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Thank you very much, @wil-weten.
Can MuseScore do the super-awesome part, of listening while I play and telling me about whether I hit the right notes and how accurate my timing is?
I was thinking of MuseScore. Perhaps I should get the mobile app version.
Andelin wrote:
Clinton,
Have you tried musescore? It is a notation software that is free of charge. It might be helpful in your quest for the playback feature. You would have to input the notes (or find something suitable that someone else has generously done already and uploaded to the website) but you can change tempo, dynamics, transpose, automatic playback/loop, add a metronome tick, etc. So many wonderful features. I’ve used it for many things. I really like it, but if you try it and find it doesn’t fit your needs, you aren’t really out anything. It has a little bit of a learning curve, but the website has good answers to many questions.I sure have. (I laboriously entered in music I couldn’t read to have it try to make it more accessible to me, and found it fairly handy in that regard. I’ve got the iPad app, too, as I recall, although haven’t used it since I’ve made some progress with reading musical notation.)
If I might ask a couple of questions (and I understand that you might not know):
– are you able to loop parts of a score? (“I want to work on this measure, and hear it repeatedly.”)
– can you control it remotely? (Again, I’d really like to advance on learning a measure, or even a few notes, at a time).I wonder what it would take to write a ‘call and response’ plugin that would play some notes from a song, and wait for you to try to play them back, all without showing the notes. Hmm… [The big downside that I see is, how do I enter in a simple melody I want to know without seeing the melody, which in turn makes it hard to play it as though I have no idea how it goes. Hey — Maybe I could find and import midi files.]
Have you found the musescore.com website, with lots of songs, to be useful?
Cheers,
ClintonBiagio wrote:
Clinton, I may have confused you by referring to a C major tuning. For ANY major scale those half steps are the 3rd and 7th. Thus if you’re in Eb major, sharp your G (now you have two Abs side by side); sharp your D – voila, two Ebs side by side. Pentatonic, with two sets of paired strings per octave.
Oh, yeah! That sounds lovely.
Why didn’t I work that out myself? 🙂
Thanks,
ClintonThanks for all the replies!
Biagio,
(You mentioned buying a Mountain Dulcimer kit).
Ah, there’s more than one kit I’d like to make!
Chords/Theory: Here are two good books that take most of the mystery out: The Everything Music Theory Book (mainly oriented to guitar but that’s not a problem) and another Ray Pool: “3’s A Chord.”
Oh, more book recommendations. Thank you.
Isolation a section for repeated listening: some notation software such as Finale and Sibelius will read in a PDF or MIDI file which you can then edit and “loop play.” You can also regulate the tempo – I learned Carolan’s Dream and a few other tunes that way and it is actually kind of fun.
I would really, really like some software that does this, especially if I could sit down at my harp and control the music from there. (I’ve been trying to pick out some simple songs; it has been hit and miss. Right now I’m listening to ‘row row row your boat’ (just the melody) on repeat — and hope I can stand it long enough that I can find all the notes the next time I try.)
The Score: I used to get intimidated by the accompaniment (all those notes!) until my teacher pointed out that they were mostly chords broken up into individual notes. The most basic however is a triad in root position: root, up a third and up another third i.e. C-E-G, F-A-C etc. “So”, she said, “Just play the melody and a simple triad”
Yeah, I had that pointed out to me, too. I don’t yet recognize them at a glance (and a lead sheet sounds easier), but the very notion makes it more tractable.
Exploring: … Now let’s have some fun and try a different sequence! Sharp those two half steps – now you are playing in a pentatonic scale and anything you do will sound good.
That sounds awesome. Unfortunately, my lever harp is tuned in Eb Major, which means I can’t do that without retuning some Es and Bs. (One advantage a pedal harp has.)
duckspeaks,
From your reply, I’m able to pinpoint something. It appears you need 4 steps (yes this is a 4-step procedure to attain what you want):
I am all ears!
