learning to listen - listening to learn
Got together with my two trad-playing buddies last night. We do a "Slow-Player" thing, working on our simple Irish tunes. I'm the mando, Clyde's the flute, Charlie's the gtr. Clyde's the most skilled musically, can sight-read cold and at speed anything you put in front of him. Charlie's got the hand-made McCullough guitar, and a nice sense for rhythm and accompaniment. And I bang away on the 8 strings, trying to learn the ornaments and expression and not feck up the melody too badly.
So last night we spent some time working on listening. It's a skill we need to develop more. Listening to each other, and listening to the music done by people more skilled than ourselves.
I usually learn these tunes by working with the dots, getting the tune into my head, and finally out my fingers. A time consuming process, and I don't learn much in the way of expression. I know I should be listening to skilled local players so I can learn tunes directly through osmosis, but we have no readily available seisuns around here. So the best source in this situation is the pro recording.
I put on The House Band doing Rock In The Mountain, a nice Scots-sounding melody with the standard A and B sections, done at a slow pace of about 150 bpm. And it runs long for a solo tune, 4:20. Clyde wants to learn how to play a tune without the dots, so this was a good exercise. Listen, listen, listen, and then try to play what we've absorbed.
Well, the results were interesting. I determined pretty quickly the key and mode of the tune (D Ionian), and so playing it on mandolin was just a matter of playing notes in the scale and putting them in the right order. Getting them in the right order was my challenge. Clyde tried several passes on the flute to find the root melody, but gave up and just continued to listen. Charlie was starting to pick it out the chords by the end and commenting that it would work better in DADGAD tuning. So the assignment at the end of the night: by next Tuesday, gotta have this down without cheat sheets. We'll see how it works out.
The best part of the evening was the communication we had while while we played. It doesn't happen much when we're just regurgitating what's on the page in front of us. But if you're forced to listen to where the music is going, then the conversation starts.
--Virgil
So last night we spent some time working on listening. It's a skill we need to develop more. Listening to each other, and listening to the music done by people more skilled than ourselves.
I usually learn these tunes by working with the dots, getting the tune into my head, and finally out my fingers. A time consuming process, and I don't learn much in the way of expression. I know I should be listening to skilled local players so I can learn tunes directly through osmosis, but we have no readily available seisuns around here. So the best source in this situation is the pro recording.
I put on The House Band doing Rock In The Mountain, a nice Scots-sounding melody with the standard A and B sections, done at a slow pace of about 150 bpm. And it runs long for a solo tune, 4:20. Clyde wants to learn how to play a tune without the dots, so this was a good exercise. Listen, listen, listen, and then try to play what we've absorbed.
Well, the results were interesting. I determined pretty quickly the key and mode of the tune (D Ionian), and so playing it on mandolin was just a matter of playing notes in the scale and putting them in the right order. Getting them in the right order was my challenge. Clyde tried several passes on the flute to find the root melody, but gave up and just continued to listen. Charlie was starting to pick it out the chords by the end and commenting that it would work better in DADGAD tuning. So the assignment at the end of the night: by next Tuesday, gotta have this down without cheat sheets. We'll see how it works out.
The best part of the evening was the communication we had while while we played. It doesn't happen much when we're just regurgitating what's on the page in front of us. But if you're forced to listen to where the music is going, then the conversation starts.
--Virgil