How to Learn Irish Tunes

By Society & Culture & Entertainment Last updated Tuesday, October/08/2024

By Ear

1). Listen to your CDs or other recordings of Irish music until you find one tune that you particularly like. Many albums will have more than one tune in each track. Yet, if you listen carefully, you should be able to tell when one tune switches to another.
2). Set your CD player, computer or other device to play the track or tune you've chosen on repeat.
3). Listen to the track or tune as often as possible. Sometimes you should have your attention fully focused on the tune. Other times, you can let it play in the background while you're doing other things. Keep listening to the tune whenever you can, until you can hum it all the way through from memory.
4). Sit down with your instrument and practice playing the tune by ear. The first few times you do this, you may find it painfully slow to translate the tune from your mind onto your instrument. With practice, you will be able to play anything you can hear in your head.
5). Repeat this process for more tunes, until you have begun to develop a solid repertoire and feel more confident in your ability to learn tunes.
6). Practice with variations on this method. For example, listen to a tune once through, then try to play along with the recording. This will help you learn to pick tunes up on the fly.

1). Choose a tune you wish to learn. This may be a tune you've heard on your favorite Irish CD or just one with a name that appeals to you.
2). Obtain sheet music for the tune you chose to learn. Many books of Irish seisiun (pronounced "session") tunes contain the most popular choices, and a quick Internet search will turn up sheet music for common and obscure tunes alike.
3). Listen to several different recordings of the tune you chose, if possible. Even if you are not learning the tune by ear, hearing it played will give you a sense of what it should sound like. This is especially important when you are new to the tradition, as it is hard to represent the swing and pulse of Irish tunes in sheet music.
4). Pay attention not only to the key of the music, but also the notes on which it starts and stops. Much traditional Irish music is modal, meaning that a piece that appears by its key signature to be in D Major (with two sharps on the staff) may in fact be E Dorian. It may begin and resolve on E instead of D.
5). Add some pulse and swing to the tune after you are comfortable playing it straight. There is no correct amount of swing to add to a tune; use your own judgment to play in a style that appeals to you.