Celtic Speed

[Becky]

I started playing my first fretted instrument (Greek Bouzouki)Oct. 2004. #I started the mandolin in April 2005. #I went to my first celtic session about a month ago and I have been afraid to go back. #I loved the experience, but it is SO fast, I can't keep up with them. #One hand is going one speed and the other is going a different speed. #Am I going to gain speed eventually??? #Or is it too soon to expect that?

[plunkett5]

I'd advise you to play well and clean and worry about speed later. If you're lucky, you might find a slow session to attend. They vary, but often provide lists of tunes commonly played and keep a moderate pace. If no slow sessions are available, go to sessions and look for people at or a bit above your level and start a house session yourself at your pace. Check out the playing of Martin Hayes if you need slow speed inspiration.

[withak]

You'll pick it up eventually. Until then, don't worry about speed. Play at the speed that is comfortable for you.

[PaulD]

One thing I like about Celtic sessions vs. Bluegrass sessions is that everyone plays the melody through together rather than taking individual breaks. I find it less intimidating and if I stumble one time through I can play rhythm and take another stab at it the next time through.

Plunkett's right, though, work on playing clean and build speed. It's hard to go back and clean it up after learning a tune fast and choppy... at least for me it is.

[steve V. johnson]

All good advice so far! Irish sessions are different every time, different people come (or don't show up), folks feel differently form week to week, and so on. Folks -can't- play that fast all the time, they get sore or injured, but from time to time the speed limits get tested.

I'd say to keep going, make some friends, soak up the tunes, and pretty soon you can arrange to play with some new friends outside of the session, teach each other tunes, have a little gathering, and then you can go back to the session with more to do.
It's really great to have a couple of people to play with outside of a big session. Sessions are social events as well as musical, so there are often other social things going on than just tunes, so having time with a good player 'on the side' can be the time to really concentrate well on the tunes and the techniqes. In a really good session you kind of never know what's going to happen next, and without knowing the tunes, new players can spend a lot of time listening and waiting til one they know comes around.

In theory, sessions are to be democratic/anarchic, that is, if you want to play a tune at a particular tempo, you should be able to say, I'd like to play "This Tune" but I really like it at This Tempo, and in most of the sessions I have been to, folks will go along and play it that way. They may play the next set at light speed, but the notion of folks being comfortable with differing tempos will be there, out on the floor. But the courtesy to play stuff so that some or all the folks there can keep up is pretty common, in my experience.

In the southwest of Ireland a ceili band player once told me that the tempo was set by the slowest dancer, but sessions without dancers are kind of up for grabs.

Also, the deeper you get in the music, the slower "fast" becomes. Fast is often relative to our abilities (real or perceived <GG>) and so as you get more comfortable with the instrument and the tunes, what was blindingly fast before will become merely too fast. <GGG> It's happened to me.

Oh yeah, at most sessions it's ok to take a recorder and capture some of the tunes so you can take them home and learn them. You might want to try that, too.

All the best,

stv

[Becky]

Thank you everyone for all your great advice. I really appreciate the support. Taking a tape recorder is a good idea. I was getting rather discouraged...thanks for picking me up!

Becky

[banjomanva]

there are a lot of fast mandolin pickers.....there are a lot of great mandolin pickers....but a great, fast mandolin picker is a true find. most musicians, not professional mind you, that i have played with can play fast but they are not smooth and the melody is lost in the shuffle of hammer-ons and pull-offs. without the melody there is no song.

[jmcgann]

without the melody there is no song.

Especially in Irish music! Slow and beautiful is the route to fast and beautiful, IMHO.

Listen to Martin Hayes..

[jim_n_virginia]

Some of the tunes I know I can play very quickly and some I am still working on.

The way I can play a song very fast is to play it very slowly with a metronome, which I think is indispensable (at least to me) and there is no trick or anything I play the tune over and over and over, slowly methodically...cleanly until I know the song and can play it and not even think about what I am doing.

I think it's called "muscle memory" or something like that. Anyways, the bottom line is to keep picking the songs and practicing and soon the speed will come.

