Practicing with the Metronome (House of my Own)

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Hello, and welcome to the Fiddle Studio podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller, and today I'll be bringing you a setting of House of My Own from an Irish session at the Arthouse bar in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today I'm going to be talking about kind of a funny topic, playing with the metronome. Just to introduce you to this idea. If you haven't fiddled with the metronome, maybe you'll be inspired to try it after this episode.

I grew up with a pretty rocky relationship with my metronome. My violin teacher certainly encouraged me to use it, I would mostly ignore it. And then sometimes at the very last minute, before an audition or a lesson, try to get some hard part up to speed as quickly as I could using the metronome the very last minute, but I never used it for my fiddling. 

So I hadn't fiddled with a metronome or ever really just put it on to practice too. And the first time I saw other musicians doing this was when I was in college, and conservatory. And I noticed that some people would practice with a metronome running either in headphones or just on in their practice room. And most of the people doing this word jazz musicians. So I noticed jazz drummers and bass players practicing with a metronome at different speeds. One of the interesting things about this, to me was that all of these players all had very good time. At the time, I thought my time was pretty good, too. 

When I started putting together groups of students to play fiddle tunes together, including jazz musicians and drummers, we didn't always fit together, we were having trouble staying together. So that was the first time that I thought, Well, maybe it's time for me to try this practicing technique. And try out playing the metronome with my fiddling, because I'd only ever used it for classical music mainly as a way to just take a hard part, slow it way down, and then inch it up the metronome, you know, one click by one click going faster and faster. 

I definitely had a moment. I remember what it felt like in the practice room where I thought well is something wrong with the battery is this metronome broken, because my fiddling was not fitting in with the beat. So that was the first time that I realized at the age of 20, 21, that I wasn't playing the fiddle with really, really solid time, I was speeding up and slowing down as I was playing. 

And in order to really learn how to play exactly with the beat, I had to slow down, probably to like 70, 80 beats per minute, playing my fiddle tunes like that with the metronome and get them really tight, and then speed it back up to jam and dance tempo between 105 and 120. I'm really glad I did this, I feel a lot more confident in my time. 

Now I still once in a while, get my metronome out, just to make sure that I'm that I'm keeping the beat, okay. It helped me have a sense of how fast I was playing, and also helped me just lock into the beat. And I used it as a dance musician. If you're playing for beginning dancers, you, you don't want to lock into what they're doing, you have to keep the beat for them. But when you're playing as a dance musician, for experienced dancers, will often wear dance shoes that make some noise on the floor. And they'll be keeping the beat with their feet. 

One of the pleasures of playing for dances is locking into the beat that they're keeping. And of course they're keeping a beat listening to what you're playing. So the music and the sound of the feet on the floor, pull together. It's really a wonderful feeling to be playing. And you start to feel like the music that you're playing and the steps, that they're taking that they're both expressions of the same thing. It's hard to describe.

I highly recommend learning to play with a metronome. Whether you play for dancers or not, it's always good, you might discover some things about your playing. And you might have that moment where you wonder if your metronome was broken happens to all of us. 

Our tune today is a setting of another slip jig from the Irish session at the Arthouse, which is the bar in Baltimore. The full name of this tune is I Have a House of My Own With a Chimney Built on Top of It. And it's a slip jig in E minor. There is some discussion on the session that this might be the longest to name on the session. I Have a House of My Own With a Chimney Built on Top of It. For short, I call it House of My Own. 

It's a tune composed by Junior Crehan who was a fiddler in County Clare. Born in 1908, Crehan started playing Irish music and an early age on the concertina before switching to the fiddle. My understanding is that he studied fiddling with Faddy Casey, also in County Clare at the time. I read an article that he played in the same pub in Cor for for 70 years. That's kind of amazing. 

He wasn't widely recorded, but wrote several tunes that are still played, and beloved in the Irish repertoire. If you go to the session, you can look up Junior Crehan and see the tunes that he wrote. This is a really nice tune. We enjoyed working on it. Here we go.