# On the use of mp3s



## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

The Use of mp3s

Fiddle Guru is a technowizard & I do feel that now is a wonderful time to be learning music - with so many aids, like YouTube, Discussion Boards, Online-Tutors etc.

My teacher thinks quite rightly that a violin pupil cannot really know what he or she sounds like. You are very close to the instrument, and hear a loud strident scratchy noise that can sound better to someone further away; on the other hand, many of your mistakes are unconscious ones and you're too embroiled in playing to be fully aware. Listening to your own performance on an mp3 is the best way to note strengths and weaknesses and work on correcting mistakes and bad habits.

Absolutely! 
The trouble is, the analysis of your own mp3 will only work if you have the right attitude - if you're ambitious to do well, determined to eradicate mistakes, dispassionate & able to analyse, rather than oversensitive and apt to collapse with mortification at hearing a dire performance.

Guess which description applies to me! 

I can't learn from mp3s of my own performance, because the two or three mp3s of me that have been made of me playing baroque or Playford I can never bear to listen to again. They are lying buried somewhere at the bottom of the pile of email-correspondence between Fiddle Guru and myself.

During my first weeks with Fiddle Guru, I refused point blank to make any mp3s. I may not be an expert on the violin, but I am on *me*. I know myself, and I always have, and I foresaw that nothing would be achieved by recording me except my own demise from embarrassment.

Fiddle Guru kept urging me to make mp3s, and at last, after he'd moved to his new home in Pakefield, he said he was going to find the leads and make one. I said I really hoped he couldn't - we were both giggling - and luckily he *couldn't*, so my bacon was saved.

But I was enjoying the Playford tunes so much that at last I agreed & we did a set of tunes, with FG accompanying on his fiddle - the best bit. When we came to listening to it afterwards, I felt like hiding under my jumper, a la Aled Jones. It wasn't as bad as I'd thought - the tone of my violin - Bonnie - was good - but on the last tune my E string sounded cheese-wire, and I was out of tune too, so after the first couple of listens at home, I relegated it to the bottom of the email heap.

I moved on to Baroque, and once again Fiddle Guru urged me to make mp3s. It was now that I had my happy idea - instead of me massacring my favourite baroque tune, Purcell's Rondeau, why didn't *he* produce a play-along version to *show me how* he'd like me to play it.

So started the series of FG baroque and folk mp3s - I probably have getting on for a hundred - that are little gems in my email cache. They are nuggets of living history - sometimes a word or two gets taped, or I can hear the Guru taking a deep breath before he starts, or he accidentally catches the notes on his keyboard before the sonorous click that signals that the machine is off again.

Once we were well into these lessons, I institutionalised them, so that there's always a spot in our hour-long lessons where we have a Guru Guest Gig.

Sometimes FG plays me a piece that I'm coming on to in my Baroque Text Book, and sometimes a piece from the music that he's currently rehearsing, either for Norwich Baroque or La Serenissima or English Touring Opera.

I feel like an aristocrat with my own Music Master Royal, as the Guru 'takes away' some delectable melody with his usual angelic or faintly mischievous touch. Plus, it allows me to recuperate a little, as these lessons demand so much of me in concentration, determination, passion, and repartee.

As with the Suzuki, having music to play along with is fantastic. I can imitate the baroque style - I have company during my practice - I have something to get me past any reluctance and stiffness - and I have something to listen to, that will seep into my brain and help me move and breathe more easily in the rarefied air of baroque.

Going back to my own mp3s - Fiddle Guru did not give up easily. He persuaded me to do a couple of mp3s - one of folk and one of baroque - and sent them to me afterwards with encouraging compliments, but I still hated them, and the process of producing them - like having one's psyche shone up with wire wool.

One time, when I had refused as usual to make an mp3, the wily Guru switched his machine on secretly and recorded it. I think, if I'd played the piece well, I wouldn't have minded the deceit - possibly. As it was, he caught a thunderous elephantine glitch. I was furious and made him destroy it. I told him how dishonourably he'd acted and he muttered an apology and promised that it wouldn't happen again.

And it didn't, until about a year later when I caught him in the act of switching his machine on - at least I scotched that attempt!

