Slow practice and rhythms are two different ways to practice and make your playing faster. But how does slowing down help? And how is that different from practicing with rhythmic variations?
Our tune for today is Ne'er Shall I Wean Her, a jig from a session at the ArtHouse bar in Baltimore, Maryland.
Email me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, or Buzzsprout. Find me on YouTube and Bandcamp.
Here are my Fiddle Studio books and my website Fiddle Studio where you can find my courses and mailing list and sign up for my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!
Slow practice and rhythms are two different ways to practice and make your playing faster. But how does slowing down help? And how is that different from practicing with rhythmic variations?
Our tune for today is Ne'er Shall I Wean Her, a jig from a session at the ArtHouse bar in Baltimore, Maryland.
Email me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Music, Spotify, or Buzzsprout. Find me on YouTube and Bandcamp.
Here are my Fiddle Studio books and my website Fiddle Studio where you can find my courses and mailing list and sign up for my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!
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 Neer Shall I Wean Her from a session at the Art House Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we'll be talking about rhythms versus slow practice, two big ways to improve your playing to learn a specific tune better, to get your playing up a level and, of course, play faster something we're talking about this whole month in January.
Speaker 2:On the Fiddle Studio podcast. I'm going to tell you from my perspective as a fiddle teacher and when I'm watching a student and giving them advice for how to get to the next level for speed, for playing really accurately and really cleanly, when to slow down and use slow practice and when to use rhythms For slowing down. If it's out of tune, it requires slowing down. You have to add the thinking back. In Last week I was talking all about how to bring the thinking out of your playing. But if your tune is out of tune in your left hand the fingers where they're going then you really need to slow down. You can put a drone on if you can't tell whether it's in tune or if you tend to get distracted. I developed over many years of teaching violin the ability to ignore when things are out of tune, because sometimes I just need to work on other stuff with my students and not be correcting their tuning all the time. So I can get distracted and just not noticed when things are out of tune. When else to slow down? If you can't play it, rhythms won't help. So if it's a really complicated finger pattern would often use different strings or different placements on the strings, a mix of low and high fingers. Until you can play it, you need to go slow to learn what it is.
Speaker 2:I use slow practice in fiddling for ornaments. It's funny the first thing a lot of classical players do is they'll take the ornaments out and for fiddle it depends. I love to teach more intermediate advanced students the tune with the ornaments right in there. But we tend to need to do it slow to fit them in with the timing correctly and then speed it up from there. If you already know the tune without ornaments and you're putting some in especially if it's big like turns, ornaments with a lot of stuff going on it helps to sort of slow way down, put them in rhythmically the way you want them to sound, right where you want them, and then speed the tune up once you've got it slow. But you like the ornamentation and kind of the feel of the tune. If you want to practice using more bow, if you're working on your tone, you got to go slow. We talked about that and in the recent podcast the Biggest Mistake I See.
Speaker 2:So when to use rhythms, this is another way to bring your thinking out of your playing. Just a quick review of what rhythms are. They're usually used for reels For classical players. They're used in any kind of run or fast passage of rapid notes that are all the same, whether they're triplets or groups of two or four. Notes for passage work for reels, for fiddle.
Speaker 2:You can change up the rhythm and play the whole thing. Instead of all the same length note. You can play it long short, long short, long short, long short, long short and then go back and play the same thing short, long short, long short, long short, long short, long. So you're changing the rhythm and some people like to really play around with this. They might make the first note in the group of three long, long, short, short, long short, short and then make the second note in the group of three da da, da, da, da, da, da da.
Speaker 2:It's a little tricky for me to wrap my brain around, but whatever pattern you're doing, if you can play something but it's not moving that quickly, if you're thinking of slowing you down or just you don't have the muscle memory in your hand yet you just haven't played it enough, or you're trying to get over the hurdle to just bring the level of your playing up faster, you can use these rhythms. They also work great if you're playing as a little uneven or you're having some trouble coordinating between the left and the right hand. It really solidifies things and it allows you, because it makes the tune so solid, to go much faster. The trick is to take the long notes as slow and long as you need them to practice the short notes really quick. You know I'll really encourage students to do these long notes where their brain catches up and then do the little short changes for their short notes. Any conservatory you go to walking through the practice room hallway you'll hear people using these rhythms. They really are a key to playing quickly and cleanly at the same time. Four slowing down If you can't play it, if it's out of tune, fitting in ornaments or practicing using Marbeau and for rhythms to clean it up. Get it faster. You can use that.
Speaker 2:Our tune for today is called several variations on Neer Shall I Wean Her or I-Neer Shall Wean Her. It's also called Mrs O'Sullivan's and the clearest explanation I got of this is that when it's played in A people call it Neer Shall I Wean Her and in B minor it's Mrs O'Sullivan's. I also saw it under a third name. Folks mentioned seeing it in Scottish collections as the Irish girl. I did find a little blurb about this being collected in 1967 by Brendan Bretnach from Molly Meyers Murphy, and Molly Meyers Murphy had been a student of Tom Billy Murphy. So Molly Meyers Murphy married Tom Billy's nephew Will Murphy and learned from him. They live near Cork and she apparently didn't have a name for this but said that I-Nair Shall Wean Her was the name they used in Cork. Anyway, you can find it in various albums. Let's see Air Fix, an album from Ross Ainsley and Jarlath Henderson. Also Christy McNamara's album, the House I Was Reared In, so you can look for it there. Here we go.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudiocom, along with my books, courses and membership for Learning to Fiddle. I'll see you back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.