Normally, I translate the note. I have a few of the more common intervals memorized, so they’re second nature and no transposition is involved. For music in the key of Bb, I would actually find it much more difficult to play in the key of Bb and depending upon the instrument would find it much easier to play in G or C. (Except on a piano, I would still want to play the song in Bb on a piano. I can only opposite transpose on a piano. And there is no reason to ever change 2 flats to 5 sharps.)
I have a friend who transposes by interval. I never knew why she always wanted to know the starting note of the song. Then I needed to transpose a song that had an uncommon interval and I figured out her method. When I started laughing, I had to explain what I was up to.
Transposing is my big musical skill. I have never formally studied music. Friends and family and you folks on the internet have taught me everything I know. I’ve tried to explain my systems (guitar chords & individual notes) to people with masters degrees in music but they don’t get it. I think they want to make it more complicated than it is. I really thought you’d ask about the mermaids.
Thanks for this insight, Mr. D. I think you’re absolutely right on. No flow, no ITM. The hard part is technically mastering the flute sufficiently to get into the groove in the first place.
I’ll admit I’m very hard on myself and am often listening for errors, inconsistencies, choppiness. It changes as I improve, and changes from day to day depending on how well I feel I’m playing, or how I’m feeling in general.
My mental approach is probably something I need to work on. Thanks to this thread for bringing it up.
we’re all just jealous… mermaids dont watch us when we play, so how can we think about them?
it’s hard to stop analyzing and critiquing my playing, especially in comparison to how others might view it (depending on their musical tastes… fast, rhythmic, flowing, slow… etc). i should probably just be thinking about mermaids!
haha. yet another reason to support delrin! see you guys later… i’m going to drop out of school, grab my flute, some swimming trunks, and head to the beach.
[quote=“Denny”]I thought that God had the strings & the devil had the woodwinds…/quote]
ahhh…that explains why I think “#%**((%U&&&&#!!! instrument of the devil” sometimes…because it IS
other than that, most of the time when playing I am trying NOT to think.
when I start to think, things go wrong easier.
just trying to go in a kind of meditative state, empty my mind after having remembered the first few notes and let the rest happen.
that is harder to do with someone in front of me, though…
berti
I don’t think I think of anything while I’m practicing. Sometimes I imagine being at a performance. That helps me to keep the flow and don’t stop in the middle of a tune to work on some variation that just popped into my head (of course, sometimes I do that anyway, but it’s not healthy to keep doing that all the time).
When I’m not playing I’m often working on different tunes in my head. I listen to a lot of my favourite players, most often Matt Molloy, but also Crawford, McGoldrick and Egan. I have their tunes in my head and I start to think of other ways I would play it instead, sometimes I get great variations which I recon is better than the way they play it, but those things rarely get memorized and put to life sadly.
Now I’m going to join Aanvil for that dram of Single Malt
whisky
I have a hard time NOT letting my mind wander when I’m playing
It’s when I concentrate on fingering, etc, that I screw up the most.
So I agree with the above post.
I’m beginning to realize what an individual art flute playing is. What works best for one player might be the opposite of what works for another. It seems that the rules of the game are primarily just the natural laws of physics that make a flute work, and the game within the game is the individual style and method that a player uses to make music out of physics.
I’ve been thinking about this thread - even during a gig yesterday. I psych myself out with inner dialogue because this music is learned by ear and I come from a classical background tied to reading and performing with sheetmusic which was my security. Then I realized that when we talk we don’t think about what the words look like or how to put a sentence together - we -even wee ones -just do it. We’re wired for it but we think too much.
One tune that evokes a clear image for me is Morrisons jig if I play it with a certain feeling. I’ve only once got it to work really well, but rarely play it. It evokes being out at night in a huge open plane in the middle of a thunder storm. A feeling of danger, tension,excitement, smallness of me and vast beauty and power of nature. There can be great tension in the jig.I hope to work on it again to try and get the feeling into it.
I can play along with many tunes easily. Variations come nicely as well. When I then try to ‘learn’ them something gets in the way and it doesn’t come as easily. Could be that I’m struggling to remember the tune exactly. But other times I could lilt the tune fine but still have to break it into parts to ’learn’ it.
I’d love to be able to just hear it in my head and play it as easily as when I’m following. I do hear it in my head but something gets in the way of a dead easy flow right through the tune. Anyone have any suggestions?
Thats a nice post gorju except for the “plane”. The only open planes I know of are bi-planes but they aren’t seen much these days.
I don’t know to what extent imagining may be counted as “thinking” but I too imagine when I practice. I like to practice in landscape and there I imagine the sort of people that the music is about. I practice alone in a room also, almost daily and there I imagine the landscapes evoked by the music. Sometimes I practice along to a CD or sometthing and I imagine I am a member of that band and I imagine children in the audience, my childhood cousins etc.
The imagining is driven by my feeling for the music and I only practice music that moves me.
And I like to practice in the company of imaginative friends. There is nothing higher in human convivia that I have experienced.
I am in the middle of reading the Inner game of Music ( Barry Green ISBN 0 330 30017 2). I recommend it. It ties in well with this thread. Some very useful ideas. I don’t think it’s a book I can just read and apply fully. Parts will work to a degree just after reading. Refine as I go on. Recapping is needed. It’s a library copy I have so I hope to either copy and highlight points or get my own.
I mainly got it to try to counter occasions of feeling uncomfortable when playing. The only time in my life that I have shook with fear was in a competition! I find that a very different situation to ‘normal’ playing but a challenge worth sorting. The stage fright can come on very sudden, when I think I will be OK. Even for players who would never play in uncomfortable situations there are a lot of worthwhile ideas in the book.