[Part A]1. Develop the ability to realise and call out (sing out) the so-fa names of every note when you hear music (or work it out when it lingers in your mind). [Part B] Best thing to do is to step through Julie Andrew’s Sound Of Music Theme Song (Doh a deer a female deer). Get printed music (or web equivalent) for this please. E.g. Doh-re-mi-doh-mi-do-mi Re-mi-fa-fa-mi-re-fa Mi-fa-soh-mi-so-mi-so Fa-soh-la-la-so-fa-la……)
I’ve split that into two parts.
Yes, I can see that developing that ability (Part A) would help.
Um, really? I’m surprised there’s any pedagogical values in the song when it has been adapted for entertainment. I did listen to it on youtube, and I’m sure I could learn the lyrics readily enough, but the pitches is another matter. How would the printed music help in hitting the pitches?
I’d better try playing some notes (probably on a keyboard) and seeing if I can hit them.
I read points 2, 3, 4, and 5 and nodded.
Trust me, fun starts during Step 1! When I was a kid I had nothing and that’s how I got started by myself. Now we have the Internet and so many kind souls here with you.
Good luck!
All right. Thanks for the encouragement.
balfour-knight,
here’s to YouTube. (I wonder what being a travelling minstrel would’ve been like. Must’ve been interesting.)
[I have a friend who has] said repeatedly “most people can play by ear if they will just try and do it!” She thinks that too many people learn to read notes and then entirely depend on them. They think that they are not playing correctly if they make up their own variations as they play. This attitude can “note-tie” people so that they believe they cannot play any other way.
So I say, Clinton, just “try and do it.” Prove that my friend is correct. If you are only 32, you should have plenty of time to learn, play, and enjoy your music.
I can believe that.
Sigh. Pity I’m almost 35 now … if only I’d started earlier. 😉
Oh, and if I do this successfully, I think your friend will be proven right.
Thank you.
Tacye,
Another thought is that it is really easy to have too high expectations and get frustrated if you can’t play a piece straight off. Your ear may replace the notes on the page (or vice versa for ear players working from written music) but it doesn’t replace or remove all the working out and practice needed and both methods of note learning have their ‘hang on what happens there’ places.
Thank you. I have to admit, when I see my wife pick out a (really simple) song I’m struggling with with almost no effort, it is a tick frustrating. I just need to realize that, as in so many things, it isn’t fair to compare one of my weaknesses to someone else’s strengths; I can only strive to do better than I’m doing now.
Biagio,
Let me add another: unless the piece is specifically scored in one and only one way, you’ll likely encounter many interpretations. For one example, I mentioned “Beach Spring”; I’ve always heard it in a major key (Ionian mode) but just picked up one by Harper Tasche – Mixolydian that one. So choose one interpretation and don’t necessarily try to mimic it exactly; that gets too confusing and takes a lot of the fun out.
Interesting. I don’t think I’m quite that advanced yet.
Don’t try to mimic it exactly. Hmm… That’s not a mathematical statement at all 🙂
duckspeaks,
My other thought would be, I don’t believe in skipping the knowledge of reading music, theory on intervals, harmony, forms, counterpoints and what not.
Makes sense to me. Why reinvent the wheel (unless of course you are trying to create something that is not a wheel — which I’m not).
In fact it sets the bar higher to skip having a written piece and wing it on the fly.
I’d say.
to be mechanically fair, to play by ear and make it up as u go requires you to be capable to arrange melodies, rhythmic patterns, harmonic progressions and preplan the Drams/contrast of the piece in the fly. You need to he an instant composer and arranger. It required solid knowledge so well internalised that one can at least think a few bars ahead at the time of playing.
Wow. Good heavens.
But again, the good news is that fun can be attained early, even at the cost of chopping up music into short discontinuous sections just to experience the “it works” moments. This joy will fuel your motivation…. may be to browse a few web pages for music theory….
Sounds good to me.
Hmm… That really makes me wonder what different subjects do to have joy in the journey. No wonder so many people hate math(s), as it is so often divorced from any use or joy. [Cue a great article, A Mathematician’s Lament, on what music would be like it taught like math.]
When fumbling around, having fun is most important. Your posts have show a lot of (too much??) respect for music. Lets fool around to pick up some fun and energy to go on.
