Well, the way I do it is I listen to the recording until I have the tune memorized, then play it on the flute. It actually didn’t occur to me until recently that people would actually play along with the recording.
But you have to understand my background. My first instrument is the highland bagpipe. There’s no way you could play along with recordings you want to learn, at least, not with pipes (but maybe with a well-tuned practice chanter). So I just got used to memorizing the tune, and then play it by ear.
That’s all I meant. Does it make sense? I’m so unorthodox that I do have a copy of Amazing Slow Downer to learn stuff from recordings, but I always end up changing the key to fit whatever instrument I pick up. Sometimes you just feel like Eb, you know?
As far as “tricks” go, I’d have to say that I don’t think there are any tricks. Someone mentioned that tunes resolve to the tonic of the key . . . that’s not always true, and often isn’t the case. The lucky thing for learning flute stuff is that people nearly always play on D, Eb, or Bb instruments. It’s easy to tell from the timbre if it’s a Bb, but D and Eb can sound very similar. For those, it’s probably easiest just to try both. Whistle is another matter entirely, since you can have a chromatic collection of whistles from pedal tones to the stratosphere. In that case, if you don’t have access to a keyboard, start with D and work from there.
I guess I’m being characteristically unhelpful . . . and for that, I apologize.
Wrong. Any really competent fiddler would be able to change keys instantly without fuss or bother. Often all this invloves is moving the same fingering a few notches up or down the neck.
Some folk fiddlers might not play in more than a few keys but would be able to jump from one to another without any trouble. If you find you can’t do this, then your technique is simply inadequate for what you want to do which is as much a fault in folk music as it is in any other music.
Far too often on these forums people fail to distinguish between learning to play an instrument and learning to play Irish music on it. Nobody starts playing ‘in an Irish style’ at their first fiddle lesson. If you learn fiddle, you should, I think practice scales. If this sounds too faormal you can practice them playing with floating intonation.
Batty said it. Piece of cake switching keys on a fiddle, almost as easy as switching chords on a guitar. Any tune you can play on a whistle, you can shift down a fifth and play on the bottom three strings with the same fingering but you’re playing in a new key.
If I hear an A in a tune, and I can find it on my fiddle (which I usually can), I can figure out the rest of the notes relative to that.
Yes, muscle memory play a big part in playing fiddle, but having a good ear plays a bigger part, or you’ll be memorising placing your fingers in the wrong places.
Practising scales in very valuble, a bit boring but can be livened up by practising bowing techniques at the same time.
Hie thee hence and get thyself a fiddle Jack. You’re young enough to learn quickly, you have a good ear so it shouldn’t be torture.
Err… and transposing up or down a fifth is going to help him distinguish between C, D, and Eb whistles how?
Not to mention that I don’t understand why trying to play along using different whistles to see what works is bad, but learning an entire other instrument so you can play along and see what works is good. Not that learning fiddle would be a bad thing, but it sort of seems like massive overkill for the question at hand.
Well, if you’re not a theory guy (if yer like me!), the simplest way I find is to have whistles in all keys. Then, try to play along with each of them. If you end up having to half hole on the whistle you’re playing with, 90% chances are it’s the wrong whistle. With time the process is gonna get faster as it takes only 4-5 notes really to sort out the right key/whistle.
Sometimes you might end up being able to play with 2 or more whistles. For example, a C and F whistle can both manage tunes in C, (as D and G, tunes in G!), but the highest note and lowest note should set you straight.
With time your ear develop and you can notice notes in a tune that are out of the D/G/Em scale, like FNat and G#, and it helps u find the key/whistle faster.
Martin was simply adding an illustration to a general point I made in the post he quoted. If you read in context, you’ll notice that he was agreeing with my point. As I explained, to play in a close key you simply move your pattern up or down the neck without changing fingerings. If you are playing in D with no open strings you simply move everything up a half step for Eb. No new learning involved.
It would be if that were the only advantage. It’s possible to learn theory without playing a chromatic and chordal instrument but very much harder. You simply can’t hear the things about chords that you are being taught or compare the sound of an Eb major scale played straight after a D major scale. You don’t have to play well to be able to use the instrument for the purpose of finding the key of a whistle quickly. Guitar or piano would be even better. Murph mentioned that he often finds one or two notes are out. If he went with his first guess and tried playing a chordal accompaniment to the tune on guitar his mistake would be immediately obvious.
It’s all about just how much you really want to know about music. If you’re happy getting by with minimal theory, that’s fine, but I do believe you’ll regret not learning theory later if you start getting seriously good. I don’t think anyone would choose fiddle for the help it gives with deciphering keys but, if, like Martin, you already play, then that’s what you would use. I play keyboards, guitar and members of mandolin/bouzouki family so I just work things out on whatever is nearest at the time. I might try a D whistle first since they are so common, but if that failed I’d reach straight away for a chromatic instrument.
