Disclaimer: I’m not really someone who learns tunes 100% by ear. What I do is more like memorize and visualize the tune. I like to have both an audio play along track and matching sheet music or tab handy. It helps me to “see” the tune written out measure by measure. I can’t resist the urge to cheat and look at the music. That said, I do have advice about learning a tune by ear that has worked for me before. And that advice is…
Write it yourself!
If you’ve ever written a melody of your own before this should be fairly easy for you. If you’ve never tried to write your own tune before, then this can be a start. When writing an Irish tune that already exists a lot of the work is already done for you. You don’t have to write Silver Spear, Out on the Ocean, or Boys of Bluehill completely from scratch. You just have to write a tune that sounds exactly like the one you are trying to write! Or as close to it as you can get at this moment in time*.
The first step is to listen to the tune you want to learn until you can hear it in your head. Find a YouTube video or some other simple source that sounds like the way they play it at your local session. For the purposes of this exercise, once you can hear it in your head the distinction between a tune you are composing vs. a tune that already exists is insignificant.
Take what you are hearing in your head and find those notes on your instrument. I recommend knowing the names of the notes you are playing and writing them down. At least know where then notes D, E, F#, G, A, B, C and C# are. You don’t have to write this in sheet music format. You can do it in whatever shorthand method works for you. You can also skip writing it out altogether and keep it entirely aural. I happen to like writing it out so that I can put the notes into some sort of context.
Have the recording on loop and play along with it. Play the rhythm even if you can’t play the notes. Imagine that the tune is a wheel that’s spinning and if you get off the tune doesn’t stop. It just keeps on spinning until you jump on again. Or imagine that it’s a block of wood and you are chipping away until you have carved something that looks like an approximation of the original. At first you might only get 10% of the notes correct and you have to fudge the other 90%. If you stay on the wheel and slowly chip away, you’ll start to connect more dots and the notes or phrases that you land on become like little stepping stones to get across the pond without falling in.
Things to listen for and make note of
How many parts does the tune have? Plenty of Irish tunes have just two parts: an A part and a B part each played twice through AA/BB. However, sometimes there are three or even four parts. Or other times it is just a two part AA/BB tune but the second time through the B-part maybe you play a different ending than the first time through the B-part. Like AA/B1B2.
Where is the tonal center? AKA where does it want to resolve to? Irish session tunes tend to have tonal centers resolving to the notes D, G, A or E and there are certain sounds these keys or modes make that distinguishes one from the other.
Does it have a C natural or a C sharp note? Assuming that your melody has one of these notes, are you hearing a C natural or a C sharp? If this distinction becomes significant to you, then it can act as a shortcut that helps other connections fall into place.
Does the B-part go higher? Quite often the B-part of a tune will be in a higher octave, or at least use some higher notes than the A-part did. After a while you can almost guess where a tune is going to go.
Are there any patterns or scalar things that you notice? Being able to recognize things like this can really help with your ear learning. I don’t really know the musical term for it, but for example a tune might be doing something over an A-minor arpeggio for a measure and then do the same type of pattern but over a G-major arpeggio for the next measure. Or there might be a scalar phrase that starts on a G. Then that phrase gets repeated starting on an F# note. Then it repeats again starting on E note. Stuff like that.
Are there any repeated sections? It’s not unusual for the B-part of an Irish tune to re-use portions of or even half of the A-part. So if you’ve learned the A-part, you sometimes have a head start on learning the B-part because something you already went over is going to be re-used in the B-part.
Grade Yourself
Give yourself 30 minutes to write the tune. After you’ve “written” the tune, compare what you have to an actual transcription of the tune you were trying to play. What did you get right? What did you get wrong? For the parts that you got completely wrong, could you already tell that you were unclear about that part or did you think you had it right? Comparing your version to the original and making note of where you were off vs. where you were on track can help so that next time you get even closer to the actual notes.
*On the bright side, if you are really, really bad at transcribing what you hear then the worst thing that happens is you accidentally write an original tune!
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