And someone suggested learning something the RIGHT way and I have first hand experience in that. I spent weeks and weeks learning a new song (The Galway Reel) and I could play it fast backwards and forwards and when I played the song with other I learned it WRONG!

It was very hard to go back and relearn the song. I STIll mess up sometimes when I play it. http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/mandosmiley.gif

[allezlesbleus]

Martin Hayes is quality but James Kelly is the stuff.

ALB

[mancmando]

Talking of fast tunes, I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but I often find that the best players/bands seem to play and it doesn't sound that fast (until you try and play along with them). Similarly something can sound fast but isn't....

[steve V. johnson]

At the Dublin, Ohio, Irish Fest I heard James Kelly play with Ged Foley. I found their pace to be really deliberate and then I heard folks at the next table going on about how lightning-fast they were going. It's pretty relative, I guess...

Later that evening I was in a session at the hotel, and the two teenage girls from the band The Cottars came to play. One plays fiddle and the other whistle and bodhran. They were happy and excited (and YOUNG) and played everything at 170mph, just about all night. After the first couple of sets, which were great fun, I started to hear differences. One was the Cape Breton variations in the ways that they play Irish tunes that are real familiar, the other was that they ... um... 'trimmed'... 'smoothed'...
uh, well... left out a bunch of the notes in the tunes, going so fast that they slid right by some of the most charming and characteristic bits of the tunes. After a while I resigned to listening. Those girls are so cute that they drew an enormous crowd anyway, so the distance to the drink stash kept growing... <GG>

stv

[danb]

I think it's called "muscle memory" or something like that.
Yeah hmm, "kinesthetic recall" is a phrase springing unbidden into my typing buffers..

It is very much like that. Sheer number of repetitions does in fact lead to speed. Not thinking about it helps too.. I used to practice with the TV on, radio, etc. It's a very odd thing, you want it ingrained into your artistic hemisphere, not your logical one. The artistic one also feels free to experiment over time. Sessions are good because there are lots of distractions that keep the musically-dead half of your brain occupied http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[steve V. johnson]

DanB sez: "I used to practice with the TV on, radio, etc."

Classical pianist Glenn Gould used to practice with two radios, one on either side of him, turned on and tuned to two different stations!

stv

[danb]

"free your mind, and your hands will follow"

Sounds like something out of the Matrix. It's a strange sounding approach, but it does work.

[mandroid]

In my recollection I did better sitting in on jams in Ireland with them all playing Head tunes, than I do when playing with the Sightreaders, its the classicly trained violinists,I get dropped by,[a bike racers term] rather than fiddlers, and the harp and button accordions mix, i suppose, or maybe its the better beer...

[danb]

I really think it is to do with having "The right distractions". Maybe it's that whole left brain right brain thing. Theory aside, it's strangely easier to play well in a session. There's a tipping point too.. it's harder to start a tune on your own and keep it together than it is to flourish along with other folks. Recording solo is harder than with a friend.. etc

[MandoJon]

I listen over and over to the tune to get it in my head (free the mind) and then work it up to an OK speed. At that point, I stop trying to play fast and practice it deliberately VERY slowly but making sure it still sounds like the tune and that each note is perfect. Do that several times while not thinkning about where the fingers go and you'll fly through it next time you try to play fast. I got the idea of doing it that way from doing TaiChi (which is practiced so slowly because it's actually a very fast martial art - but not a lot of people know that).

Um... well that's my theory... :P

Picking up tunes on the fly is another matter. I'm lousy at it but am noticing I'm getting better the more I do. I'd say, sit in, listen and then ask for the tune name at a convenient point and the get the TAB/notation from here or The Session and work it up in comfort and then go back to the session and join in next time they play it http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

As for distractions, my two-year-old likes to "help" daddy when I play. Sticky little fingers poking about the strings as you're trying to rattle off a reel beats any of these classical pianists with their radios malarky!

[mando bandage]

I've found that focusing on the speed of my right (picking) hand and making my left hand keep up works better than vice versa. Seems kind of counterintuitive, but it works.

R