🎻 Why you shouldn't throw your sheet music away

Hi Reader!

If you’ve ever taken a class on Irish traditional music or worked with an Irish fiddle teacher in past, chances are you’ve been told not to rely on sheet music and instead focus on learning by ear.

I do agree that you should listen more than you look when it comes to getting this style under your fingers.

What I don’t think you should do is throw all your sheet music away and never pick up a tune book ever again.

After all, if you've put the time and effort into learning how to read sheet music, you should use that skill! (I have the same opinion about using vibrato in Irish music.)

Something that comes up again and again when I talk to fellow music teachers, both in the Irish tradition and in other fields, is the importance of offering multiple learning methods for students.

You may have heard of the VARK method before (Visual-Aural-Reflective-Kinetic), and perhaps you gravitate towards one learning method over another.

The trick here is to not confuse this with a personality test! Just because you learn better by learning by ear, or by having the sheet music in front of you doesn't mean that's the only way to learn a tune!

Personally, I have learned tunes by:

• Repeating phrase by phrase with a teacher in a live group workshop or 1:1
• Reading the sheet music and memorizing it from the page
• Listening to a recording a gajillion times in my car and putting bow to strings later
• Listening to a recording and wrote out the notes on staff notation or with a shorthand code while listening.
• Picking up a tune live in a session on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th pass through
• Repeating phrase by phrase in a pre-recorded audio message
• Singing along with a recording, then singing the tune on my own, THEN putting it on the fiddle

And there are even more ways to learn! With sheet music, you can have the dots on the page, or you can use a neat notation method like Padraig O'Keeffe did (check out his manuscripts on ITMA's site here).

Maybe one is more familiar to you, but maybe another allows you to focus more on the bow patterns because it's less visually overwhelming than a lot of dots on a page.

The point here is, don't rule a learning method out just because someone downplays it. And do get curious about trying something you haven't done before! We're trying to give ourselves our best chance at learning here, after all!

Happy experimenting!

~Hannah