Using melodic patterns to play by ear

One important thing to realise about playing music by ear is that the notes found in melodies are not random. The are melodic patterns that show up over and over again, and learning to recognise and play these makes playing the ocarina by ear much easier.

Note that the names I am using for some of these patterns were coined by David Fuentes, who has a great article series giving examples of these in well known music. You can find it linked at the end of the article.

What are melodic patterns?

A melodic pattern, or melodic figure is any short pattern of notes that occurs commonly in music. For instance if you take a look at the first part of the swallowtail jig shown below, can you see the repeating visual patterns?

You may notice several occurrences of a 3 note 'slice' from a descending scale, shifted up and down in the range. This pattern is called a 'scale run', and examples can be found in most, if not all genres of music.

Melodic patterns are useful because we can practice them over the whole of the range of our ocarina. We can develop muscle memory, associate that with the sound of the pattern, and know how to perform it as soon as we hear it.

Let's see how it works in practice. The following is one octave of 3 note scale runs for an alto C ocarina. Play through them until it becomes easy, and listen to how each one sounds:

With the pattern in your fingers, we can start learning to recognise and perform them by ear:

• Find someone who plays an instrument, and ask them to make up some melodies for you, formed entirely from 3 note scale runs.
• Begin these patterns in simple relationships. For instance, make the first note of the following scale run start on the last note of the previous.
• Ask your assistant to tell you what note the melody begins on. Then, as we did in the first part, listen to the whole melody, hear the figures, and perform it.

For instance, one might start off with something like this:

As your experience grows, gradually introduce other ways that the figures can follow one another, such as:

• Starting on the same note as the first note of the previous figure.
• Starting on the last note of the previous figure.
• Starting on the note one step higher or lower than the last note of the previous figure.

Ask your assistant to introduce these one at a time, and make sure you can comfortably play music by ear including it, before introducing another one. All of these patterns can be played to other rhythms as well, and you may want to experiment with varying that too.

Arpeggios

The other pattern that you will hear in a ton of music are arpeggios, where the notes of a chord are played one after another. For instance, here is a C major arpeggio:

Arpeggios show up all over the place in music, including:

• "Great Fairy's Fountain" from the legend of Zelda.
• The opening of the first movement of Beethoven's moonlight sonata.
• The highland bagpipe tune "Atholl Highlanders" also makes extensive use of arpeggios.

I'd suggest practising these figures in the same way as the 3 note scale run, first learning to play them across the range of the instrument. Here are the arpeggios within the first octave of an alto C ocarina:

Then having the basics, ask someone to make up melodies for you that include these patterns. It can be helpful to begin by contrasting the 3 note scale run with an arpeggio. You'll notice that they sound quite different, with the arpeggio sounding more 'open'.

As you gain experience the range can be expanded, following the same pattern over the whole range of whatever ocarina you have.

Also, while not strictly related to arpeggios as a melodic pattern, I feel it worth pointing out that the start of swallowtail jig shown previously is built on a framework of a D minor arpeggio. The notes of the chord are D, F, A, and the first and third note of the scale runs 'slot in' like building blocks between them:

Most music is based on the foundation of a chord progression, and it is common to see the melody notes align with chord notes. This subject is explored in The relationship between melody and chords.

More melodic patterns

Now you know the essence of recognising melodic patterns by ear, and from here, it's just a matter of gradually learning more patterns over time. As you do so, you'll start to hear them in music as you listen, enhancing your ability to play by ear.

The following are some more common melodic patterns. All of them have been given in one position. I'd suggest working through them, practising each over your ocarina's range, them practising playing music by ear including the pattern.

Anticipating movement

The ascending or descending motion of a scale run or arpeggio in melodies is often emphasised by first moving in the opposite direction. Thus we have the figures 'Crazy driver', 'Bounce', and 'Pounce':

These figures kind of 'throw' the melody in an ascending or descending direction, and the same kind of pattern in reverse can catch it, creating a sense of resolution to a single note:

Some other figures that do this are two patterns called 'Little Holly Philip' and 'Plectrum'. These create a sense of resolution by surrounding a note with a higher and lower note.

Like the figures mentioned previously, they can be reversed, which changes their function from 'catching' to 'throwing' the melody.

Arpeggio inversions

The notes of the arpeggio may also appear in different orders which are called 'inversions'. Each progressive inversion is formed by taking the note of the bottom of the arpeggio and moving it up by an octave, until you get back to the root form an octave higher.

Melodies often make use of inverted arpeggios as they allow different chords to show up within the same note range. For example, in The Atholl Highlanders. If this melody used a root form triad for the F major section, the lowest note of the melody would suddenly jump up.

Ornamental patterns

Many kinds of melodic figures that one will hear are essentially ways of ornamenting simpler patterns, such as a scale run or long note of one pitch. One of these is the auxiliary, where the note above or below is played:

It is also not uncommon to encounter patterns which oscillate between two adjacent notes, either notes from a scale, or notes from an arpeggio:

And a scale, vs a pair of diatonic thirds, both of which serve the same function, starting and ending in the same place, but the second sounds more interesting.

Pedal notes

The final kind of melodic figure I want to mention are pedal notes, when a melody jumps to another note which is usually a chord note. The term 'pedal note' comes from church organs, which have pedals to play sustained bass notes.

Pedal notes describe a general category of melodic figures, and a simple example is where a two note scale run is ornamented by jumping up or down to a chord note in the middle:

Pedal notes are also found in longer sequences, repeatedly jumping to a lower or higher note like the following. An interesting phenomenon occurs if such a pattern is played at a high tempo, the mind merges everything together and the fixed note actually is perceived in harmony.

There are a great deal of pedal note patterns in use in music, and because of that I'd recommend learning the ones that show up often in the music you play.

Closing notes and further reading

Learning to recognise and play patterns by ear is useful as it moves you from thinking about one note after anther, to one pattern after another. It's analogous to moving from sounding out one letter at a time, to recognising whole words.

The patterns that I've mentioned in this article are meant to be an introduction, and are in no way exhaustive. I'd strongly recommend reading the article ' The 24 universal melodic figures' by figuringoutmelody.com, which gives countless examples of figures in real music.

Also, try studying the music that you play regularly and see if you can identify any of these 3 or 4 note patterns for yourself. The common patterns do vary between musical genres.

You may have noticed in playing through these patterns that how they sound changes depending on where on the instrument you play them. We'll be addressing this next in Learning to identify melodic intervals by ear.