Huh. My first thought is, “I don’t know how”. All right, I’ll have to play with it.
If you have a chance, get the black & white DVD on late cellist Jacqueline du Pré. It ends with a short scene of her plugging the cello and singing on a train in a carefree manner. Lets have that sort of fun!
Interesting. And on that note, in my day job, I stumbled across a totally unique video game, Cello Fortress, wherein several people use regular video game controllers to ‘attack’ a fortress, which is being defended by a person controlling the game by playing a cello. Such a genius idea. (I’d love something like that for my harp, but I’m not at all ready to spend the time to try to create a program to identify chords from a live recording that has been changed from a time to frequency domain!)
Balfour-Knight,
On the subject of “having fun” with your music, Clinton, please check out Angi Bemiss’s website at http://www.simplytheharp.com She has put together excellent resources on learning how to play and enjoy the harp simply.
I’ve glanced at the site twice now but cannot readily discern that these are different from typical books of music.
Thank you everyone.
Clinton BlackmoreWow, so many replies! Thank you, everyone.
First, in the interim, I actually called up Mr. Kovac and asked if he felt I needed to, say, be able to sing on key before his 7 easy lessons on playing the harp by ear would be useful to me, and he thought they’d be useful to me even at my skill level. (It was really nice just being able to talk to someone and ask questions on the phone.) So, I’ve ordered a couple of his videos, and, well, here’s hoping it’ll work for me.
I’d like to reply to some of the comments here (and, if I don’t get finished, I’ll have to continue at another time). (Well, I finished with the comments so far — this will be a long post. I’ll have to post more frequently in the future.)
Biagio,
Here’s the half-full: people have been playing the harp (and everything else) by ear for thousands of years before notation came about, and for a few thousand years after that too.
It is amazing that we are using a method that *isn’t* the one that’s been used for thousands of years. In one article I read, a person called it “Call and Response” when one person would play some notes and a student would try to play the same notes back. I wish I could find some software that’d play a song a bit at a time so I could try to replay it in the same way (but it seems like “Call and Response” has a second meaning — someone plays/says something, and another person plays/says something else that replies to it — so my ‘google fu’ is failing.)
The “trick”, if you will, is to learn tunes by interval i.e. 1 is the tonic note, 4 is the subdominant, 5 is the dominant for the major notes in the scale. So if you are tuned to C that’s 1, F is 4, G is 5 (and of course the next C is an 8 or a 1 take your pick).
I know what you mean (although the programmer in me wants to count the dominant as an offset of 0). I was trying that the other day — I took a simple tune I knew, changed my levers, found the diatonic scale, and was able to play the tune offset in a different position. That’s really cool!
There IS one book I can suggest, and it’s great (but also a lot of work) – Ray Pool’s “1 2 3 Play”.
Excellent. I’ve added it to my wish list.
Balfour-knight,
I had not yet responded to this thread, because I do not know the answer to “how does one LEARN to play by ear?” You can either do it, or you can’t.
I can appreciate where you are coming from [really, I can — that comment on your sister knowing math rings true for me!], and am glad that you later said that you think it can be learned. Let me take an aside and say that fortunately, I have a growth mindset. There’s no way I would’ve started playing the harp at age 32 without a musical background were that not so.
I’m reminded of meeting a fellow from Russia who was living in Vancouver, Canada. He was over fifty, and didn’t speak any English. I think I asked him once why he didn’t learn it, and that he said that he was too old. My answer to that is: in ten years, you’ll be sixty, whether you learn English or not. Following one choice, you are as bad off as you are now, but acting on a different choice will mean that you’ll at least know some English at the end of that time. [Hmm, and, as tangents from that tangent, I’m reminded of the article, “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” (http://norvig.com/21-days.html), and would point out that I sympathize with him; learning Russian was the hardest thing I’ve ever attempted.
Duckspeaks,
Dear Clinton, I am adult as well, old in fact, when I started.
🙂
I realise mostly to play what u like one has to rearrange it for lever harp anyway and I am too lazy to write music down and so I play by ear and heart ad well.
Wow, would that I could be so lazy!