OK, you got me. I wasn’t being 100% serious. :roll:
However, knowing Jack well from meeting him & hearing him play at Wille Clancy Week, I know he has the talent, interest and dedication to work at an instrument, and it’s a lot easier to learn a new instrument a) when you’re young like Jack and b) when you have played other instruments & music already under your belt. So if Jack is interested in learning fiddle as he said, better to start now aged around twenty than in ten years time.
True – but you’re glossing over a key point here – “with no open strings”. Irish style fiddle uses open strings. Your assertion that no one learns Irish style as a starting point is simply wrong. People start directly in that style – indeed, it is the traditional way of doing things. Martin’s example of switching strings is what most Irish fiddlers do to transpose, in my experience – if they can’t do that, they work out the tune in first position (or whatever it’s called) with new fingerings.
To each his own. I’ve got sixteen years more experience playing chromatic instruments than I have playing whistle, and a fine grasp of music theory – but I would never try to figure out the key of a tune using something that was fully chromatic. To me, that just makes it more confusing, not less. The patterns of notes needed for Irish music just fall much more naturally to my fingers on whistle. And being able to play along at speed is half of the battle.
I guess it all depends on what you are listening to. I listen to a lot of pure drop stuff these days, mostly from Sligo. 99% of it is in D or Eb. I almost always have whistles of both sorts within easy reach – one of each in my car, on my desk, and in my backpack. Trying both keys is completely painless, and is obviously the easiest way to figure out what a recording uses.
The exceptions are easy enough to know. Mary Bergin uses all sorts of keys (and at least one of her albums lists which whistle is used on each track). Kevin Crawford has a Bb flute. Lunasa and Flook like F whistle. Killian Vallelly(sp?) sometimes uses a C chanter. Pre-1975 whistle recordings tend to use C whistles. If a tune is in D but minor you need a C whistle.
These simple observations cover virtually every track I’ve ever tried to play along with, and hundreds and hundreds of classic Irish recordings. (Plus Newfoundland recordings, too!) They are definitely biased towards flute and whistle, but that is my primary area of interest, and the observations work for quite a lot of fiddle and accordion recordings anyway.
Given these sorts of recordings, it seems utterly silly to try to develop fully chromatic pitch recognition, or learn a new instrument, just to figure out the key of a tune. Even wandering over to the piano seems kind of pointless if you have a nice bag of whistles.
Of course, if you are not listening to particularly traditional Irish music, or you’ve run into a whistle player fascinated by different keys or something, your milage may very.
The same pretty much goes for me, although I have to nitpick here and say that such tunes would not necessarily be in Eb or D, but in the modalities based on a minimum two-octave range with Eb or D being the lowest note of that range. Certainly other instruments can and do go higher or lower, but in trad the two-octave diatonic scale is the jumping-off point.
Finding the tonic (or tonics, depending) of the tune gives me the key. I use my flute for that. One day at a session a bodhrán player brought a CD to a session, bless his heart, and wanted us to learn a tune from it. It was a great tune, but I soon figured out that it was in Bb minor as I recall. Sorry, I don’t have a G# flute, nor an Eb flute. I could have done “Em” fingerings on the first one, or “Am” fingerings (think D whistle) on the other, and in that way could have easily played in Bb minor. What the hell do I have all these keys for, then? I’m not much of a musician, I guess; more of a gear head.
To address the original question posed by MurphyStout, I don’t have any tricks for knowing the key of the flute re: my previous post. I had to laboriously figure it out, and made mistakes in the process. Gotta love that editing feature…no one would be the wiser if I hadn’t mentioned it. I think that finding the tonic, listening to the range in the mode being played, and thinking in terms of the intervals of the diatonic scale would over time do the trick, but for me, at least, it would take some extended practice.
Sorry about that sarcastic looking ‘mmmmmmmm’ a couple of posts back. It was actually an abortive attempt to make the post I’m currently working on.
Well I actually didn’t gloss over anything. Open strings give you a very good clue to the key when working out fiddle tunes. But I understood Murph to be asking about how to use violin to help work out keys of whistle tunes. For this purpose movable scale patterns are the most useful although the adjustment required to play those patterns with open strings is so minimal it could scarcely pose a problem.
Well I actually didn’t assert that at all. What I said was that nobody plays with any stylistic distinctiveness at their first lesson. This holds true whatever the style of the teacher. Until you can find notes and play them more or less in tune you aren’t playing fiddle at all. I have no objection to people beginning on an instrument by learning a traditional folk style. That’s what I did on almost all the instruments I play.
These misunderstandings aside Colomon, I think I agree with pretty much every opinion you expressed.
