Hey L.E. I didn’t mean to sound frightened or scornful of ornamentation. What I’m tired of his hearing people try to pack in as much of it as they can at the expense of the melody. “Danny Boy” sounds great on its own, but some musicians (dare I say not at your level) seem to feel that every song has to have ornamentation to such a degree that to my ear it kills the song and becomes a distraction. I’ve listened to the masters and I’ve listened to self proclaimed experts and the difference is when the music flows with ornamentation and when it seems halted by a “see what I can do” piece. I’ve been all over Europe (lived there for many years in the military) and I’ve listened to a lot of very good musicians play whistles in pubs and shows and yes they did play ornamentation, but it fit the music. It just seems to me that the facination with this part of the music here in America has reached a point of militancy in some parts and the real tradition is getting lost in the Trad. Sometimes it seems that some musicians are insisting that your sentence be rewritten as follows:
As you wrote in your post that you had to learn the songs and then the traditional ornamentation began to flow in later; I feel that it should be that way. I’m just embrassed by fellow musicians who give new-comers grief for not playing “trad” style. This is not a problem I’ve noticed on this message board, but more of one that seems to happen at festivals and sessions in various parts and to differing degrees. The people on this board actually seem to care about helping one-another, but the same can not be said in many of the festivals and cons I’ve seen.
1.every time you play, practice fundamentals. For instance, play scales in D, G and A.
learn some arpeggios and practice them. The book “better, stronger, faster” by Bill Hart
is worth practicing.
For each ornament, practice it by itself, up and down the whistle. Divide and conquer.
Break whistle playing down into its fundamentals and practice the fundamentals
separately.
When you come upon a difficult passage in a tune, play it again and again very very slowly.
When you make a mistake, play the passage again and again that way too.
Learn to enjoy methodical practice. It can be done. You can get to the point where,
upon stumbling over a difficult passage, you look forward to exploring it very slowly.
This Works.
More controversial. If there isn’tmuch ITM around you,
learn Old Time music, even bluegrass, play the music that’s there
to play. You can become more fluent in ITM that way too.
Even more controversial (tho’ I’m not sure why) is to be sure to use a metronome when practicing your fundamentals. Slow perfect practice is the idea. I know it sounds weird but your brain will speed it up later.
You can also run speed drills with a metronome. Start with a manageable speed for the pulse (half notes for reels for example). Play your exercise or a tune you are really comfortable with against that pulse at a speed where you don’t make ANY mistakes. This will be at a speed that is much slower than you can currently play the tune, but perfect practice makes perfect. Do this several times. Pay close attention to matching the beats in the melody to the metronome’s pulse.
Now, increase the speed on the metronome by only 5 beats per minute. Keep going with this routine until you are up to “session speed”. Remember, NO mistakes. This can be sort of tricky. You have to fool your mind into believing that this is possible to go that quickly and play cleanly. So here is the final trick. You want “session speed” to be in a comfortable place not the extreme of your abilities. So to bring this inside your range of tempo abilities… Go even faster a few times. Make this a larger jump in tempo maybe 10-15 Beats per minute faster than session speed. (This will be really fast.) Don’t worry, you are not ever going to perform it at this speed. Consider this a type of callisthenic. You are doing stretching exercises here.
Now go back to session speed. You will be amazed now at how easy it is to play cleanly at that speed and more than learning a tune at that tempo you will have proven to yourself that you can in fact do it. This may be the biggest hurdle you face, remember you have had 10 years to get in to the habits and mindset you are currently in. Give yourself the time to change the ideas you are working under.
If you don’t want to sound like you do now, do something different than you have in the past. Review your practice routine. Are you doing things that will increase your ability or are you just playing along at your same level?
There is some excellent advice given here, the best so far being “decide to do it” Things will fall into place after that.
40+ tunes - WOW! Congratulations - that’s an accomplishment!
I am still trying to memorize tune #1. I have played it for several weeks, hundreds of times, and I still can’t play it from start to finish without a glance at the music. I am also missing a note or two each time I play it even while looking at the music. Will I ever get it?
Mozart could hear a tune once and then play it in it’s entirety. It is obvious I am no Mozart.
Still I am having great fun playing and hope you are to. I try to immerse myself in the piece and enjoy it fully and not get worried about the pace of my progress. Live in the moment, in joy!