(Dear me, I’ve spent a lot of time tediously entering the melody line from written music that I couldn’t read into my computer to have it play it back, print out the notes with names or in different shapes or colours, and to have something that appeared more tractable [and I’ve also avoided doing it on other songs ’cause it was too much work!] Playing by ear to avoid that sounds awesome.)
I would suggest trying to get hold of “folk songs” of the 60s, just a few, to experience the basic harmony.
Interesting that you mention that. I recently went to a family reunion where I was asked to find and prepare music, karaoke-style, that my great uncle used to lead family members in. A lot of it was WWII-era, and some went back to the 1890s. The picture of the family just sitting down around the piano or with a guitar and singing songs really appeals to me, and I’ve sure got a list of songs I could start with.
The physical demands of harping is mich to handle already. not having to read music is one way to help the initial stretch of the journey
Well said! I can see that on the piano, with peripheral vision, playing written music must be easier, but boy, I lose my place all the time (or try not to look at my strings at all) when playing on the harp.
Hearpe,
But I can usually pick up a guitar or sit at the piano, and be playing along by the end of most songs by knowing a few basics about song structure
Wow!
The first -knowledge of the keys- is most important and best learned on piano I think, by playing the Major Scale (Do-re-mi-so-fa-la=ti=do) off of every key- you get to know the key scales- ie “C” has NO sharps or flats,
I rather like playing different scales on my (fully-levered) harp — and transposition seems straightforward, too. I finally learned that when there is a sharp in a signature, it is always the same sharp (same for ‘n’ sharps or ‘n’ flats) — wow, that simplifies things a bit. And it is nice not to have to try to throw in black keys.
Perhaps I should try to learn the piano, too. I learned the C (major) scale years ago, but that was about it. I do think having to hold the note would be good for better understanding rhythm — I don’t keep a beat very well (yet).
Do you have any further thoughts on why the piano is best for learning the key signatures? I’d tend to think that, say, a chromatic lyre or a special keyboard that doesn’t use the 7-5 white/black split (can’t find the right picture!) might make it more obvious; nonetheless, I haven’t got access to such a device.
The second important component of “playing by ear” – The three chord theory- is that most modern music is often built around the I, IV, V progressions and mixtures
Wow. I’d come across chords being notated in that way, but didn’t realize the progression was an important thing. [Yes, I saw the video about everyone copying a similar progression for Pachelbel’s Canon.] That’s good to know.
So anyway, once you have a grasp of those two things, you can generally find the key by listening to what note a piece RESOLVES to at the end of the main phrases.
Nice! Now that I understand what a tonic note is, that makes sense.
Do I have to worry much about songs being written in different modes or in anything other than a major scale? (Or do I just say, “this is the truth, until I am able to discern otherwise”?)
Andelin,
I suppose you learn to play by ear the same way you learn anything musically–just try it. I would start by trying to pick out a melody of a familiar song. Start with the easy stuff and go from there. Learn music theory along the way. Practice it as much as you can, and your skills will improve.
Awesome.
That’s the beauty of music–you can never be “done” learning.
Amen. If this life can be thought of as a “choose-your-own adventure” life, then I like the idea of choosing something that keeps me turning the page.
Another suggestion is to find a friend to play music with, no matter their instrument. Playing together will help you keep up with your music, and can help if you can’t do formal music lessons. Plus you get to enjoy the company of friends and make beautiful music together. 🙂
Aha! Now I know why I have kids! 🙂 I will look for more opportunities to do just that. I recognize that when there is a deadline, practice becomes more earnest and progress improves faster.
Biago,
Thanks Hearpe, great suggestions! Here’s another – as opposed to a keyboard, get your hands on a mountain dulcimer. That instrument’s fret board is laid out as a major scale (7 tones) rather than chromatic like a guitar or piano. So whatever note your keytone is tuned to, that’s the key you are in.
Wow. That’s a different suggestion. [keyboard clacks as I ask google about this.] Hmm… They might just be affordable. I hope there is no “rosewood harp”-equivalent that I’d have to watch out for.
Sylvia,
If you understand chords, you don’t need to worry about the left hand. Just play the melody and put the chord in the left hand with it.
