Playing your favorite songs on the ocarina

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. 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 might think, and is covered in Playing the ocarina with sheet music.
• Ocarina tabs: Tabs show you how to finger the notes of a song. They 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.

As was discussed in The types of music notation, 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

Due to our limited short team memory, humans can only handle so much new information at once. If you try to learn too much too quickly, it feels overwhelming. However, there are two 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, let's use 'Out on the Ocean', a common Irish jig. As a whole, it's pretty long:

Let's 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 'Musicality: how to make your ocarina playing sound good'.

Then, once you've broken the melody down, it can be learned one part at a time:

• Listen to that part of the melody a few times so that you know what it sounds like.
• Repeat the fingerings for each part. After a minute or two, you'll notice it start to become automatic, the fingers start to move by themselves.
• Then you move on to learning the next small part.
• Once you can play a few parts of a melody separately, try joining them together.

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 music down in practice

Breaking down music like this has never been easier. There are numerous software tools which will help you to do so:

• Audio editors like Audacity and Reaper can be used to loop parts of recordings, as well as slow them down without changing the pitch.
• Music notation software like MuseScore can do the same thing with sheet music. You enter some notes, and then it will play them back for you, while showing you the current note being played. The MuseScore website includes sheet music for many popular songs.
• If you know how a melody sounds, you can do the same thing in your head! Imagine the sound of a small part at a time.
• Or with paper notation, use vertical lines to visually separate things.
• Or ask your music teacher to play parts of the music for you.

This is how it looks to loop part of a recording in Reaper. Sections of a recording can be looped effortlessly by selecting them, and the 'BPM' option at the bottom changes playback speed without changing the pitch.

Playing in tune and in time

Two essential 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. Both of these can be addressed by playing over a known-good recording of the song or tune.

Correcting your rhythm is a matter of listening for when your note is sounding in relation to the note you are hearing. There is an exercise to develop this in 'Getting rhythm', and when they match exactly your playing will blend perfectly with what you are hearing, and can even sound as if only one instrument is playing.

Intonation can be checked in much the same way, as when two notes are exactly in tune they produce a clean sound, but if they are not, you will hear a wobble in the sound.

This is covered in Playing the ocarina in tune.

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. There is more information on this topic in the article Playing the ocarina in tune.

Finger transitions

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 or placing a single finger:

Lifting or placing two or more fingers at the same time:

Lifting one or more fingers, while simultaneously placing one or more fingers. These are called cross fingerings.

It is possible to practice all possible note transitions on the instrument, get them into muscle memory, and make them feel equally effortless. How to do so is discussed in How to never think about your fingers again.

Closing

I'm sure you've now started learning to play some of your favourite songs, and that's great. Just be patient, as it may take a few weeks to get where you want. But as long as you stick with it, you'll get there eventually.