After three years of this, I still play mostly Airs, blues and American traditional music. The common thread in all three, as I see it, is that expression is more critical than speed or ornamentation. To put it bluntly, on most other things my fingers just don’t keep up with my brain.
Is there anything anyone can think of from their own musical education that might help with this? Bear in mind, I’m closing on sixty and my early instrument was a trombone. I can play a mountain dulcimer somewhat but ma attempts at a hammered dulcimer were a cacophonous disaster.
You should avoid to do any hard manual work.
My fingers had become much quicker when I took typewriting lessons.
No brillant ideas for the rest, sorry.
Meditation. I’m not joking. My sense, from my own experience, is that it frees up some blocks to connecting your finger movement to your thoughts and allows for a firmer grasp of more elements of the music making in general. I happened to learn Transcendental Meditation years ago. I kind of doubt what method will make much difference. I’m thinking a disciplined, regular quieting of the mind is the key.
Tony
As I usually say . . . you will get better advice from someone else, but I can tell you what worked for me.
Dexterity improves with time and practice. I took up the whistle to help my dexterity. My fingers used to lock straight and move awkwardly. Try to keep your fingers curved rather than flat and keep your fingers close to the holes even when you’re not playing those notes. I find this hard to do(as my fingers then to lift high and flay back when not covering a hole), but if you make it as part of your practice, it should help the speed.
Could be the whistle as well, as I found my Tony Dixon helped me to speed up and I found it very easy!
But I’ve approched new skills as I learned to do in therapy. Start with one or two goals, work to accomplish each goal each time you do the task and add new goals gradually, while mataining the first goals. For example, you might work on keeping your fingers close for a week or two(not worring about speed) then add ortamentation(while paying attention to your fingers)and in a few weeks, pick up the pace a bit . . . but still keeping the first two skills in mind.
Thanks, Mamakash. I forgot to mention the obvious. Practice makes it happen gradually. Practice the same tune slowly and fast. You’ll find different difficulties manifest. It really is training- knowing what it feels like when it’s done right. I’d say meditation facilitates this process.
Tony
Not something that most people want to hear, and advice that most people won’t listen to anyway. . .
Practice scales, finger patterns, arpeggios, broken chords. These are the components of the music, and getting your fingers to do them consistently will improve your dexterity for tunes. I have access to a book that has helped me a lot, which I’ve mentioned here before. Its called Better - Stronger - Faster and it works, not only for fingering, but breathing.
I do these exercises nearly every day. On occasion they’re the only thing I play. I’m still not a stellar player, but people who have listened to me for three years have commented that I’m playing much better than I did a year ago.
A metronome also helps, in that I know that I started playing an exercise at 60 bpm, for example, and have slowly gotten it, click by click, up to 80 or 90. It makes sure that I don’t speed up on an easy section then have to slow down for the harder, ring finger notes. If I can play something through at one speed then the next time I practice, I speed it up a notch or two.
Lastly, playing with others helps enormously. You get hauled along with them, and get inspired to go home and practice things that you hear. Just because its a reel doesn’t mean you learn it at 100+ bpm.
I would lay odds it’s the brain that is slowing down the fingers not your fingers unable to keep up with the brain. Once I learned the music (around 7 years of playing, I would estimate), I don’t need to think of finger movements, the tune will move them..
Don’t use the tips of the fingers, use the pads and keep the fingers straight (but not stiff). Curled fingers use more muscles in moving and therefore will take longer to move.
Learn the cuts and rolls as that will really speed up your fingers. Once you can think of a tune “vertically” (a gestault?) rather than “horizontally” (a sequence of notes following one another), speed will come automatically.
The way I understand it, it is thinking (or feeling) of the phrases that make up a tune as blocks, or patterns, instead of just having a string of notes and breaks that come one after the other.
It is quite easy to perceive a broken chord as a single entity and not as 4 (or 3) single notes. Same with “logical”, very common ending patterns. This can be extended so that longer phrases sort of melt together, and the tune becomes a series of these blocks, with heavy and light parts (rhythm), a certain swing and mood, a feeling, and a melody, all in one.
It’s a bit difficult to explain, but this is one of the aspects that can’t be conveyed with dots, and also why changes in speed and phrasing can give a tune a completely different character. To me.
I’m with the female tiger–the Bill Hart book Stronger, Better
Faster is a big help. I think that to master the whistle
or flute, especially to increase speed, broken chords,
arpeggios and scales are precisely what’s in order.
