I'm trying to improve my ear to recorder playing, one note at a time. I can sight read tunes fairly easily with recorder. If I hear a tune and I like it I try to play it by ear and if I screw up and get frustrated I try to find the notation. Sometimes the black dots don't match the tune exactly but I read the written variation and then alter it if I wish to something closer to what I hear. I like to memorize tunes and find that I can remember the notation in my head faster and more easily than I can memorize the tune to replay; if I get stuck I bring the page up in my head and see what the next note should be. After a while I can remember the tune completely aurally.

Singing is different. If I try to sing a tune I've heard I get it faster than if I try to play it on recorder. But I can't sight sing as accurately. So often times I play a tune on recorder so I can sing it and I sing a tune for recorder so I can play it.

In each case I suppose that if I accepted that it would take more work and practice I could get better at hearing recorder tunes and sight singing, but because I can get the tunes another way I continue to do it the way that works at the moment.

And yes, Shambles, there have been occasional times when I've been working intensively on my sight reading skills that I can hear a tune and bits of it, unfortuneately never all of it, appear in my head as notes on the page. It doesn't happen often but I've always assumed that if I worked harder at the music all these little bits would fall together in place and I'd be able to move easily from visual to aural and back again.