Progression timeline for ITM

[PaulDa321]

Hi everyone,

 

I’m primarily an Irish trad backing guitar player, learning concertina on the side.  I take lessons with Lexi Boatright (great teacher, seek her out if you need one). I’ve just gotten to the point of playing one or two tunes in session and it takes a pretty long time just to learn a new tune. It’s intimidating to think about the sheer number of tunes these people know and how many of them can learn a tune after a couple of times through. I’m wondering if there’s anybody out there, especially players who didn’t already play a melody-focused instrument, who progressed to the point of quickly being able to pick up tunes. I’m wondering, generally speaking, how much practice and how long it took for you to get there. I know everybody is different. It seems like an astounding hurdle at this point. Any general advice would be appreciated. I’m not discouraged—it’s fun to show up with a new tune every month as it is—but I am curious!

[Alan Day]

I would say that if you turned up with a new tune every Month good enough for a session ,you are doing remarkably well.

Lots of tunes  have similar patterns and after much practice picking up tunes may be slightly easier for you. 

You may be some time.

Al

Edited February 22, 2024 by Alan Day

[SIMON GABRIELOW]

I think it will vary for each person.

I started by doing a lot of copying music down by hand, which was good discipline to learning the music, for me, later on as I advanced. So by then I could pick out a melody and find it on keyboard ( concertina)..matching note to how I heard it aurally.

If you can hear the tune in your 'head' or the sound of it will maybe help you grasp the music also.

[Michael Eskin]

Be patient. Far better to learn a few tunes well than a lot of tunes poorly.

 

I already had a background in silver flute before I played traditional Irish music.

I started playing in traditional Irish music about 1995 and between the tunes I can start and the tunes I can play if someone starts it, I have a repertoire approaching 1000 tunes and continue to learn new ones.

That's about one tune every one to two weeks since I started.  

It definitely gets easier as you learn more and more tunes, the brain starts to recognize the common patterns between the tunes, so you have that to look forward to.

 

Edited February 23, 2024 by Michael Eskin

[PaulDa321]

That’s a heck of a lot of tunes!  Not sure I have the brain-space for that, but the ability to re-learn a tune quickly could help. 

[davidevr]

As Michael said you really need patience. It’s really a long long game. 
The more tunes you know, the easier it gets to learn new ones; so I suggest you try to add a new tune every week, or something like that. At one point things will just click and you’ll suddenly realize you can learn tunes much faster. 

Another thing, if you have a chance, join a local session. You don’t need to play at first, just show up and listen to the tunes, that’s the best way to commit them to memory. I’ve been playing the fiddle for years and had no session pals at first, so my repertoire was around 80-100 tunes and it stayed like that for 10 years or more; when I started joining local sessions the number of my tunes tripled in 2 years time, with much less effort. Now, after years of practice, it takes a few minutes to learn the basics of a tune on the fiddle; probably 20-30 minutes on the concertina but I am really a beginner here.

Final advice, play very slow. Everyone says that, and it made little sense at first but now I can tell you it’s the only way to get a good rhythm.
Again, patience, and enjoy the ride.

[RAc]

< off topic and misplaced, sorry for the noise >

 

Edited February 23, 2024 by RAc
think first, post afterwards...

[Theo]

Two stages to this:

1 learning the tune so you can sing it, which just requires time spent listening, and that can be live music or recordings.

2 learning to put the tune in your head into your fingers on the instrument.  They are very different skills and I think you can make better progress if you recognise that and adopt a learning strategy to suit.

[SIMON GABRIELOW]

I think that you can over learn (as I term it )..a tune, that is you can focus too much on perhaps a few tunes, and easily become fatigued on them. So, if that happens, and you do not feel you are progressing as you would like, then leave them aside for a while, and go back to them later on. Because your brain will still be taking in that information, even as you rest, and next time you should find that learning speeding up.

 

 

Edited February 23, 2024 by SIMON GABRIELOW

[PaulDa321]

This is all great advice—thank you all!

[seanc]

Not sure how relevant this is.

 

but I find that it tends to “stick” with me better this way.

have the music in front of you.

go through it very very slowly.

Get each note perfect at slow(est) speed.

Once you pretty much “have it” add metronome.. again at slow speed, get each note in the right space.

then slowly, increase tempo to playing speed.

 

any time you make a mistake, go back to the start.

