Practice: Listening Speed

People tend to discuss the speed at which they play dance music quite a bit, but lately I've been thinking about the speed at which I can listen.

Before I started learning to play the whistle a lot of dance music sounded like a blur to me. It was too fast for my mind to follow. Learning about different rhythm types helped a lot since I could follow the structure of the tune. So did counting reels in cut time.

But more than anything it seems to be a matter of practice. I'm learning to "listen quickly." The more active listening I do, the better I can follow fast tunes, and the more satisfying the listening becomes for me.

Practice: Stuck in Your Head

When I started learning to play the whistle I chose tunes based on what other people I knew were playing and which tunes I liked at the moment. But lately I've been using a different strategy, with great results.

Ever hear of an earworm? It's just a word for songs which get "stuck in your head." Not surprisingly, this started happening with tunes as I started listening to more and more Irish and Scottish music. One day, unable to get "Harvest Home" out of my head, I decided to put my affliction to good use and learned the tune. I found I was able to memorize it in about half an hour or so, instead of the large number of days it had taken me to memorize tunes the past.

Since then, I've seen "earworms" as opportunities. Whether or not a tune is on the list of tunes I think I want to learn soon, when it gets stuck in my head I work on learning the tune. I find that having the tune cycling in my head means that I'm less likely to have my own mistakes confuse me as to how the tune actually goes. This is part 1 of the basic two-step process for learning a tune.

Practice: Methods of Memorization

One of the things I like about learning to play the tin whistle and Irish and Scottish music is that my constant need to memorize new tunes (and songs, as I like to sing) is giving me a real mental workout. My day job also requires me to remember large amounts of information, but memorizing tunes seems to work a different part of the brain. Research indicates that "mental exercise" can reverse the decline in brain function in old age, so the more the better!

I notice, though, that the method I use to learn a tune has changed since I took up the instrument last year. Previously I would play the tune through until I no longer required notation (I wasn't doing much ear learning at the time). Now, however, I find it much more effective to learn a measure or a phrase and then build on that, one piece at a time. This seems more effective both when learning from score or by ear for me.

I spoke to a fiddler who uses a third method. He learns the first note of each measure or phrase — the "outline" of the tune — and then fills in the rest.

I don't know if any one of these methods is "best," but it's interesting that there are different ways to do the same thing.

Practice: Patience and Perseverance

I found this Chiffboard post and the discussion that followed worthwhile. It began with the following quote from Willie Clancy:

Get a grasp of the Gaelic tongue and develop a love for it. Go to the Gaeltacht and the old people who have it and learn it. I feel that a knowledge of our language is essential if you are to express the true spirit of our music and, as the saying goes, "Don't settle for the skim milk when the cream is at hand". Apart from that have patience; learn to walk before you run. You might have a flair for the music, you might think you're good at it, and you might be tempted to plunge ahead without perfecting your technique; well it might be in your head but your fingers will let you down. So, start playing early and develop your technique with patience, practice and perseverance.

I can remember being frustrated years ago when I realized that I was a much better driver than I was a musician simply because I drove the car more often than I practiced playing, despite telling myself that music was more important. No matter how much you say you value something, doing is how we learn.

So will learning Irish make your reels better? Maybe.

Practice: Hitting the High (Up) Notes

I was in Santa Fe, NM, a week ago for my brother's wedding, so while there I tried, without any luck, to find a session to sit in with. The closest thing I found was Celtic de Santa Fe, a dance school; the owner gave me the name of a local musician she knew, but by then it was Thanksgiving and I had to give up.

But I did manage to practice a little. I was playing really badly, and at first I presumed it was because I was somewhat out of practice with all the travelling that I've been doing over the past few weeks. Later on it hit me that I was close to 7000 feet (over 2000 meters) above sea level — higher than Denver by a good bit — and the air was much thinner. It didn't bother me so much when walking around the city or hiking, but I really noticed the difference while playing the whistle.

And that taught me something valuable: My breath control sucks. Or, at least, I wasn't giving it the attention it deserved.

I've thought a lot about breathing in the past, but mostly in terms of intake, how to get the air in. I've noticed that if I inhale too deeply or if I'm running out of air that the quality of the sound I get from the whistle suffers and I need to let some air out through my nose or inhale again, respectively. But when I strarted trying to pay extra attention to keeping my breath pressure consistent it really helped even out the timbre.

But what does "consistent" really mean? Obviously different pressure is required for notes in different octaves, and breath requirement changes across each octave as well. It also changes between different whistles. Rather than think too much about this I'm just trying to listen to the sounds I'm producing and aim for an even tone. This mostly works well, but I notice that I tend to over-blow when I play outside, since the whistle sounds quieter in the open air than it does in the small room where I usually practice. I have to consciously think about playing "quieter" to get it right.

Practice: Cut Slow

Another interesting piece of feedback I got in reference to my earlier post on learning to play tunes simply before adding ornamentation was this comment from "Sam_T" who noted that beginning pipers must use at least some ornamentation since they don't have the option of tonguing:

In practice, this means that you have to learn to use cuts and rolls from the beginning to get through virtually any tune. This might sound terrifying, but in fact just leads to different emphasis on learning. For example, the first tunes I was taught on the pipes were the Rambling Pitchfork, the Kesh and Garrett Barry's, all of which feature prominent rolls - this is precisely why they were chosen. Of course I played them VERY SLOWLY INDEED.

And this is just the point. None of the ornaments used in whistle playing are "difficult", in the sense of requiring any particularly complex motor skills to perform (although I might leave crans as an exception); it's not usually the movements themselves that cause the problem, but coordinating them at speed. Most people can play a perfectly good cut or tap in isolation, from the first time they pick up a whistle. The struggle comes in stringing them together. So the solution is to play slowly.

Another benefit of learning ornamentation from the beginning is that it gets you quickly out of the habit of gripping the whistle/chanter too hard. It's virtually impossible to play a good cut when you're hanging on to the instrument as if your life depended on it.

There's more good stuff in this post, so read the whole thing.

I'm practicing cuts on a couple of airs now, so it's natural to play them slowly. I think I might start the Kesh/Kerrigan's jig next, since L.E. McCullough has a number of variations of this one in his tutuorial, both simple and complex.