The book says it’s meant largely for people
who feel they aren’t progressing as fast as
they would like. Costs about 10 dollars. Best
P.S. I don’t think age is an important factor.
Just saw again yesterday two of my old street
singer friends. They’re now in their middle sixties
and have improved considerably in the
last three years.
This makes complete sense. I was trained originally as a drummer, and the first thing drummer learns are the rudiments, which are phrases of notes. There are 26 standard ones plus dozens of others, and if you learn them all, you will never encounter any passage in music that you have not already practiced and mastered. Music then is simply a combination of rudiments.
What wasn’t clear to me in initial question was whether its the ability to go up and down the whistle with ease or whether you hit roadblocks at certain points that cause a drastic reduction in speed. Tyg’s method is best for former. For latter, you have to isolate the trouble spots and attack 'em creatively.
For example, many times a piece is de-railed by a C natural. You have several fingering options there to work around and try. Once you have settled upon a choice, you do the old Romero (who really knows who invented this?) guitar technique. Ten times perfect slow, then do this over and over again at increasing speeds. If you make one mistake, you start the ten again. Very boring but no subsitute. You’ll come out of it knowing how to do it, I guarantee.
The other generalized comment about speed is this. Remember to listen to those favorite cds that really made you want to play in the first place. Pick up the whistle and try to play along. Sure, you may miss some notes but it puts you back in touch with where you want to be and gives you momentum. And try not to be intimidated by telling yourself that “they are stars and you could never do THAT.” There may be some truth but ignore it.
The first Irish thing I ever learned on whistle was a reel (whose name I still cannot figure out from liner notes, it MAY be Lad Obeirnes but not the Norbeck one), that I heard on a Patrick Street record.
The fiddle just played it so finely, so connected, that I just HAD to learn that tune. This was before I could play a roll or anything so I was just guessing at certain spots without understanding. At least for the Weekender emotional/mental configuration, special tracks on various CDs elevate me beyond others to try really hard and great results can follow.
If it’s really a physical problem, glucosamine (sp?) may help. I started taking a glucosamine sulphate supplement about six weeks ago because a “busted knuckle” was still extremely tender six months after I’d caught it between two 16’ two-by-sixes when I was building a carport. After six months it was still so tender I couldn’t play my steel-string guitars for more than a few minutes, and it hadn’t shown any improvement in about four months. The doctor said there was nothing that could be done about it, that I’d probably have problems with arthritis in that knuckle. When I went to the music store to get a nylon string classical guitar so I could continue to play, they recommended I try the glucosamine. It seems to have helped quite a bit. Six weeks later the knuckle is still a tiny bit tender but only after I play the steel-string for a couple of hours – that’s a huge improvement. Yesterday I even played bass for about two hours before the knuckle started giving me trouble.
What really surprised me though was that my fingers seem a little more nimble across the board. So, it may help you if your problem is actually physical. I’m not saying its a miracle cure, but it does seem to help some.
If the problem isn’t physical, but merely needing to build “muscle memory,” then those recommending running lots of scales and such are on the mark. I’m still nowhere near as fast as I want to be, but the way I picked up what speed I had was to run up and down the scale doing cuts and rolls.
All of the above said, I still prefer slow airs and laments simply because jigs and reels all seem to sound the same after about twenty minutes
I come to whistling through through years of playing fife. I don’t want restate what has been already said, but perhaps augment a couple things.
Try to keep your fingers curved rather than flat and keep your fingers close to the holes even when you’re not playing those notes. I find this hard to do(as my fingers then to lift high and flay back when not covering a hole), but if you make it as part of your practice, it should help the speed.
I mastered this by practicing in front of a mirror until I relized how far I was lifting my fingers, and how far I actually needed to lift my fingers to get the desired note.
Practice the same tune slowly and fast. You’ll find different difficulties manifest. It really is training- knowing what it feels like when it’s done right
In the fife and drum corps I currently tutor, when we hit a phrase in the music that people are having trouble with, we take the passage down in speed to a crawl and play it over and over and over and over and over and over until we can bring the speed up.
This has been stated before and in my mind can’t be stated enough:
"Music is not the notes on the page. Music is how the notes are played together to create a whole. “
I’ve been know to exclaim when truly frustrated with a piece, " Come you $%^&*!!!# black dots lets work together!” (It doesn’t help much as the dots don’t generally listen, but it makes me feel better!)
I also find that Guinness is a great help for making me think I am playing fast and really well
