Posts Tagged ‘Learning By Ear’

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Bass playing– ON the beat, please!

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Red Henry

Yesterday evening I went out to a local weekly jam session. This event started a couple of years ago and has turned into an informal outdoor concert, with a dozen or more pickers and a hundred or so listeners every week. The players are all local folks, and I enjoy playing music with them. But every so often something will happen to make the music hard to play.

When I arrived and joined the session yesterday evening, a person was playing bass and doing well with it. She knew all the songs, and played solidly on the beat. This really helped the jam session hold together.

After about an hour, though, she needed a break, and was replaced by another player. He got through the first number, though a little shakily. Then when a fiddle player kicked off the next tune (Golden Slippers, in G), the bass player started playing his notes on the off-beat, and stayed there.

Now, bass players play their notes on the ON-beat, not the OFF-beat. When a bass player is playing on the off-beat instead (like a mandolin’s rhythm), it makes the music sound pretty weird. This time, it seemed as if half the players stayed with the fiddler’s rhythm, and the others were wandering a bit between the fiddle and the bass. It was a pretty diffuse sound. I stopped playing after the first few beats of the tune, and decided it was time to pack up and go home.

I applaud all the folks who want to come out and play, but it’s better when the bass player just plays on the beat. It’s easier for everybody!

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Posted in By Red, jamming | 2 Comments »

Record yourself!

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Red Henry

That’s right. Record yourself. That is one of the best ways to hear exactly what your playing sounds like, and to find out what you need to work on.

In years past, recording yourself was very easy and cheap to do, with the inexpensive cassette recorders that a lot of folks had. Modern technology makes recording almost as easy (but not cheap) by using video cameras or small high-tech audio recorders. Even most digital cameras can take a movie–with sound– of your playing. But whatever your favorite device is, just record yourself playing a couple of tunes. Then play them back and see what you sound like.

When you hear your music played back, it might not sound quite as good as you thought it was going to. (My band-leading, banjo-playing brother-in-law Mike says that for him, recording music– and listening to it afterward– is as pleasant as having teeth pulled. But that’s just his opinion.) Now, I’m not saying this trying to discourage anybody from playing. If in the playback, you don’t sound like Earl, or Ralph, or J.D., or Murphy, that’s not a reason to give up playing, or even recording. The point is that you can really hear what your playing sounds like. You can hear all your notes, and your timing, and your rhythm. And if you are playing steadily enough on the tape to play along with yourself during the playback, that’s excellent! You’ve come a long way, and are ready to play with other people, whether you feel like it or not!

Sometimes when you hear yourself for the first time, you might be discouraged. But this doesn’t mean that your playing normally sounds the way it does on the tape. Any time the tape is rolling (or any other recording is going on), you’re going to have it on your mind, either consciously or unconsciously. And it might affect your playing. But the more practice you get recording, the better you’ll play each time you record, and when it comes time to listen back to the tune, the better you’ll sound. Recording and listening is great practice, and can sure help a person’s playing!

Record yourself!

Red.

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Posted in By Red, Learning By Ear, Practice | 2 Comments »

Unfamiliar situations: Flying and Picking #14

Friday, July 9th, 2010

Did you ever try to play music in a place that wasn’t familiar, and found yourself so distracted by the room, or the people, or the lighting, or the phase of the moon, that you had trouble playing? Or did you learn to play music while sitting down all the time, and then try to play while standing up? It might have been uncomfortable at first. You were in an unfamiliar situation.

I was reminded of this two nights ago, when I flew my very first night solo (well, my first since 1971). I’d flown several times at night recently with my instructor, but hadn’t tried it alone. So I took off about sunset and just practiced landings over and over, and kept at it as it got really dark.

Now, I’ve made about 400 daytime landings or so in the last 7 months. So I’m pretty familiar with them now. But now I was flying at night, and the situation was different. I really had to concentrate to find some of the same visual clues I’m used to in the daytime, and I had to adopt some new ones. But it worked. The results? 11 pretty good landings, including the last 3 in the pitch dark. But it did take concentration and practice in the new, dark situation (making those landings over and over). It was a gradual thing, but finally I was pretty comfortable with it. I really had to concentrate, but it just took some practice.

You can make the same kind of adjustment when you’re playing music in an unfamiliar situation. If you’re put off your stride (or even freaked out) by standing up to play, or playing in a new place, or playing in front of people, or playing in a group you’re not used to, then don’t concentrate on the unfamiliar stuff. Simplify what you’re doing and concentrate on yourself and the notes you’re playing. Keep your eyes on your instrument and play tunes you can play in your sleep, or your favorite basic backup licks, or just vamp until you have your hands and mind under control again. Let your brain assimilate the new variables a little at a time, and eventually you’ll get used to the new situation. Play your same familiar tunes and licks over and over standing up, for example, and you’ll get to where you can stand up in a group and handle not only your oldest material but new things as well. Practice at different places in your house, or your yard. Play when one or two family or friends are around– not suddenly for a crowd, but gradually. Even if you’re freaked out at first, it just takes some practice!