 

at least for me. This seems to work, it may be tedious. But it gets burned in and then muscle memory takes hold.

i always find that once I think I know the tune, it all goes to hell once the metronome comes in. And it’s almost like having to relearn the tune over again.

 

[Jillser Nic Amhlaoibh]

My experience differs from seanc's in that for me I learn tunes quicker and remember them better if I learn them by ear.

 

I also don't go back to the start of the tune if I make a mistake, rather I isolate what part was tripping me up and try to figure out what the problem is - am I rushing the notes in that part? Would it be more fluent and easier to play if I use an alternate fingering for it? etc. If I just go back to the top of the tune and start again without ferreting out what tripped me up then I'm likely to just replicate that mistake again - not saying my way is the right way, just that it's the way that works for me.

[Peter Laban]

I am a strong believer in letting the tunes 'sink in', let them soak until they're ready to be learned.

I listen a lot and am in a musical environment and often find tunes I pick up easily have been floating around, making their way into my subconscious, for some time without me realising it.  At some point I'll notice them and they're there, ready to be played, as it were.  I like to think of it as tunes finding me when they're  ready. 

 

 

 

[LR71]

I hadn't been playing very long when I started filling up a page from a drawing notebook with tune titles.  I probably crammed close to a hundred on the one page - very small print, with red lines between titles to increase legibility.  So, it didn't take me long to begin vacuuming up Irish music - but I'd been playing music my whole life, and had been very obsessive about other genres for a decade at that point.

 

Almost 30 years later and I still constantly listen to this stuff, and learn new items.  It's always fascinating to me how there's this batch of notes in my brain which wasn't there before.  How'd it get in there? 

 

There are people I've known the whole time I've been playing who still churn out the same couple of dozen tunes every week.  Good for them!  They're happy to just get together with friends and have a good time.  They have skills in other areas, too.  As I said to some friends the other night, "Knowing thousands of tunes, great.  That and 10 cents will buy you a cup of coffee!" That's paraphrasing a saying from days gone by, when coffee was a lot cheaper.

 

So I'd learn whatever they're playing at your local beginner's session, for a start.  Work on playing solidly, good time, lift, etc.  And listen to it as much as possible, like Peter says.  These things really do burrow into your subconscious.

[fred v]

I try to start learning a new tune every week. That way I have a new tune up to speed every week but it takes awhile to get there. Practice every day even if just for 30 minutes. Practice scales every day. Segovia said "The serious student of the guitar will spend his first 8 hours of daily practice working on scales". That, my friend is what "the gift of music" means.

[PaulDa321]

Excellent feedback so far and thank you. Regarding was Seanc and Jillser said, I really thought I was a by-ear learner, having been improvising guitar chords for so long and disdaining reading music or tabs.  As it turns out, I remember and interpret tunes incorrectly. I end up reproducing some alternate version of things if I don’t look at the written notes—even tunes I’ve heard weekly for years. This might be great once I have the base tune and can deviate slightly, but for now, I really have to look up the ABC to play the tune remotely correctly, and then get it into memory. Hopefully I can put some personality on it after that. 

[seanc]

15 hours ago, PaulDa321 said:

Excellent feedback so far and thank you. Regarding was Seanc and Jillser said, I really thought I was a by-ear learner, having been improvising guitar chords for so long and disdaining reading music or tabs.  As it turns out, I remember and interpret tunes incorrectly. I end up reproducing some alternate version of things if I don’t look at the written notes—even tunes I’ve heard weekly for years. This might be great once I have the base tune and can deviate slightly, but for now, I really have to look up the ABC to play the tune remotely correctly, and then get it into memory. Hopefully I can put some personality on it after that. 

Everybody is different. And everybody learns differently. 

 

All I can say is that when I try to learn something by ear, it will be close. But, generally, not really "right".  And if  depending on one person's by ear take that may or not be correct.

 

What I have also learned, is that even though I think I have good rhythm. When put to the test of a metronome, I will always be off. Especially, when "playing" rests. If left to my own devices, I will almost invaiably rush the rests. And once I have learned a song, it is more difficult to unlearn it.

 

In ITM, rhytms tend to be more straight than others. But, then a tune like "Butterfly" comes around.  Where there is a LOT more space than a typical ITM tune.  And really knowing where the notes are supposed to be and learning to nail that down correctly is important.

 

[adamhuestis]

What process do you guys generally use for learning a tune?  I have trouble learning songs that do not have words.