Learning a new Tune

[Retired1]

I'm curious how others approach learning a new tune such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT1gMBWwMRI - the first A & B section - do you start slow until you can play it perfect then slowly dial in the speed, or do you learn it basically and then speed up mistakes be d****ed ? How much time would you spend on it on a daily basis to get it wired ? How many days/weeks would it typically take for you to be able to play it at speed without mistakes ? When you've got it, how often would you play it to keep it ? It amazes me how quickly I can learn some tunes, and others take forever.

[rick-slo]

That's a duo. Which part?

Neither part is difficult on its own. Mainly memorizing.

[Retired1]

The Mandolin

[Doug Young]

Fortunately, they're playing this at a pretty moderate tempo! But with any tune, yes, you start slow, then slowly speed up. You have to first work out the fingerings, which might be at "zero speed", in other words not even worrying about tempo. Once you know what you're going to play, then work on it with a metronome at whatever speed you can play it perfectly. Over time, slowly, speed it up. I'd also be sure you know it in your head - so you can sing the melody, even if silently. One suggestion I've heard from multiple sources is to be sure you can play it perfectly 10 times in a row at whatever speed you're at. Once you can do that, you can bump up the metronome a notch.

There is an interesting aspect to this, which might not apply so much with the fairly moderate speed of this tune, but sometimes when working out a piece slowly you end up using a sub-optimal fingering, because an awkward fingering doesn't cause any problem at the slow speed. Then later, as you speed up you hit a wall. So it's sometimes useful to go back and forth - once you can sort of play it, try to see how fast you can go, then note any problem areas. You can investigate those and try to figure out if you just need more practice, or if there is a fingering optimization that needs to be done. You don't want to really practice a lot at the too-fast speed, because you'll learn the mistakes, but you need to do a dry run now and then to see what issues you'll likely hit when you get there.

As far as keeping it under your fingers once you've got it, I think that depends. If you've played a lot of similar things and the piece doesn't pose technical challenges, then once you really have the piece in your head, it will likely stay there with occasional practice. But it certainly varies for me, and I think others, too. I once asked a fairly well-known fingerstyle player how it it took him to master a piece and he said, just like you - sometimes he works something up and records it a few days later, other songs he'll work on for years before it's ready.

[rick-slo]

How long it would take to learn depends on how well you play generally. Mostly what Doug said above. Tempo wise I would vary it some as you go. A bit higher tempo now and then seeking out the best fingering before you start spending too much time memorizing a fingering that won't work at a faster tempo. I imagine that this piece is usually suitable to a more relaxed tempo as played in your link.

[TBman]

I start off really slow, learning the positions and then gradually speed up over time. Nothing I learn to play is fast anyway. My "fast" days are behind me.

I'm much more concerned with accuracy and musicality than I am with speed. Most of the things I learn to play sound just as good at 70-80% of performance speed anyway as long as the musical flow isn't sacrificed.

[phydaux]

Tommy Emmanuel is my personal guitar hero. One of his sayings is "Before there can be music there first must be skill."

A somewhat lesser hero of mine is a kid named Napoleon Dynamite. He said "Nunchuk skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills, girls only want boyfriends who have great skills."

So it's all about developing the skills.

I start at a pace that I call "Stupid Slow" until I can play the song through perfectly while referring to a chart.

Then I break up the song into bite-size chunks, and work on memorizing each chunk one at a time. Again, the pace is Stupid Slow. For each chunk I'll make several passes, alternating between focusing on left hand technique and right hand technique.

There's a name for working on a bite size part of a song and trying to play it without looking at a chart. It's called "Ear Training."

Once I've memorized all the chunks then I work on playing the song perfectly all the way through from beginning to end without referring to a chart. Again, my pace is Stupid Slow.

When I'm confident in my left hand & right hand technique and can play perfectly all the way through from beginning to end, then I work on picking up the pace.

The focus is always correct play rather than speed. Speed comes with muscle memory. You need to make sure you're teaching your muscles the song and not teaching them the mistakes.

In my experience playing a song at Stupid Slow, particularly over and over Stupid Slow, is an EGO KILLER. I just want to chuck it and shred, and ignore the mistakes. But that doesn't teach your ear. It doesn't help your left hand technique or your right hand technique. It doesn't even help your ego, at least for ME it doesn't, because every mistake I make reverberates in my head like a church bell.

Ego is the enemy of skill development. And girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.

[JonPR]

First of all, I would transcribe the whole thing, so I have some written reference. (In the old days I do it mostly by ear, but it's pain to have to keep operating whatever audio playback I'm using to loop sections. Much easier to just have some notation and/or tab to look art.)

For learning to actually play the tune (commit to memory so I don't need the notation), I do it in chunks, phrase by phrase, or bar by bar.

I.e. I play the first phrase as slow as I need to to get it correct and in time. I.e. I'd slow down the fastest notes until the tempo was comfortable, and than play it all at that speed. Once I get that comfortable - nearly up to speed - I'll move to the next phrase, get that down. And then join it to the first phrase. So I end up with the whole thing as a chain.
I'll spend quite a long time going over groups of phrases too, practising the transitions as much as the phrases themselves.

It's about getting to feel it as a narrative.

Obviously how long it takes depends on how long and complicated the piece is! The process of memorising takes longer than transcription.

