One of the big problems a lot of band have is that it seems to take forever for everyone to learn new tunes. In my opinion, this is not because people don't want to learn them but because they don't have an efficient technique for learning. What follows is a method that I've found to be better and faster than the usual practice of playing a tune over and over until it imbeds itself in your memory.

The first principle is that you should concentrate on learning coherent phrases within the tune. A phrase will usually consist two bars of music, although in 4/4's it's normally one bar. It's much easier to memorize two bars than a whole tune.

The second principle is learning the tune back to front. In other words, start by learning the ending phrase, and work backwards through the part. That way, once you get through the bit you're working on, you're on cruise control - you already know the rest of the tune.

To walk you through this, we'll use Corriechoiile's Welcome, which is a nice old tune that just about every band in these parts used to play back in the sixties. It seems to have gone out of fashion these days, at least around here, which is a shame. It's still a great little march.

As stated, we start with the last two bars of the first part. Using the last note of the previous bar as a pickup note, we get

Nothing tricky here. Play that over a dozen or so times, and you should be able to look away and play it from memory. Now play it for a bit without the music, until you're comfortable with it.

Next we back up two bars, and again taking our pickup note from the next previous bar, we have

Follow the same procedure with this. Practice it until you can play it without looking at the music, then play it without the music until you're comfortable with it.

You should now be able to put these two phrases together, and play the last line of Part 1

Backing up to the last two bars of the first line, we have

You may have noticed that only the second bar of this phrase is really new. But indulge me and practice the whole phrase anyway.

Having got that down, we back up again to the first two bars, only to find that you already know them; aside from the pickup note, which is good old strike-in-the-chanter "E". they're the same as the first two bars in the second line. so you're now ready to try the whole first part from memory;

Now we're ready for the second part. Look through it to see how much you already know;

You will, of course, have noticed that this is the only new phrase;

Actually, only the first bar is really new, but we'll stick to procedure and practice the whole phrase. Once you've got that down, you're ready to try the whole part from memory.

Got that down? Now try the whole tune. See how easy it is?

Of course, when you try to play the tune tomorrow, you'll realize that this has all been a sham and a delusion, and you can't remember the damn tune at all. Not to worry; just go through the whole process again. You'll find that it goes a lot quicker. Do it every day for a week or so, and you should have the tune down and ready to go on pipes.

Too Much Black on That Page...

This part deals with tunes that many people will pass up because of all those eighth and sixteenth notes. You may think that your fingers just can't keep up (They Can!). Or perhaps you just can't get the timing to come out right - something that usually results from panicking and trying to rush so you can get all those notes into one beat. What we are going to do here is show you a method for approaching these tunes.

Let's take as an example The Portree Men, which is a nice little three-part tune that a lot of people would bypass because it has too many "fast bits".

Here's the first part of the tune;

In order to make it a easier to follow, we're going to write it out as a 4/4, or more correctly in "allabreve" time, which means that it's written as a 4/4, but played in 2/4 time. (That's the way reels are written.) Actually, properly written in allabreve time, it would look like this;

Yeah, whatever. Since our object is to simplify as much as possible, we'll write it out just as if it were a 4/4, thus;

This, believe it or not, works out to exactly the same tune as in the actual music pictured above, except that it looks a lot more attainable, right?

The purpose of this, of course, is to familarize you with the music. You start out practicing it just as you would a nice, simple 4/4, except that you don't stop when you get it up to your normal marching pace; you keep going until you have doubled that. This, of course, does not mean that, instead of your normal stately pace, you will be proceeding down the street at a mad gallop, strewing drummers in your wake. As you get up to a workable speed, you simply start counting on every second beat.

With a bit of practice, you should be able to work the timing out from the regular music. However, to take you through this tune, we have prepared what we shall call a Practice Sheet, which will take you through all three parts in the 4/4 format.

We also have another practice sheet, this time for a very nice slow march called The Skye Gathering.

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