Red

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Posted in By Red, Improvising, jamming, Practice | 2 Comments »

Earned the License! (Flying and Picking #12)

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry

Folks, I’m going to break away from those excellent postings from Kaufman Kamp to tell you about something else good that happened this week. As many of you know I’ve been learning to fly, and on Wednesday I got my license! It’s been a huge 7-month-long project, studying and flying all I could, but it finally happened. I took the flying examination (called a “check ride”), and passed with– yes, I’ll say it– flying colors.

This flight exam was in the same old rusty Cessna 172 you see in that photo above, registration number N51056. I’ve flown about 121 hours so far, mostly in that same airplane, and the plane and I have come to know each other pretty well. Now I’ll start flying a couple of times a week just for fun, in this airplane and others, and enjoy the flights even more, because now there’s no pressure about making the grade. Although I expect to keep learning forever, now I’m an independent pilot.

And what (to ask it again), does this have to do with playing music? A lot. The more I fly, the more connection I see with music. You’ll have some goals when you learn to play, such as playing your first tune all the way through without stopping or losing your place; being able to play your tunes while your teacher plays rhythm for you on a guitar; someday being able to play along with the group in a jam session, and maybe even performing at parties, small concerts, at church, or for folks at nursing homes. But along the way, you really hit a landmark when you can play your tunes standing up, at a reasonable speed, in a jam session. That’s what Murphy sometimes calls “becoming an independent banjo player” (or mandolin player, or fiddle, or guitar, or whatever). Although you still have lots you can learn, you might say that that’s when you’ve earned your license. And it’s good.

Red

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Posted in By Red, jamming, Learning By Ear | 8 Comments »

Speed Bumps (Flying and Picking #11)

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry


As you may recall if you’ve been a MM blog reader for some time, I’m taking flying lessons. Over and over, I find parallels between learning to fly and our students learning to play music.

In the last several weeks I’ve made a lot of progress in flying. I’ve flown solo to some airports over a hundred miles away and returned home easily. Flying solo, I’ve made some difficult landings in crosswinds and tailwinds, and had gotten pretty confident of my ability to get the plane on the ground safely in nearly any situation. But recently, the quality of my landings deteriorated for no reason that I could see. All of a sudden, just getting on the ground solo was a problem. Safety was not an issue– it’s very easy and safe to keep trying landings over and over until one is right and you land– but the landings were much more difficult. Practice didn’t help, as my landings got more and more awkward. So in search of some insight I took a flight with the chief instructor, and he gave me some new angles, exercises, and tips on landing the plane, and now my landings are back to normal.

Is this connected to learning to play? You bet. Whether you’re learning your first tune or your hundredth, you’ll have ups and downs in your learning. You’ll play a tune well one day, and suddenly be unable to get through it the next. You play in groups and jams with no problem, and then one day you find that your fingers don’t work right in front of other people. This is normal!

This happens to professional players too, but you usually can’t tell when they’re on stage. Some days (or weeks) we just can’t play as well as other times. Practice helps, but sometimes, like golfers and baseball pitchers, we can get into a slump, though the audience won’t usually notice it. Professionals just let it go, perhaps giving themselves a break by taking a few days off, because they know that the music will come back.

When you’re in a slump, try something new. If practice isn’t helping, you might even take a few days off from playing. If playing in your usual jam group doesn’t help, try taking a week off from the jam, or playing with some other folks for an evening instead. Listen to some banjo music that’s different from your usual fare. Relax and play along with our Slow Jam or Picking Up the Pace DVDs. Ask your instructor to just spend a lesson playing, trading breaks on your familiar tunes, instead of trying to learn any new tunes for a while. Everybody needs a break!

Red

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Posted in By Red, Improvising, jamming, Learning By Ear, lessons | 4 Comments »

Building Blocks (Flying and Picking #9)

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry


Last night, my instructor Brian and I made a cross-country flight to an airport about 62 miles away. The flight was in the dark, it was over some pretty sparsely-populated Virginia and West Virginia mountains, and it was in a very small single-engined airplane. We navigated visually at night, and we were not flying on instruments. Were we scared? No, not even when one of the radios quit working. We didn’t really need any radios at all. Did we have any trouble getting there and back? No. It was a lot of fun.