This particular piece is technically simple enough - I could play each phrase up to speed (in fact faster) as soon as I had the notes - on mandolin or guitar - but memorising the whole thing would take a lot longer. Hard to quantify, as I'd take breaks and come back to it. I might only spend a couple of minutes on it at a time, maybe as much as 10 minutes (before getting bored and moving to something else...). But it would take several such sessions - and then maybe coming back to it the following day or a few days later - before I'd be confident I had the whole thing down. I.e., there's a law of diminishing returns when spending too long in one session. I find my brain starts to grind to a halt after a while. Better to come back refreshed. In the meantime, the brain seems to subconsciously organise the info learned in the session - so it's not forgotten next time, and seems to make more sense.

[Andyrondack]

Originally Posted by Retired1

I'm curious how others approach learning a new tune such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT1gMBWwMRI - the first A & B section - do you start slow until you can play it perfect then slowly dial in the speed, or do you learn it basically and then speed up mistakes be d****ed ? How much time would you spend on it on a daily basis to get it wired ? How many days/weeks would it typically take for you to be able to play it at speed without mistakes ? When you've got it, how often would you play it to keep it ? It amazes me how quickly I can learn some tunes, and others take forever.

If I learn a tune and try to speed it up before I can play it cleanly then the mistakes and stumbles get baked into the 'muscle memory' and become very difficult to correct without relearning the piece again from scratch.

[vashondan2018]

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

If I learn a tune and try to speed it up before I can play it cleanly then the mistakes and stumbles get baked into the 'muscle memory' and become very difficult to correct without relearning the piece again from scratch.

Amen to that!

[rick-slo]

Originally Posted by Andyrondack

If I learn a tune and try to speed it up before I can play it cleanly then the mistakes and stumbles get baked into the 'muscle memory' and become very difficult to correct without relearning the piece again from scratch.

The point of speeding up intermittently as you are learning a piece can be to not bake in less efficient ways of playing something. If you have something laid out for you in a good score or tab or where there are no tricky spots where the correct fingering and chord positions are a bit up in the air then a steady increase in tempo works well.

[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by Retired1

I'm curious how others approach learning a new tune such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT1gMBWwMRI - the first A & B section - do you start slow until you can play it perfect then slowly dial in the speed, or do you learn it basically and then speed up mistakes be d****ed ? How much time would you spend on it on a daily basis to get it wired ? How many days/weeks would it typically take for you to be able to play it at speed without mistakes ? When you've got it, how often would you play it to keep it ? It amazes me how quickly I can learn some tunes, and others take forever.

Hi R1

Generally when I want to duplicate (approximate or ornamentate) as song on YouTube or other video/audio, I listen to it 3-4 times a day for a week.

I don't even start breaking apart sections for a couple three days.

Then I decide how much of the original form I want to follow and then start learning the notes/chords/fingerings.

If it's super simple then I head into the arranging pretty quickly.

Needless to say, it's memorized well before the mid-point of the process.

[Tahitijack]

For piano

I learn the left hand chords (harmony) first starting slow until I can play them without gaps or mistakes. Gradually increasing the tempo. Once I have the left hand on auto pilot I move to the melody and right hand learning the melody until I can play it without gaps or mistakes. Then I put the two together and voila we have a song. The time it takes to produce a song that is not embarrassing to play varies. Easy songs like And I Love Her take more time than a song like What The World Needs Now Is Love.

[Robin, Wales]

Originally Posted by Retired1

I'm curious how others approach learning a new tune such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT1gMBWwMRI - the first A & B section - do you start slow until you can play it perfect then slowly dial in the speed, or do you learn it basically and then speed up mistakes be d****ed ? How much time would you spend on it on a daily basis to get it wired ? How many days/weeks would it typically take for you to be able to play it at speed without mistakes ? When you've got it, how often would you play it to keep it ? It amazes me how quickly I can learn some tunes, and others take forever.

I used to learn tunes on trad noter drone dulcimer from videos like the one you have posted (played on mandolin or fiddle).

I'd start with listening to the tune a lot. I'd get the rhythm and phrasing in my head, and listen out for the hooks (those bits that stand out). I may find those first on dulcimer.

Then I may pick out the gist of each phrase, its key notes, before going back and filling in the the passing notes.

Once I was 80% there I would switch on my metronome and play through the tune. I keep the metronome running and do my section repeats, or phrase repeats on the fly.

For your example hornpipe I'd most likely run the metronome at performance speed from the get go. My aim would always be to get to performance speed as quickly as possible. It is physically very different to play a tune slowly (and by physically I really do mean the physics!), so I can't see any point in "learning" something that I'm not going to use. A bit of time spent breaking down the phrase slowly, then practice at playing speed as soon as possible. If I can't flow a tune at the speed that it is normally played at then that means that I have a whole host of playing building blocks that are not in place. So it is better to work on those separately rather than persist with a tune that is beyond me for the moment.

In terms of "how long". I would expect it to take perhaps a few evenings work to nail that hornpipe on dulcimer if learning it just from that video to a point where I'd be happy playing it at a session, not perfect but good enough.

It is not something that I would want to learn on guitar as I don't have a need to, it would sound much better and be more useful to learn it on a melody instrument.

I am talking about just learning the tune here, not composing a fingerstyle or classical guitar arrangement of the tune, which is way beyond my pay grade!

[Gtrfinger]

Everyone has given great advice. So I won't repeat. However just as a side note, when learning this, if you're finding there's a couple of bars (or more) that you're struggling with... Write those down separately.
Use them as exercises.
When you find left hand and right hand fingerings for them that work best for you and the music, don't vary those fingerings. At all. You'll learn much faster that way.

Also, again, as a side note, John Williams, David Russell and several other classical players , have said try to incorporate dynamics in the early stages of learning, as opposed to adding them at the end. Not sure I subscribe to that view but I'll leave it here anyway because it's interesting. And they surely know better than me about such things.

I'd love to hear this tune when you're done.