Remember Bob Ross? He was the guy with the big hair who had a PBS show where he would do paintings of landscapes with mountains, trees, ponds and skies. Bob Ross would paint from his mind. He wasn't looking at anything. He wasn't looking at tab or sheet music. Could he paint that exact same painting again? Probably not an exact copy, but he could paint one very similar if he wanted to. Or he could paint a completely different one in that same style if that was his goal.
An Irish tune is like one of those paintings. You play from your mind just like how Bob Ross paints from his mind. You hear the tune in your head and then play it. Fortunately it takes us about 30 seconds to play the tune once through, whereas Bob Ross took 30 minutes to paint his.
When you play that same tune again next week, it's like painting that same painting all over again, maybe with a few variations from last time but not so much to make it a completely new painting. Each tune is like that. When you move on to play a different tune, it's like Bob Ross painting a different painting than that other one. But when you play that tune again, it's like painting that painting again. Perhaps it comes out a little better than last time you played it at the session.
My first attempts to pick out simple melodies by ear were similar to what I would have gone through had I tried to forge a Bob Ross painting. I had no skill in this regard, so the melody I came up with didn't bear much resemblance to the original version. These were very bad paintings when compared to what Bob Ross would have done. They ended up being "original" compositions instead of a transcription of a pre-existing tune. Which isn't such a bad thing!
Eventually I got better at it, to the point where instead of painting a different painting than the one that I was trying to mimic, I was actually painting a similar painting to the one Bob Ross did. If you are trying to learn Maids of Ardagh and you are getting 90% of the notes correct, and the other 10% are just a result of misunderstood notes or not having the motor skills to pull it off, then technically that's still Maids of Ardagh. Just an amateur version of it.
Anyway, this "Irish tunes are like Bob Ross" paintings thing made a lot of sense to me last night as I was going to sleep. I waited 18 hours to write about it and now I don't really know if I understand the comparison. Ha!
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