Fiddle Studio: Supercharge Your Practice (Old Granny Rattle Trap)

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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 and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Rattle Trap from a jam at Anna Bandeira Chocolates in Northampton, Massachusetts. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about supercharging your practice. First I will make a couple of announcements. I wanted to thank two people who left reviews. Thank you so much. These were on Apple Music. Thank you to Heather. Actually, I know Heather, we play together in Baltimore. Friends leave friends reviews. Thank you, Heather, they're really nice. Review from Idaho Fiddler, who said some nice things about the books and the podcast, and thank you very much to Idaho Fiddler as well.

My other quick announcement this week is that my new course is out. If you go to fiddlestudio.com and click on courses you'll see all my courses. The new one is how to Play Faster. I've covered a lot of the topics over the last month or so and what I'm talking about today is also involved. But you can go there if you want to see the videos, kind of the outline what I cover in it, the different tunes I use to teach the concepts, and it's a $50 course. I tried to price it at about the cost of one lesson. It's more. It's definitely more material than I could fit into one lesson, but that was my thinking in the pricing. I actually changed the prices on the fiddle studio website for this new year. I wanted to make the material a little bit more accessible. All of my courses are now $50 and the membership, which gives you access to everything, is $25 a month. You can start it or stop it at any time there.

Advertisement is over. I know this title is a little bit clickbait-y how to Supercharge your Practice. One of my kids said now that you've talked so much about how to play fast, you should do a podcast on how to play slow, which is kind of an interesting idea. I might do that soon, but I'm finishing up my final concept that I've been working on with speed and we're going to be talking about mindful practice versus mindless practice. So the too long didn't read upfront. I'll just tell you the system that I've been experimenting with with my own practicing is to break it into thirds. I usually only have time for like 30 minutes at a time, so I'll do 10 minutes of slow mindful practice. I'll do 10 minutes of going through things in different rhythms or different keys. No-transcript, mindless practice, basically building muscle memory. And then I'll do 10 minutes where I just play what I want to play. Ha ha ha. Joyful practice. I've been calling it so one-third mindless, one-third mindful and one-third joyful.

You might not be the kind of person who takes a very organized approach to their practice and has systematic ways to approach it. That's a little bit how I am. I come from a family of people who do that. So if what you're doing is working for you, definitely stick with that. But if you like to try out different things and see how they affect your learning and your playing, you can give this a try. Let me know how it goes.

This practicing technique is, I will say as a caveat, separate from oral understanding and meaning listening, knowing what the tunes and the style sound like. So I didn't say anything about listening, but obviously you want to be listening enough that any tunes you're learning you've got really well in your head, any style that you're working on, you've got an idea of what it sounds like. You can well, I won't say hum it, Janie, won't let me say hum it. You can sing it in that style. You know what it sounds like. So mindful practice. Let's start with that.

Mindful practice is slow practice. Yes, it's slow. I've been doing this third of the time. As I said, you know if you're playing slow enough because, instead of making mistakes and then correcting them, you're getting it right the first time. So if you're working on your tone and you're still squeaking, you're not going slow enough. If you're working on relaxing your shoulders and you keep finding them up around your ears, you need to slow down more. If you're, for instance, tripping over your rolls and not sitting them all the way into a tune, trying to work on Irish ornamentation, you've got to slow the whole thing down more. That is my mindful practice For right now.

I'm working a lot on how to shift my hand around on the button accordion. The button accordion is very difficult. It's like if you were learning the fiddle but you had to shift right from the beginning. So there's a lot of very slow practice where I have to play very easy tunes very slowly so that I can think through where I need to shift my hand around, keeping in mind, like, what's coming up in the melody, is it going to go down? Do I have to find a way to shift down? Is it going to go up? Do I have to find a way to shift up?

Generally, of course, slow practice on the fiddle means working on your tone, working on technique. Relaxation Could be shifting for sure if you're doing hard stuff like that Could be finger patterns, you know, getting the hang of something tricky that goes on back and forth on different strings or back and forth between low and high fingers, anything like that.

Okay, we'll talk about mindless practice. You know there's that saying go slow to go fast, and I don't agree with that. I don't think going slow works on what you need to go fast on the fiddle. I just agree with it. I think it's muscle memory, it's your autopilot that helps you go fast. It doesn't necessarily help your autopilot to play things really, really slow.

What it takes really is repetition. Some kinds of what I would call mindless practice are just really at the heart ways to do a lot of repetition. If you're playing something in a lot of different keys, hitting those patterns around, a lot of different resting tones, that's repeating. If you're playing something at different tempos, using the metronome at 60 and at 70 and at 80, again you're repeating. If you're playing something with different rhythms, it's another way to do it. And even if you are playing in a gym, playing with other people repeating the tune you know three or five or 10 times at a jam, that's another way to just get repetitions in.