There’s a lot more for me to understand. I did pick up “Music Theory and Arranging Techniques for Folk Harps” by Sylvia Woods, but, right now I have to try to memorize a melody and then memorize the chords and then try to put them back together — I can’t read them both simultaneously (even with the simplified notation). I do look forward to being able to play from a lead sheet/fake book.
Do you have any additional thoughts on how/where to learn to understand chords?
Balfour-knight,
Thanks everyone! This has become a fascinating forum.
I agree!
I do want to add that KNOWLEDGE about what you are doing “by ear” does indeed make it easier.
Great.
Out of this developed my formal musical education. … And it was not easy, playing simple tunes by the music instead of the complicated ones I could play by ear!
Wow — it must’ve been hard to persist.
I once had an adult piano student who played magnificently by ear but wanted to learn to read music. It took years, but she finally became good at it, so I know it is possible. Be patient, like Andelin said, work hard, and it should improve.
Amen.
And yes, these replies have been helpful.
Tayce,
Of course playing by ear can be learnt – but easiest from sound rather than reading, obviously, so books will either need someone else to play, or a CD. There is a listing here of some of the books available if any of the descriptions look good to you:
http://www.davidbartonmusic.co.uk/practical-musicianship-resourcesthanks for the link.
Playing by ear needs two things – first is knowing what sounds you want to make, and second is being able to find them on your instrument. If you can start out picking out the tune of twinkle twinkle, notice if you play a wrong note and hunt around for the right one you have the base skills.
Sometimes I have to hunt for a long time, and sometimes I can’t tell if the note I want is higher or lower, but I believe I’ll get better with more practice.
Cc-chiu,
On one hand, knowing the theory is quite useful, on the other hand, ‘just doing it’, getting practise, also helps a lot. Someone already mentioned trying to play songs you already know (pop songs etc), it forces you to replicate on the harp what you are ‘hearing in your head’.
I’ll practice some more. Unusually, I don’t listen to a lot of music, so I ought to work on hymns instead of pop songs 🙂 (and maybe some of those Sandra Boynton songs that we listen to with the kids).
I learned to play by ear from a folk perspective, so my advice would be: attend workshops where they focus on learning by ear or take lessons with a teacher who can play by ear… In such workshops/lessons, they teach you new music by playing one phrase, having everyone repeat it several times, then playing the next phrase, connecting them, etc…
Oh, I’d love, love, love to go to some workshops! (The nearest ones I know of are in Vancouver and Montreal, and that’s a bit of a stretch to get there. [Lethbridge and Calgary are the cities nearest me; I don’t suppose there are any harp workshops in Montana?])
Hey, are there any recordings from workshops on the internet? (I know that it isn’t the same as being there, but it might still be useful.)
You know, I bet my last harp teacher could do teaching by ear, and if not, perhaps I’ll look into Skype teachers. [I’m not taking lessons right now due to a shortage of spare time, and a shortage of discretionary money, but that will change, too, as all times and seasons do.]
Thank you, thank you, everyone. I am sorry I didn’t reply sooner; I’ve really enjoyed hearing your advice.
Clinton
That’s fairly slick (after the annoying sign-up for an account process). I can’t tell you how much I wish it were open-source software; it’s so close to what I need.
Thank you, e-nb.
ClintonA strange question deserves a strange answer, right?
What do you get if you cross a harp with a guitar?
– A Chord Harp
– or a Harp GuitarI’m sure there is a singer who dances with a small harp, but my google fu fails me.
I can’t vouch for any of these choices — but, it never hurts to widen your options, right?
Good luck. If you can invest the money and time, I see no reason to be bound to a single instrument.
Thank you, Patricia.
I hadn’t considered looking at stands for other instruments (or the resonant qualities of a box). I found the cello stand on the sharmusic website; do you know what the interior dimensions are (such as if I tried to sit a harp in it)? (Any idea if it would work if I tilted a harp back?)
Cheers,
ClintonFabulous. My harp teacher recommended getting a harp about that tall, which is a big reason it is high on my list.
Thank you, Eric.
