Playing by ear (Heater Don't Stop)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller. Today I'll be bringing you a setting of Heater Don't Stop from my album Broke the Floor by Meg Wobus and Charlie Beller. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about playing by ear on the fiddle or this might pertain to other instruments as well. 

Playing by ear is funny. Some folks take to it right away. I always wonder, especially if they haven't played other instruments. Did they experiment a lot with instruments when they were a kid? Did they spend a lot of time whistling? Yeah, I wonder how they got basically the part of their brain that thinks about melodies and music wired to their fingers where they could just easily figure out, pick out a tune or find the notes to play along. 

For some people it's a struggle, and I don't think it's their fault. I just think our brains are wired differently and sometimes you have to work to connect those two things Physical motion of your hands, if we're talking about fiddling with what you're hearing and what you're thinking about trying to play. 

You can't really play by ear if you're not listening to what you're doing. So people playing music without listening to what they're doing. Sometimes they call it typing. I think that comes from piano Pianists kind of an insult to say, oh, he's just typing. The way you might practice typing you're just reading a document and then making your fingers type it out on the piano. 

Just reading music and then just making your fingers type it out on the piano. So with a violin I think you're kind of forced a little bit more to listen to what you're doing. But people still tuck their instrument under their chins and I do this sometimes and I'm just off in a different world and I'm not really listening to what's happening. Sometimes I'll go back and hear myself and say is that what I sounded? Like I wasn't paying any attention. 

If you're trying to Listen in focus on what's coming out of your instrument, it really helps not to have something that you're reading. You're not reading music, you're not trying to read something else, you're not looking at anything in particular. Maybe your eyes are closed or you're just soft gaze and you're listening to the notes coming out. 

You may, if you have trouble distinguishing between notes, just like some people have trouble distinguishing between colors, it's just a difference that comes up. You may want to do ear training test or software online to try to develop that skill of just being able to hear the difference between the different notes. 

One way I like to play around with ear training for people who are just starting off with fiddling or just dipping their toe into playing by ear is in a curious kind of improvisational way. Start on one string, take your A string or your D string and try to make up some little four note tunes on a string. Just to hear what the notes are doing, play around with your fingers, listen to what's coming out. You only need four notes to make a tune if you play, play some little patterns, put them together. Pretty soon you'll have a little four note, three or four note song. 

You can go from there to picking out simple children's songs. You know really well. If you know Row River, your boat or Three Blind Mice or any other song that you grew up with, that you can hear it in your head. And then pick out a note and try to make that sound on the fiddle. Yeah, also works with simple fiddle tunes, but of course if you're not using the music, you want to know it in your head, the sound of it. You want to basically know it is so well you can hum it. So if you can hum old Joe Clark then you can try picking it out. But if you can't hum it yet you can't remember how it goes. You're not really playing by ear trying to figure it out. 

You do have to think a little bit about keys. So it helps, when you're first starting to play around with learning by ear, playing by ear, to have just one or maybe two keys, that you're working in the key of G. And you're working in the key of G basically means that any songs you're trying to figure out, or even little songs that you're writing, would end on a G. Because if something's in G it means it's all centered around that resting tone of G and it may not necessarily start on a G, although a lot of songs do start on their home base note. 

But it would normally end on a G. And then you'd want to know the seven notes that make up that scale. Seven's, not that many, you can learn it. The one octave G scale is just on the D string 3A, 1, 2, 3e, 1, 2 and your twos are low. So you know that. Or you can use A if you like your high twos but work in that one key. 

Try making up your songs, working out some children's songs, maybe working out an easy tune or two, and just do them in that key until you get comfortable with those seven notes Going back and forth, skipping, hopping, leaping, different patterns that basically make up music in that key. Then you can branch out to some other keys. You've got D, a, e, minor, a minor. I mean that might hold you for a while. 

I love to take a really easy tune and try starting it on different notes, so playing it in different keys. This is a classic way to practice. You can do it with a scale. I had my interview with VanNorstrand  and he said he'd never played scales. But I think playing scales is really useful. You can just make up your own music, like Noah did, or you can play some scales and move that around to different keys and then try it with some easy tunes. 

You know if you're playing the piano or right now I'm playing the English concertina. I know where all of the natural notes like on the piano it's the white notes and then all the black notes on the piano are sharps or flats and on the concertina it's the same where you kind of know where all the white notes are and then on the edges are all the sharps and flats. It makes it easier to know what key you're playing in because you know in G you've just got that one black note on the piano, the F-sharp, and the rest are the white notes. But on the fiddle you need to know your finger pattern, loathe, high, twos, what's going on, what the notes are, but there's only seven, you know. 

I guess the last thing I'll say is the next step, after listening in to what you're doing and learning to pick things out and just let the wrong notes slide by and keep figuring out until your hand is able to into it its way through a tune is that you want to actually push it into your subconscious. This is where I'll actually I'm trying to do this with the concertina now. I want it to be subconscious so that if I'm hearing a tune in my head, my fingers will just do it and there's no thinking about it. I can think it where are the buttons and it'll go slow. 

But in order to get it fast it needs to be happening basically subconsciously. Unless I've like practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced, I'll have that one tune fast. But I want all my tunes fast. So I've actually been propping open a book or even, you know, reading an article on the internet and playing tunes while I'm trying to do something else trying to read or have a conversation with somebody and making the tune as easy as it needs to be for me to do it while I'm not focused on it. As you push the skills into your subconscious, you're creating that faster link between the melody remembering part of your brain and the finger muscle movement part of your brain. I want those to be super well linked so that it just happens before you can even stop to think is that a two? Your two is already playing it. It takes a little while. 

Our tune for today is called Heater Don't Stop. This is a tune I wrote kind of a crazy tune, to be honest, but I like it. I think I was trying to write an old time tune, but it's not really old time. It's in D minor. It's got some unusual notes in it. I wrote this up in a cabin in Pennsylvania. It was by a stream and I was playing around a lot with tunes that I know that have hits in them and writing tunes with hits. 

I really love it when the fast notes stop and then there's these kind of bum, bum, bum bum. I call them hits. They're just longer notes that really emphasize that part of the tune. In Contra Dancing they're used for balancing, doing the balance movement. Yeah, I somehow ended up writing this tune that has five hits in a row, which is five is not a great number for dance. Everything is four or eight. It's actually very hard to use this tune for Contra Dancing. It's hard to dance to, but it's fun to play. Yeah, I'll share this tune with you. This is Heater Don't Stop. From my album Broke the Floor.