When you're thinking about your autopilot, the question is at what point does the level of difficulty of the different kinds of music you can play intersect with your autopilot? Which is to say, when I was teaching a kid that needed a big repertoire for Suzuki or for Fiddled, they need to be able to play a lot of stuff from memory and maybe, even if they can't recall it immediately from memory, they can play along very convincingly with someone else who knows it.

So a kid who needs a repertoire of 100 short classical pieces or 100 fiddle tunes isn't going to have the time to practice all of those every day so that it tunes in like a recently practiced place. They need a good autopilot. A kid who's autopilot's really amazing meaning their ear-to-hand connection is very, very strong they could play almost all of their repertoire. Maybe a very recently learned, very difficult piece they might struggle with because they would need more recent practice in their hand to play it, but they could do most of the repertoire just from autopilot, because they remember what it sounds like and if they can remember it they can play it in their hand. Their hand just knows what to do.

Sometimes I would teach kids from other teachers usually, who could play very well and often read music very well, but their autopilot was at a very, very low level. They could only play the simplest things back because they had like a page-to-hand connection so they can read, they can play with their hand what they're reading on the page. Or sometimes it was a kid who they could practice the song or the piece well enough to play it, but they didn't necessarily listen to it and they weren't always listening when they were playing it. So they weren't listening enough to really know the song like in their head. So all of a sudden they can play it with their fingers. They maybe are a kinesthetic person, so they're playing it, kind of have to know what it sounds like, but they don't know the music. If I asked them to sing through it they wouldn't be able to do.

That Actually happened to me a little bit in college. I was a little bit of a goof in college, not very serious with my classical repertoire, so there was a lot of music, I learned that I wasn't studying to really know, I was just studying it to be able to play it off the page of my lessons because I didn't really like it, I didn't care if I knew it well. So that music is hard for me to go back and play because I never learned it. I don't know what it sounds like, it's like new to me Even though I practiced it and learned it when I was 20, it feels completely new, whereas songs that I know my autopilot kicks in helps me. All of a sudden it's easier to play. I hope this is making sense.

So mindless practice is building that left hand autopilot and I know last week Janie talked all about the right hand autopilot. I like working on the left hand. What can I say? It's nice to be able to play the notes. You can do both yes and right. It really is so helpful to be able to have the muscle memory to be able to play what you have in your memory. I mean, if you add note reading to that, you can do almost anything Like the world is your oyster. So we talked about mindful and we talked about mindless practicing, and my third, my third category was joyful practicing pretty self-explanatory.

There's something out there that's fun for you to play. Look, I love playing over the waterfall and that's the kind of tune that everyone makes fun of. I still love to play it. I practice it all the time. I love playing Mari's wedding. I love tunes like Snowflake Reel that have crazy chords in them and you know people roll their eyes. They're a little ridiculous, but I remind myself that even if my family's heard me play this tune a million times, I like playing it, so I'm going to play it again. Play stuff that you love. It makes it more fun for me.

Our tune for today is Rattle Trap, or Old Granny Rattletrap. I learned this tune at an old time jam I went to. I was staying up in Northampton, Massachusetts, and even though it's in New England, they had an old time jam there. So this month we're going to have old time tunes from up north. It was at a chocolate shop Wow, what a great place to have a jam Ana Bandeira Chocolates.

And the jam was led by Natalie Padilla, who's a really great fiddler. She played a couple of different instruments but when she played the fiddle I was like, wow, she sounded great. A real kind of Texas bluegrass style. She sounded really good on the old time. She also plays Irish. I think she has classical training, one of these musicians who does a lot of different things. You should check out her music on band camp, Natalie Padilla.

The jam was great. It did start pretty early. I think it started at five. By the time I figured out it had already started I was very late. Jams don't start at five in Baltimore and they called this tune Rattletrap has a crazy B part. I will try to put some fingerings in so you can see how I'm doing this in the B part.

When I post the tune on my blog To find the blog, it's either fiddlestudio.blogspot.com or if you just go to my regular Fiddle Studio site, at the top there's a link that says blog. That's where you find the sheet music which might be helpful for this tune. I did find it online a couple places. The tune archive had a couple transcriptions from Bill Hensley, Madison County, North Carolina, and from Uncle Am Stewart, a Fiddler from Tennessee, the turn of the century, and I guess there's a 1949 recording from Baskin Lamar Lunsford, famous Fiddler Baskin Lunsford. Anyway, so you can look around for it and we're going to play it for you here. Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudio.com, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.