Liberating the Ear…

by adminKFS on February 13, 2011 · 4 comments

The first time that I learned a tune by ear was one of the most liberating experience of my life. I had been playing the fiddle for about 5 years at that point, learning all of my tunes from sheet music. There were so many instances of feeling frustrated and helpless when I heard a tune that I wanted to learn but couldn’t find the music. I heard a tune called ‘The Dawn’ from one of Natalie MacMaster’s early records and was desperate to learn it. The only place I could find the music to a tune called ‘The Dawn’ was in an Irish collection and it resembled nothing like the tune on Natalie’s record. I knew then, that If I wanted to learn the tune I would have to do it by ear.

At that time, there was no software readily available to slow tunes down. So I sat in my room, constantly hitting the rewind button on the cassette player. I was never going to be a slave to sheet music again. I learned the tune that day, but it pretty much took the entire day. But, the more I did it, the quicker I was able to pick up tunes. It is a very empowering skill.

You become your own teacher when you learn by ear. You begin to internalize things that you don’t even realize. Of course, it is a daunting exercise if you have little experience. So it is important to start off small. Sing a note, then try and match that pitch on the fiddle. Try and sound out a really common simple melody like Mary Had a Little Lamb. If you can do that, there is no reason you can’t learn by ear. But there is much more involved than matching pitches on the fiddle.

One of the more difficult aspects of learning by ear is retaining the melody of the tune you are trying to learn. That is why it is so important to listen to the tune for a while before even trying to pick it out on your instrument. If you can sing it to yourself, then you’ve internalized the tune. It’s like learning the words to a new hit song on the radio. It’s pretty hard to get all the words after the first time you hear it, but once you’ve heard it over and over on every radio station, you magically start to sing along. When you’ve internalized the tune, you begin to realize that there aren’t as many notes to learn as you maybe originally thought. The first phrase probably sounds like the third phrase. That is because it usually is. All good tunes have themes within the melody that usually repeat throughout the tune. So if you can break the tune into distinctive phrases, it’s not so much of a daunting task. The more you do this, the more you adapt to the structure of tunes, and the easier it will be to internalize them. One of the most valuable things you gain from learning by ear is associating melodic intervals to finger shapes. For example, if you hear a big jump in the melody, how big of a jump is it? Do you have to skip one finger to get to the next note? Two fingers? Do you have to cross a string? After a while, when you hear an interval of a third, you will automatically skip a finger playing the two consecutive notes. You might not even know what a third is, but you will still associate the pitch with the shape. So the next time you take a fiddle workshop, do not be discouraged if you the tune doesn’t stick with you after one class. Take the tune home with you and listen – and listen a lot. Sing it to yourself. Break it down into phrases and start learning one phrase at a time. It gets easier. And it will be empowering.

Finding your invisible drummer

by adminKFS on February 13, 2011 · Leave a comment

As part of my performance degree program at Berklee, I had to take what is called a ‘recital preparation’ class. Over the semester, each student prepares three performances. The first one is a solo performance. For my first performance, I played a jig; a common tune called ‘Irishman’s Heart to the Ladies’. I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be. I was in a class of all jazz players and I was playing a fiddle tune… without any accompaniment that would give the music context. Despite my uncertainty to the reaction, everyone seemed to enjoy the performance and the professor loved that I played with the ‘invisible drummer’.

What did he mean by the invisible drummer?

Because the fiddle is a melodic instrument, we often forget that in addition to playing melodies, fiddlers convey the tunes rhythmically through phrasing and emphasis of certain notes. We might make the mistake of thinking that the accompanying instruments (guitar, piano, bass drums, etc) provide the rhythm, but while an accompanist creates a groove, it is the fiddler that creates the intricate rhythms that propel the tunes along. This is what my professor meant by the invisible drummer. I didn’t need a back up band to convey the rhythm and pulse of the music. The audience felt the rhythm through how I was phrasing the music.

When students begin to learn how to play fiddle music, whether or not they are just learning the violin or coming from a classical music background, they often find it difficult to outline the pulse of a tune. The focus is on just producing the notes. What often happens is that each note has the same emphasis. To try and feel the basic rhythm of a tune type, I often ask a student to switch roles. Instead of taking the role of melody player, I ask them to accompany and lay out the pulse. For example, with a jig (6/8), I ask them to try and comp along, with the goal of outlining the pulse emphasizing the first and fourth beat. This is a good beginning to feel the basic pulse of a specific time signature. Understanding the more intricate phrasing and rhythms of a particular fiddle style is difficult to teach and is most successfully learned through listening.

Next time you listen to a recording, in addition to trying to internalize a melody, take some time to listen to how the tunes are phrased. See if you can hear when the fiddler is slurring as opposed to single stroke bowing. What notes are accented and emphasized? Rhythms and phrasing inherent to a fiddle style are just as important to absorb as the melodies, but this is often the more difficult part of absorbing a style. In addition to a lot of passive listening, try these active listening techniques to unlock your invisible drummer.