About timing: I’m told there are old men in Ireland who sit in the park and make their whistles sound like a bird.
For me, the name of the game is to become one of them–at least an American approximation. I think in terms of years.
Also I think it’s often the case that people who have a hard time with something, but keep at it, surpass those for whom it comes easily. Sometimes great facility is a curse in the long-term. Struggle
lends depth. All of my life I’ve been surrounded by people who did what I wanted to do more easily and more quickly than I could. But sooner or later I usually did it better. The race is not always to the swift.
Also a lot of folks avoid jigs and reels and play airs and
hornpipes. Sooner or later one must attack one’s weaknesses
and concentrate on what’s harder. The places where one
has difficulty are good teachers.
Kerry Posted: 27 Apr 2007 19:40
One other thing, if you haven’t discovered Micho Russell yet, I would highly recommend his CD titled “Ireland’s Whistling Ambassador.” Micho is regarded as one the greats of all time, and he is also noted for using ornamentation sparingly. Every time I listen to him I realize that he never wasted a note, and never put one in where it wasn’t necessary.
lemccullough Posted: 17 May 2007 02:31
I was fortunate to study and learn from a few of those master musicians (including Micho Russell, whose unique style is too often bandied about as a tattered battle flag for under-achievement).
Sorry to dust off a thread that is a little old, but I just came accross this and kind of feel the need to respond.
I certainly wasn’t trying to “fly a flag for under-acheivement” nor was I suggesting that ornamentation is overused or totally expendable. I was just trying to point out a player that used ornamentation more conservatively. Although Micho played with less ornamentation, it does not make sounding like him any easier! (I also think that Micho could have ornamented a tune with the best of them…if he so desired.)
I finally discovered the difference between memorizing a tune and learning a tune. When I memorize a tune, I see the notes on the page in my head and play those notes. Memorizing the page takes a long time and the memory is temporary; if I go for a while without playing that tune, I have trouble pulling up the picture in my brain.
About a year back, I heard Sting singing “Fields of Gold” on the radio. Something clicked in my head. I pulled over the car, got out my whistle and picked out the chorus from ear. I still don’t know the notes, or even what key the tune is in but I can play it anytime without hardly thinking about it. I’ve started using sheet music to get the gist of how a tune goes, then listening to a CD and picking out the tune. If I run across a spot I can’t figure out, I’ll pull out the sheet music and figure it out then put the sheet music away. After I’ve learned tune this way, the “picture” in my brain isn’t dots on a page; it is some non-visual combination of sound, finger postion and an image of where the tune is going (up, down, big intervals, little intervals). Those memories are much more permanent.
I’ve still got a long, long way to go. I haven’t figured out any more of “Fields of Gold” other that the chorus. I don’t play fast and ornaments are very much a work in progress. But I feel like I’m learning music now and not just a sequence of notes.
I can’t tell you how to learn this other than to say you can do it. You can put down the sheet music and play that tune. Use whatever mental tricks you can dream up to make your brain believe that you can and you will. In my case it was as simple as pulling over the car and playing the tune before I had a chance to think about what I was doing.
Interesting points Walrii. I find I can often learn a tune quickly “by instinct” without thinking much about it, but that memory is prone to failure. It takes me much longer to get it into the “thinking” part of my brain where I “know” it and can play in public without fear of a trainwreck.
Whit, I’m pretty sure all this leads back to which part of the brain we think with. Everyone has probably heard about the right side of the brain = three-dimensional, visual, multi-tasking thought processes while the left side of the brain = linear, verbal, logical thought processes. Among my other hobbies, I am a flight instructor. One of the hardest parts about teaching people to fly is to translate all the words in the books and ground school lessons into a 3-d picture of the flight. Once you get the student to stop thinking in a verbal, linear part of the brain and start using the 3-d, visual part of their brain, things go pretty smoothly.
I’m guessing there is also a musical section of the brain. I’m thinking it lives in the right side but that’s just a guess, as it probably isn’t a visual section of the brain. If we get the visual and verbal parts of the brain too heavily involved, we probably hamper the musical section’s ability to learn the music. So we each must use whatever mental tricks work for us to activate that musical section and let it learn.