The flight went really smoothly, and along with flying the plane I was able to do all the things I’ve been practicing: checking our course on the ground, checking our speed toward our destination, cross-checking our progress using the navigational radio that still worked, and talking when necessary to Air Traffic Control and other airplanes. Then, of course, I had to land the plane when we got where we were going and again when we came back. In the dark. Was all this complicated? Yes, a bit. Could I have done all this right after I started training? No, of course not. Why wasn’t it overwhelming? Because I’d learned it all a step at a time.

I keep finding similarities between learning to fly and learning to play music. Learning to pick is something you need to do a little at a time. Our banjo students, for example, no matter how much they want to, can’t launch right into learning “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”, or playing “Dueling Banjos”, or improvising in jam sessions, right off the bat. Nobody can (except maybe teenagers). Instead, the students need to go through our Beginning Banjo DVDs step-by-step to learn the building blocks– the banjo licks– which they’re going to use. Then they need to go, step-by-step, into more advanced DVDs which teach them how to put those building blocks together, one step at a time.

Taking one step at a time, it all makes sense and becomes easier. You start with one thing and learn another, and then you aren’t overwhelmed and discouraged by not being able to do it all at once! Learn to play step-by-step at your own speed, and after a while you’ll be cruising over the mountains yourself.

Red

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Posted in By Red, DVDs, Improvising, jamming, Learning By Ear, Practice, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Picking with Others is the Easiest Practice

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry


Folks, we’ve discussed practice several times on this blog lately. Some of my own entries have had to do with how to keep up with your practice when you don’t have much spare time available. But there are other aspects of practice to talk about, including “What’s the easiest way to practice?” and “What kind of practice is best?”

In my own case, I discovered in 1967 (about a week after I started playing) that for me, picking with others was the easiest and best way to practice. It’s that way for others, too. When you are playing with other people, (1) you don’t have to provide all the musical energy– energy circulates around the group (even if it’s only two or three people) and comes back to help you; (2) practice time passes so much more quickly that three or four hours playing music with others make seem shorter than one hour at home; and (3) it’s a lot more fun. And you sure learn a lot, painlessly. This is why Murphy says over and over at the end of our videos, “Find some people to pick with!”

Now, I know that in some parts of the country (and the world) there are few other players of bluegrass, country, folk, gospel, or other similar material whom you can get with. For example, I spent a year at an Air Force base in Del Rio, Texas, and didn’t find any other musicians that year. Nowadays, of course, things are a lot better: we have our Murphy Method Slow Jam and Picking Up the Pace DVDs, and you can have a jam session any time right in your house!

So as I said, when you’re picking with others, you not only have a better time than in solo practice, but you learn faster. You also begin improvising, and backing up other players, in a live setting where people are having a good time. Playing in almost any kind of group is not only the easiest kind of practice– but the best.

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Flying and Picking (6)

Friday, February 5th, 2010
Into the Wild Blue Yonder

Into the Wild Blue Yonder

Folks, a few days ago I mentioned that my flight instructor and I had gone on a cross-country flight to another airport here in the Shenandoah Valley. Well, yesterday we went on another longer cross-country, and a parallel really struck me between flying and playing music.

The first time, we flew to an airport near Harrisonburg, Va. I had my hands full trying to identify my checkpoints, keep my log of the time at each one, and dial in my radio navaids to confirm my navigation. We got there right on time and course, but I had my hands full just taking care of those “mechanical” things.

Then yesterday, we flew down to Charlottesville. I was able to do all those things, plus keep checking on the chart to make sure that we were in exactly the right place every minute, and looking ahead to what came next. This time the forecast winds were not as perfect as last time, so we might get a little off course, but this time I could detect it soon and correct for it. I was able to make everything go more smoothly. I think I kept us within a half-mile of our planned course the whole way, and when we were about 15 miles from the Charlottesville airport I spotted our destination runway straight ahead (and we were, almost eerily, nearly lined up with it again). Not only had we arrived on target and on time, but I’d been able to look ahead and think of the flight as a whole, instead of as a series of individual steps.

How does this connect with playing music? Well, you start out learning the notes to a tune, and you play them as well as you can. You eventually get to where you can play all the way through the tune without (hopefully) losing your place, or, at least, if you miss a lick you can recover and keep playing in time. This means that you have the “mechanical” part of the tune under control. But as you keep listening to the DVD over and over (for example, Cripple Creek on our Beginning Banjo Vol.1 or Earl Scruggs playing his original version on the Foggy Mountain Banjo CD), the more you hear. You may automatically pick up the subtle way Murphy and other players syncopate the notes to make the tune more listenable. You start hearing notes that are more accentuated than the others, which define (or at least imply) the melody. You start hearing the overall tune, which is more than just the notes.

You come back to the DVD lesson or Earl’s CD a few weeks or months later, and you can hear more than you did the first time. You start hearing more than the notes. In other words, you start hearing the tune as a piece of music. So keep listening to Murphy, keep listening to Earl, and keep picking!

