When I play it sounds rushed - no matter how fast or slow I play.
It is not only a breathing issue, I feel. It is mixed with a not grown enough ability to give a tune a ‘crisp’ phrasing or rhythm.
But how should I go on?
e.g. I listen to a good recording of a favourite tune, slow it down, take in phrase by single phrase (and learn a lot), slow my playing down (and down again) - and still I don’t come anyway near to what I hear.
I’ve been experimenting with a new tune for 3 weeks like this now. And I’m just frustrated. At this point I would very much appreciate a teacher, a ‘real person’, for from listening alone I don’t seem to get it right.
Well. Perhaps anybody out here feels like sharing own experiences, good ideas … whatever …
I am the first to respond, but there are a bunch on this Board far more knowledgable and articulate on whistling than I; that said, two points.
First, regarding breathing and phrasing - what you are experiencing is very common, and yes, was once a big problem for me. Any reoccurrences these days I find are due almost entirely to not breathing in the right places. The feel for the music, the lilt, will come with time, but you must breathe properly within a tune so as not to disrupt that feel. What happens is you’re either running out of air or anticipating running out of air, so you try to speed up to get through a phrase, and it falls apart. It is most helpful to cut out some notes and/or shorten some longer notes; this not only enables you to breath but also enhances the tune by providing variety. However, it is important to know where to do this to maintain the proper lilt and feel of the music; you should be able to identify that by listening to tunes through a few times; very often that type of variety will be heard the second time around in a tune, e.g.
Second, that brings us to the teacher part; can be helpful, especially at first to understand the BEST places to breathe, among other things. My former teacher has been offering for some time now lessons via Skype and someone closer to you may be able to do that. If that type of teaching is available to you, just download the free Skype program, and set up a simple camera/mic setup (like one by Logitech, e.g.) which is not expensive, and if your teacher has that setup, you can hear and see each other and do lessons at whatever intervals are convenient and affordable.
Just some thoughts. Relax; it comes with time and easy practice with some pointers along the way and a bunch of listening.
To cut out some notes to make ‘breathing space’ I find helpful, could try it more often.
To shorten longer notes I actually seek to avoid because to make them linger gives me this feel for the music, the lilt and flow. But i cannot quite manage them yet - even with enough air in my lunges they sound not relaxed enough. Funny.
(Tonging for instance helps me with phrasing and rhythm, but I don’t want to apply it throughout a tune. Certainly it would be helpful to do my homework on ornamentation in general, but I feel that breathing, rhythm and phrasing should come first now for me.)
Anyway, should relax now, give it (even more) time …
… and Skype is a good idea too. Will see what i can find.
I postponed learning to do this for a long time, but in retrospect I wish I had focused on learning to do it much sooner. It really helps with keeping the rhythm and flow of the tune going, and making what I’m playing sound right. For the longest time I was only grabbing breaths at the end of phrases, and couldn’t figure out why my tunes just didn’t sound rightl Because I’d been doing it that way for so long, it took a lot of habit-breaking work to change my approach. I eventually had to retire all the tunes for which my learned breating habits weren’t appropriate for Irish dance music, and re-learn how to breathe properly using an entirely new set of tunes.
I found that listening to lots of Irish flute players helped, because they have to breathe even more than whistle players do, and listening carefully to how they phrased and where they took their breaths helped me get a feel for where my breaths should be happening, and how the phrasing needed to sound to make it flow around the breath.
The maing counter-intuitive thing I needed to learn was to play through the end of phrases to hit and emphasize the first beat of the next phrase, then catch a breath, and finish off the phrase and flow into the next. From there, you can go on to explore other places where dropping an (off-beat) note and catching a breath can work. Note the areas where you tend to naturally run out of breath, and experiment with breathing and phrasing and dropping notes in that area to see which phrasings make musical sense to you. It’s all about listening and playing around to figure out what sounds right / makes musical sense when you play it.
Listening to flute players is a really interesting idea.
… the flow - that is exactly what I want to do better. (Sometimes I think I got it right, but my self recordings often proof me wrong.) I will take your advise to play around the ‘running out of breath places’ .
And perhaps allow more feeling in playing again, give the mind a wee rest in between all the listening and trying to figure it out
