Moving around the circle of fifths (Tommy Mulhaire's jig)

How to create speed by taking the thinking out of the left hand. My current favorite exercise for beginning and intermediate players.

The tune for today is Tommy Mulhaire's, a jig by Tommy Mulhaire (or maybe by Martin his son). 

Email me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.

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Transcript

Meg Wobus Beller: 0:10

Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Tommy Mulhaire's Jig from a session at the Art House Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we'll be talking about moving around to different keys. This is part of a new course I'm creating on how to play faster on the fiddle or any instrument. Really, a lot of what I'm drawing on for this course is either experience I have teaching other people to play faster on the fiddle kids and adults who I've taught over the years or the experience that I'm having right now learning a couple of new instruments the concertina and the BC button accordion and learning to play faster on those and kind of using myself as a guinea pig really One of the things that I have found really helpful. It's funny I come into learning new instruments with a head start because I know so much repertoire already. I thought when I learned the concertina that once I knew what each button, what note, it made easy for me to know what a note sounds like by hearing it. I have perfect pitch. So I thought once I knew which buttons belong to which notes. I would just be able to play a tune. And it's true, I could play tunes slowly and what I realized was keeping me back from playing tunes faster was the muscle memory in that key, that all of the common intervals and steps and stairs in that key were not comfortable for my hand to do without me thinking okay, it's an A and a B and a C. There was too much thinking. The thinking was slowing me down. So, in addition to knowing where the notes were on the instrument, I needed some muscle memory within that key. So that's what I'm going to suggest for you, because this has been a fun way for me to develop the ability to play in several keys and it's made playing everything easier because my hand is just used to the patterns within that key. I mean, this is the reason that classical players do scales and broken thirds, that kind of thing. It's a little boring.

Meg Wobus Beller: 2:38

I really love to use easy marches. Having grown up in New England, I play New England marches, like On the Road to Boston, jenny's Gone to Linton, or even easy Irish polkas, like Bridges Full of Stitches. I will play them in several keys so my family gets to hear me play the same tune five times in a row. You know they're kind of used to me trying out all different ways to practice, so probably doesn't bother them as much as some of the other things I've done in the past.

Meg Wobus Beller: 3:12

You can use easy waltzes for this, like if you play Star of the County Down as a waltz, or the Ash Grove or even children's songs. Sometimes I pick it up and I'm just playing something like Three Blind Mice Go Tell Aunt Rody and I'm going through the five keys. Or you can pick something like hymns. You know a Christmas hymn, joy to the World, or other hymns, if there are some that you know really well. How great thou art. You want it to be something that you know really well, that you can hum, so that whatever note you start on, your mind can kind of tell you what the next note is supposed to sound like, and then the trick is to find it with your finger. So this is definitely not an exercise for your right hand at all. It's purely building muscle memory in your left hand. I'm trying not to think about note recognition, because note recognition for me is a thinking process and I want my fingers to be able to move through intervals, through the skips and the shape of that tune without me really thinking about it, in whatever key that I'm working, so that they can do those patterns in that key for whatever tune, just that those patterns feel comfortable in my hand.

Meg Wobus Beller: 4:37

How many keys should you take your easy tune and play it in? Well, there are 12 keys. Some folks like to go through a series of keys, up to 12. Through the circle of fifths you're basically just changing one note each time you go to a new scale, so you can go up through the sharps or down through the sharps and each time you have the same basic group of notes, but one changes each time you go up or down through the circle of fifths. It's much more challenging to go up chromatically. You know, to play a tune in A and then to play it in B flat and then to play it in B and then to play it in C. So that's a really challenging way to do it. I don't suggest that.

Meg Wobus Beller: 5:24

What I'm doing right now as a beginner on the concertina, on the button accordion, is I'm learning the keys A, d, g, c and F, so from three sharps all the way down to one flat, and so I'll just start a tune. If I know it in a key already, I might just start it there, or I'll start it in A, play it in A, then play it in D, play it in G and go through then C and then F Five keys, but I go through them a fifth at a time. Yeah, try that and let me know if it helps. For me and I've seen this with students on the violin and the fiddle, especially in jazz violin where you really want to be able to play things without thinking about them, because you have to improvise really rapidly, and when we're talking about fiddling up to tempo, you want to play things. You don't have time to think. In the middle of an up to tempo reel it has to come out without you thinking about it. So that's kind of the association I see when I look at the practicing that jazz players do, where they do so much work within a key, so many scales, so many patterns within scales, tunes that they take from key to key to key just to make their fingering within that key, that set of notes, really, really automatic, so that they don't have to stop and think about it, and when it's time to improvise and the chord comes up, their hand just is already comfortable and there's no lag within their playing, trying to get faster, trying to get rid of the lag.

Meg Wobus Beller: 7:04

Our tune for today is Tommy Mulhare's. This is a jig. According to the Fiddler's companion, this was a tune by Martin Mulhare, although Martin's father's name was Tommy. It might have been that Martin wrote it for his dad and called it Tommy Mulhare's, or it might have been that Tommy wrote it and then his son learned it. There was some confusion, certainly on the session, about it being called Castle Town Corners, but I think that's another jig that's often played with it. So this one is not Castle Town Corners, this one is known as Tommy Mulhare's. Jim Coogan, the New York Button accordion player, said it was composed by Martin, who was from County Galway, in honor of his father.

Meg Wobus Beller: 7:57

And Tommy Mulhares was born in 1906 and he played a lot of instruments. He played fiddle, was competing on fiddle and playing on the radio in the 30s in Ireland on the fiddle, and then he played the two row button accordion I assume the BC Box, maybe the GC, and he played all the other things too, flute, whistle, even the piano accordion. Oh yeah, so he did. In his later life he mostly just played BC Box and then his son, martin, also played the box, learned from his father and from Paddy O'Brien, Kevin Keegan, and won all Ireland at age 17. Oh, my goodness. So anyway, a little bit about the Mulhare family. And here is a jig it is in the key of G major