Another use for mp3s is in my folk learning. Fiddle Guru is keen on the idea that folk tunes should be picked up from someone else's playing, 'sans dots', as in a session. He has other pupils who in fact don't read music all that well, for whom learning this way, using an mp3 that can be slowed down, is an excellent method which has brought them on.

I have learned several folk tunes this way at the Guru's behest, and certainly I have them more securely than tunes I learned to play from sheet music and then memorised - but not *a lot* more securely, so for me, it isn't worth the time wasted, hours and hours, picking up an unfamiliar tune, when I could have learned three or four using dots.

I also think that the Guru's idea that traditional fiddlers didn't use dots is incorrect. In Ireland, there were many fiddlers in rural parts, and sheet music would have been hard to come by, even for those who could read it. But tunes weren't just *picked up at the pub* by hearing them being played over & over, as the Guru seems to think. In 19th & early 20th century Ireland, fiddlers had local reputations & gave lessons; it might take a pupil or learner-kinsman six weeks of work to get a tune right. I am going on what I read in the biography of Michael Coleman that came along with our cd of this famous & fabulous player.

In Scotland, fiddling was different. There wasn't the huge divide between art music and traditional music, because the class system in Scotland wasn't as prohibitive. There was always room for 'the lad of parts' who'd managed to get to one of the four ancient universities, and maybe because of the clan system, there wasn't the vast difference, always, between landowner and tenant - in the Highlands, your tenant might also be your kinsman.

Plus in the eighteenth century, with the vogue for country dances and the uniquely-Scottish dance form the Strathspey being danced in genteel ballrooms in Edinburgh and Glasgow, musicians were in demand who could play both baroque and traditional dance tunes.

There was a higher standard of literacy in Scotland than in England or Ireland. Many of the musicians of the time, William Marshall, James Oswald, and the Earl of Kelley for example, composed art music and arranged or wrote tunes in the traditional style too. Fiddlers travelled to different communities - they'd get known for having their own version of a tune - and to keep their repertoire fresh to hand, they'd have a notebook in which they jotted down variants, or the opening bars to their tunes. Some of these notebooks survive.

All in all, I think that the Fiddle Guru has a sentimentalised romantic view of folk culture; he disagrees; and it's been the cause of many a brisk argy-bargy between us. 

Sometimes I *have to* learn tunes without dots, if I can't get the music. For example, I learned Sean Ryan's jigs 1 & 2, and Scully Casey's and The Tidy Woman (jigs) from the playing of Martin Hayes on YouTube & I'm working on a strathspey by Bonnie Rider on YT called 'Yell, Yell' . But other things being equal, I prefer to use sheet music - for the following reasons:

1. I don't need the practice in learning by ear, because if I know a tune well enough to sing, I *can* play it by ear, and by the second or third go, am getting it right.

2. If I don't know a tune, it takes hours to learn, & it's wearisome. Why should I limit my repertoire thus, when I'm in my sixties, with limited learning capacity and time?

I think the late great Tom Anderson got it right: 'Never learn a tune that you don't already know!'

3. By exploring sheet music on The Session, an Irish Traditional Music site, I've learned tunes to die for, such as the strathspeys 'Craigellachie Bridge' by William Marshall, and a full set of variations of the traditional 'Gillie Callum'.

4. Fiddle Guru has a different taste to mine. He is younger, cooler, jazzier, smarter - I am older, more traditional, dreamier, couthier. 
These are the folk tunes he's asked me to pick up by ear: Paddy Fahy's Jig, Erin Shore (a song), Catharsis (modern composed reel), Natural Bridge Blues (an American dance tune), the Green Fields of Glentown (reel composed by Tommy Peoples, with a jazzier feel to it), Hector the Hero (sentimental air by Scott Skinner), Peter Man (modern composed jazzy reel), and Tam Linn, a reel much played by the younger set; I like this tune played as a dance, but not in the groovy '*dirty*' (sic) way that the Fiddle Guru wants me to play it! 
From this list, *I only like the first two*; all the rest *annoy* me, and although for years I kept them on to please the Guru, whenever I play the groovy tunes like Catharsis, *I annoy him* in his turn!

So hout, tout - let us go forward!


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