the modes by ear.

Learning tunes "by ear" is something of a euphamism for me since I tend to memorize the tune first and then try to play it later, instead of playing along with a recording. One thing which has been helpful for this process is to lilt the songs instead of humming (or playing) them when learning. There are several reasons I think this is helpful:

• It divorces knowledge of the tune itself from the technical ability to play it, allowing me to focus on really learning the tune.
• Lilting is less forgiving than humming in terms of making you get the tune right. When I hum I tend to slur notes a bit, and this makes it easy to gloss over notes that I don't have right in my memory. With lilting it's harder to get away with this.

I tried to find a link about lilting, but I can't find anything. Any suggestions? The best suggestion I have is to listen to a good recording. I'm enjoying Colm O'Donnell's excellent Farewell to Evening Dances, which features lilting, singing, whistle, and flute.

Tunes: Lullaby of London

As a regular part of my daily whistle practice, I pick a tune at random (one I can hum) and try to play it. This is a method of practicing ear learning. Last night I tried The Pogues's Lullaby of London, a song I sometimes sing to my daughter at bedtime.

Wow, that sounds really nice on the whistle! It was very easy to learn, too. Thus far I'm just following the vocal melody, but I'm going to keep fiddling with it.

This is fun, because it's taken a fair amount of work to pick up the other tunes I have memorized now, since I didn't know the tunes well at the outset. But since I've had this song memorized for years and it's fairly slow, I was able to pick it up in about ten minutes. This is a dramatic demonstration of the often-repeated point that the best that the best method of memorizing ITM is to put a CD on auto-repeat for a few days and not even bother with a score.

Tunes: How to Learn a Tune

I went to the Bardic Circle session here in Columbus last night. It was the first session I have attended. Bardic Circle is an intermediate session, so I spent most of the evening listening, although they did indulge me by putting up with my poor whistling on a slow air and perhaps misguidedly attempted to embarass me by asking me to sing (misguided in the sense that I have few reservations about showcasing my vocal "talent" in public!).

I also had the chance to talk to a guy named Jeff Richards, who plays a number of instruments, tin whistle among them. He gave me some advice on learning tunes which strikes me as very sensible, so I'll pass it along here.

My goals are to memorize at least a few tunes, and learn to pick up others by ear. Sheet music is discouraged at some sessions and outright forbidden in others. What's more, if I learn to pick up tunes by ear then I'll be able to play along with tunes I haven't memorized and don't have transcriptions for.

The gist of the advice is to learn how to play intervals rather than memorizing fingerings for tunes. So if I'm playing a D and I know the next note is a full step higher then I should know how to go to an E without having to think about the names of the notes. So there's two things I need to learn:

1. I need to know the tune well enough to anticipate the next note.
2. I need to be able to find that note based on the note I'm currently plaing.

Jeff's advice was to address the first need by humming along to recordings of the tunes. This helps to memorize the song without thinking of fingerings, and it's good practice to pick up a new song quickly. Ideally I'd be able to listen to the tune and the turn once and play them on the repeats. For the second need, he recommended playing any bunch of tunes I can think of and know already (Happy Birthday, etc.) until I'm confident that when playing one note I can always go to the next if I know how big of a step it is.

UPDATE: Here are a couple of other articles on this subject:

• How to Learn a Tune by Ear, from Small Circle Tune Learning Session.
• Deborah Clark Colón's article on learning fiddle any tunes by ear.