Arguably the most valuable thing you can do as a beginner to music is to start learning to play your favourite songs. Hearing something that you recognise emanating from your instrument for the first time feels awesome. Through playing, you begin to develop a natural understanding and music stops being a black art.
And this is easier than you might think. If you like a song, there's a good chance you can sing it from memory or hear it in your head. And if you can do either, you already know what it's supposed to sound like.
Learning how to play your favourite songs on the ocarina is just a matter of finding out how to play the notes on the instrument, and there are quite a few ways of doing so:
- Watch other players: You can watch someone else and copy their fingerings.
- By ear: If you play around with the instrument, you'll start to find patterns that sound like music you know. For some tips, see Getting started playing the ocarina by ear.
- Using sheet music: Reading sheet music is much easier than you may think, and is covered in Playing the ocarina with sheet music.
- Ocarina tabs: Tabs show you how to finger the notes of a song, and can be found online for a lot of popular music.
You'll find that some things come more easily to you than others, and I'd recommend trying things to see what works best for you.
Do note however that ocarina tabs have limitations that will hold you back as you progress in your music journey. It is not a problem to use them to get started, but you'll want to move on to other approaches pretty quickly.
How to learn complex music from the start
As we explored when we learned the fingerings, we can only handle so much new information at once. If we try to learn too much too quickly, it feels overwhelming. There are two very easy techniques that bring complex music within our capability:
- Breaking things down into a series of smaller parts.
- Slowing the music down.
By applying these, even the most complex music can be approached regardless of your skill level. You can think of it like zooming in to an image to analyse a single subject.
To demonstrate lets use 'out on the ocean', a common Irish jig. If you listen to it you'll see its pretty long:
lets break it down into smaller parts. Here is the first part of the melody:
Knowing where to put breaks that don't sound awkward is a matter of understanding the phrasing and structure of music. It is introduced in 'Figures, phrases and motifs'.
After a while, you'll be able to play through the whole melody from memory. Your speed will naturally increase the more you play.
Breaking down music like this has never been easier. There are numerous software tools which will help you to do so:
This is how it looks to loop part of a recording in Reaper. Sections of a recording can be looped really easily by selecting them, and the 'BPM' option at the bottom changes playback speed without changing the pitch.
Two very important things to keep track of as you practice are playing in tune, and ensuring that notes are played in time with the rhythm of the music.
Rhythm can be checked easily by playing over a recording, listening for when your note is being played in relation to the note you are hearing. There is an exercise to develop this in 'Getting rhythm'.
It's also important to keep a handle on your intonation. As you practice your favourite music a chromatic tuner can be used to check your intonation, as was explored in How to play the ocarina.
However, another important skill to develop is the ability to hear your intonation, and it's pretty easy to hear when playing over a recording. When two notes are perfectly in tune, your sound will be clean, which is called a 'unison'.
Hearing a unison is actually really easy, and the following tool demonstrates what to listen for. it plays two notes, one of which you can control with the slider. Notice how when you drag the slider to the right or left, you can hear a 'warbling' sound.
You may find that some finger transitions feel awkward. Dealing with this is just a matter of practising that transition by itself slowly for several days. It'll start feeling easier as the awkward feeling is an illusion caused by a lack of familiarity.
Understanding the different kinds of finger movements can also help, they fall into one of the following three categories:
Lifting one or more fingers, while simultaneously placing one or more fingers. These are called cross fingerings.
Practising scales, intervals and arpeggios will also help. Songs are built from these patterns, and practising them allows you to internalise all of the common finger transitions on the instrument.
I'm sure you've now started learning to play some of your favourite songs, and that's great. Just be patient, it may take a few weeks to get where you want, but as long as you stick with it, you'll get there eventually.
