Originally Posted by
PhillipeTaylor
There are a lot of advanced players here and they help a lot, but sometimes they forget the stages you go through as a learner. I'm a learner still, but a bit further along, and so I'll discuss some stages that have revealed themselves to me that might bring a sense of hope to your practice:
I don't know how many tunes I know now, I know too many to practice in a day or even week, so I have to rotate. So I toggle through tunes I know as part of each practice session, in addition to other stuff I do. What starts to emerge as you learn and practice more and more Celtic tunes is a knowledge that Celtic tunes have a style that not only work within the category of "jigs" "reels" and "hornpipes" (as well as airs, waltzes, etc), but there are common melodic themes that happen within various tunes. Some tunes are almost the same as another tune (or literally are the same tune), and there are often numerous variations of any given tune. So... once you learn one tune, you get to another tune and you learn it in like, 15 minutes because it's almost the same as this other tune you know. Then you hear a new version of a tune you learned, so you grind that out in 20 minutes without even looking at the music, because you can just hear the variation and what you need to do, and now you know two versions of that tune, and so on. Also, you are learning a new tune, but whole sections of it are just like this other melody from a tune you know, so you learn it in half the time, and so on.
So, there is a point where, once you know a good body of tunes, the accumulation of tunes is exponential. People talk about picking up tunes by "ear" and discuss how "easy" that is. These advanced players forget how hard that is when you have no background in the "grammar" of Irish/Celtic tunes. But once you start learning this "grammar," then you hear a section and can play it because you already know it - or something close to it - from another tune, so you literally only have to learn two bars of the new tune, actually.
So, stick with the process of learning the tunes, and this stage will open up to you, and make learning more tunes exponentially faster.
Good luck!
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