From the Page to the Session: Learning Tunes by Ear

Starting from Scratch

I grew up as a classically trained violinist, so for most of my life I approached music the way I had been taught to approach it: read the notes on the page, play them as accurately as possible, and worry about memorization later. Improvisation was something other musicians did. It wasn't really part of my vocabulary. If someone had asked me to play a tune I'd just heard, I honestly wouldn't have known where to begin.

That changed when I started playing traditional music. I only began playing it seriously about a year ago, and I keep track of the tunes I memorize by adding them to a tunebook on The Session. Not long ago I realized I had just recorded my hundredth tune there, which still feels a little surreal to me. A year ago, I would have thought memorizing a hundred tunes was something only very experienced players did, not something I would be doing myself. At the same time, a hundred is still just a beginning. It feels like a milestone, but it also feels like the point where I’m only starting to understand how much more there is to learn.

It didn't take long to realize that the skills I'd spent years developing in weren't enough on their own. In a session, nobody hands you sheet music. Even when there is a tune on the page, the dots are only the outline. The music lives in the bowing, the ornaments, the little rhythmic pushes and pulls that every player brings to the tune. If everyone played exactly what was printed, the whole thing would sound flat and lifeless.

Learning by Ear

I began by attending workshops that would help me learn tunes by ear. One instructor would simply play a phrase and have us repeat it over and over until we could stumble through the whole tune. By the end of the class, we all managed to get through it, but a few days later I couldn't play a single tune I learned that way. They disappeared from my memory almost immediately.

Another instructor did something completely different. Before we were allowed to touch our instruments, we had to sing the tune. We sang it until we knew where it was going, until we could almost hear the next phrase before it happened. Only then did we pick up our fiddles.

I still remember those tunes years later.

That experience changed the way I learn music. These days, if I can't sing a tune, I don't really try to play it. I'll listen to a recording over and over while I'm driving, working in the shop, or making dinner. Eventually the melody starts to settle into my head, and that's when I know I'm ready to pick up the violin.

Even then, I usually don't start with the bow. I often play along pizzicato first, because that lets me keep hearing the recording clearly. If I'm bowing, especially with headphones on, I end up hearing mostly myself instead of the musician I'm trying to imitate. Plucking gives me a way to check the notes while keeping the recording front and center in my ears.

Choosing the Right Tunes

Another thing that changed for me was deciding what to learn in the first place. For years, I'd hear a great recording and decide I ought to learn that tune. I'd spend several evenings figuring it out, play it for a week, and then quietly forget it because I never had a reason to play it again.

Now I try to learn tunes that are actually played at the sessions I attend. I know they'll come back around every few weeks, so every session reinforces what I've already learned.

I'm also fortunate that I spend much of my day playing violins while testing repairs and setups. Somewhere along the way I realized that instead of playing a quick scale, I could use that time to work on a new tune. At the beginning of this journey, I was thrilled if I learned one tune in a week. Now it's often closer to one a day. That still surprises me, because it doesn't feel like I'm forcing myself to memorize more. It feels more like I'm finally learning how to listen.

Seeing the Patterns

What surprised me most, though, was discovering that learning tunes isn't really about memorizing hundreds of individual notes. It's about recognizing patterns.

I first noticed this while learning bagpipe music. Experienced pipers often mark up their scores with colored pencils, giving repeated phrases the same color. Once you do that, a tune that looked impossibly long suddenly shrinks. Instead of thirty-two unique bars, maybe there are only ten bars of genuinely new material. The rest is repetition, sequence, or a slight variation on something you've already learned.

The same thing happens once you start paying attention to scales and arpeggios. They're the grammar of the music. Rather than memorizing individual notes, you're recognizing that this phrase climbs the scale, this one outlines the tonic chord, and this one ends with a familiar cadence. Once you begin hearing tunes that way, they become dramatically easier to remember.

What Traditional Music Taught Me About Classical Music

Learning traditional music has made me a better classical musician. In Baroque performance practice, composers weren't expecting performers to play the page exactly as printed. They expected musicians to understand the harmony, recognize the patterns, and add tasteful ornamentation. Suddenly improvising a cadence or decorating a repeat didn't feel like inventing something from nothing. It felt like speaking a language I'd already begun learning in Irish sessions. 

That realization changed the way I think about memorization too. In both traditions, the goal isn't just to store a sequence of notes in your head. The goal is to understand how the music works so well that you can move around inside it comfortably. Once you understand the structure, the tune stops feeling fragile. It becomes something you can actually live with.

Finding My Own Voice

That's also why I don't spend much time worrying about ornaments when I first learn a tune. I want the skeleton first. Once that's solid, I can listen to players I admire and notice what makes their version come alive. Maybe it's a drone, a graceful cut, a rhythmic bow pulse, or a subtle variation the second time through.

I don't happen to use many chops—not because they're wrong, but because they don't fit the sound I'm trying to create. Every tradition gives you a vocabulary, and over time you choose the words that become your own voice. That's one of the things I love most about traditional music: it gives you enough structure to stand on, but enough freedom to sound like yourself.

What I've Learned So Far

If there's one lesson I've learned from all of this, it's that memorizing music isn't really about having a better memory. It's about learning to hear structure instead of individual notes. Once you start recognizing phrases, harmony, repetition, and character, tunes stop feeling like puzzles to solve. They start feeling like stories you already know how to tell. Start small and simple; sing it, pizz it, then play it. And soon, you'll be showing up at your sessions able to play any tune that comes up!