Red

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Posted in By Red, General, Learning By Ear | 1 Comment »

What If I Don’t Have Any Talent?

Monday, March 9th, 2009

Murphy HenryThis Blog was inspired by Marty who read the following in the March Banjo Newsletter and sent me an email. This is a quote from a banjo player and teacher:

“All teachers occasionally get a student who has no musical promise at all. What do you do with them? I just keep trying to teach them until they reach their own conclusions.”

Marty then wrote, “My heart stopped for a minute and I thought, ‘Hey, he could be talking about me.’ Then I decided that if he couldn’t teach them, they should have tried a better way and used the Murphy Method….I still agree with the perspective that if a willing student can’t learn it is more about the teacher than the student.”

I replied thusly:

Bless your heart (as we say down South). I’m sorry that article gave you even a moment’s pause. You have plenty of promise! And I mean that. And what is more important, you have stick-to-it-ness and desire. Which, in the long run, is the most important. If, as the Good Book says, you have a talent and bury it, what good is it?

I agree with you about it usually being the teacher. In fact in my BNL article in 1983 (!), I quoted a professional tennis teacher who said that the attitude of many teachers is “If you don’t learn what I teach you, you’re a dummy.” His approach was, “If you don’t learn, I’m the dummy.” That’s the philosophy the Murphy Method is built on.

I have found that most people, regardless of age, have some musical ability if you just explore deep enough. For instance, if I encounter someone who really seems to “lack talent” on the banjo, I make things as simple as possible. In the beginning this might include simply strumming the open G chord and trying to play in time. In that regard the banjo is the easiest of the instruments to teach, because the string are so light (not like guitar or mando) and the chords (G, D7, and even C) are so easy to make. I then take that foundation stone and build on it.

Unfortunately the musical talent we all are born with sometimes gets buried by inattention or covered up by other life experiences. Or, worst of all, a well-meaning adult (parent or teacher) tells a child that she or he has NO MUSICAL ABILITY. Kids then carry that damaging—and false—belief into adulthood where it is very hard to shake. But it can be shaken!!! I make it my job to shake it! If any of you believe this about yourselves IT’S NOT TRUE! And it’s not too late! (I feel like I’m giving an alter call and we should all stand and sing “Just As I Am.” Perhaps in a former life I was a preacher!) 

I have taught many people who have come to music late in life and who get a great deal of pleasure out of being able to play a few songs. I get a reciprocal amount of pleasure watching them learn and hearing them play. I have also taught a number of adults who come to the banjo in their middle years and learn to play lots of tunes, learn to jam, learn to improvise, and even form bands.

The keys are: learning by ear, sticking with it, taking it slow, and never giving up!

So if you’re asking yourself right now if you have any talent, the answer is: YES!

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Posted in By Murphy, General, Learning By Ear, lessons | 1 Comment »

Fiddle Stuff

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Murphy HenrySuzi, one of my fiddle students, has graciously allowed me to post the list of tunes she is working on. She has taken up fiddle at the age of 71 and is doing very well. And what makes this especially interesting to me is that she’s not following the “normal” path for a beginning fiddle student. Of course we started there with my conventional first songs for fiddle: Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Mary Had A Little Lamb, Are You Sleeping Brother John, and so on. But Suzi quickly became bored with practicing these over and over. So she started picking out tunes on her own. By ear.

And here is the list she’s come up with. So far! Since she was raised in the Grace Brethren church, most of these are hymns. Since I was raised Baptist, I know them. And love them! I think this is an interesting pairing of student and teacher.

How Suzi picks these out I don’t know. And by that I mean, I have no idea of how she arrives at each starting note. But somehow she ends up playing in easy keys, mostly D, although she herself is not aware of what key she is playing in. (I told her this week that you call tell what key you are playing in by the last note in the song. If the last note is “D” then you are playing in the key of D. Cool, eh?) I have indicated which key she is playing in, in case that helps you in your own playing. I have also included the notes she starts on, in her own words which I have put into italics. (‘Twould be better if you figured out your own starting notes, but I’m just being picky!)

You’ll notice that at the end of the list are some suggestions I made for easy songs that were not religious.

SUZI’S SONGS

Amazing Grace: Key of G: D open to ring finger

When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder: Key of D: D open to index finger

Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee: Key of D: D middle finger

Jesus Loves Me: Key of D: A open to D middle finger

It Is No Secret What God Can Do: Key of D: D middle finger

Stand Up, Stand Up For Jesus: Key of G: Open D to ring finger on D

Oh, For A Thousand Tongues To Sing: Key of G: D open to D ring finger

Joy To The World: Key of D: ring finger on A

(more…)

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