I’ve been doing a bit of playing along with Larsen’s studies, and I’m concerned about the studies that are based on jigs. Larsen plays these absolutely evenly, both the rolls and melody notes. But Jigs aren’t supposed to be played that way (see http://www.rogermillington.com/siamsa/brosteve/tricky.html and http://www.irishtune.info/rhythm/). Won’t working on his studies as he plays them develop bad habits? If so, that’s a giant drag, because I was seeing huge value in having a set of exercises like this that had something I could play along with.
He doesn’t seem to play jigs with even rhythm (listening to Willie Coleman’s Jig, for example), so why are the exercises are like this?
I don’t have Grey Larson’s book, so this is a generic answer based on my own experience rather than on the material in question. I find that it’s pretty easy to ‘swing’ jig rhythm when you’re playing them up to speed, but adding swing when you’re playing slowly enough for a study is quite difficult - possibly because swing is more an unconscious than a calculated thing, possibly because not every single set of triplets is usually swung (at least when I play), and possibly because it’s very hard to play slowly, add swing, and maintain a rock steady rhythm - the third note in a triplet will usually end up out of place. I find that, when I’m teaching, and playing slowly, my playing of jigs in particular is a lot more ‘straight’ - as written - than when I’m playing at a comfortable speed.
However, this may not have anything to do with the true reason !
Deirdre
I wouldn’t think it would make you develop bad habits; I personally think they are very beneficial but only as an aid to developing fingering/tonguing techniques and different ways of phrasing a tune ie; slurring over the bar etc.
“The Essential Guide” is only a tutorial, swing or flow can’t be taught from a book. The only way to get an idea is to listen to players you admire, then mimic, adapt and always be faithful to your own path.
Listening to players you would like to emulate shouldn’t be underestimated
As Deirdre said, playing these tunes slowly makes it difficult to get a decent flow. The complete versions at the end of the book, which are a bit faster, have a bit more oomph “The Cliffs of Moher” is an example. Of course it’s all a matter of taste.
Take “The Frost is all over” as an example the way Grey plays it is very basic as a tutorial tune. One of the transcriptions, by Sean Ryan also “The Frost is all over” that is played totally differently in fact it’s nearly unrecognisable (compared with Grey’s) because of Sean Ryan’s amazing ornamentation and natural flow.
Another very good interpretation of this tune is Laurence Nugent’s.
That’s a good question and maybe Grey is the best one to answer that. I agree about how the basic jig rhythm should be (i.e. yaw-de-dah) and that is how I learend to play. My first introduction to the music was by a teacher who stressed the rhythm first, and then the notes second. I don’t have the book but maybe the exercises in question are there simply to promote a basic sense of “steady even playing” at a much more rudimentary level than what you are thinking and not meant to develop or highlight rhythm just yet. It could be very early in the learning process of that tutorial. Perhaps his approach is that once one is fairly steady, then maybe he will introduce how to create downbeats and various rhythms and some of the more subtle aspects of playing.
To echo a theme that’s emerging here, some things just can’t be practised slowly and then brought up to speed in perfect proportion. I don’t mean that slow practice won’t be beneficial; what I mean is that certain things will be lost or distorted in the slowing down that only get restored when you speed up.
Take rolls. If you slowed down every aspect of a roll in perfect proportion, you’d play the cuts and taps as short notes rather than blips—you can’t slow down a blip and have it remain a blip. So, although it can’t do any harm to practice rolls slowly, as you bring them up to speed, you’ll decrease the relative proportion of the roll spent on the rolled note while the time spent blipping remains the same. Not a big problem but perhaps disconcerting if you use slow down software.
When I try to play jigs very slowly they sound, … er . .. terrible. They don’t need to be full speed but they do need to be close before I even feel comfortable. Perhaps I’m just naturally drawn by the tempo into playing in some quite inappropriate waltz rhythm.
I haven’t started working through the Larson book yet but, flipping through it, his explanations are probably the best I’ve seen. Even where I find myself wanting to disagree—eg, some of his remarks about rolls—I still think his explanations are better than any I’ve seen in earlier books.
The book speaks about “lilt, or swing” on pages 40-42. Is that what we are talking about here? If so, he says (at the bottom of p. 41), that he recommends “playing the notes in an ‘even’ fashion when you are learning the basic physical motions and coordination of a new technique.” He says that the players can add lilt later, when they are comfortable with the technique. (He gives much more detail in the book.) I suspect that the demonstrations that he gives are designed to go along with that recommendation.
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