I can play one tune from memory, Angeline the Baker. (Jon Hall, I finally nailed it - after how many years???) What tunes/songs are easiest to add to a beginner's collection of memorized tunes? Any suitable genre would be OK.
I can play one tune from memory, Angeline the Baker. (Jon Hall, I finally nailed it - after how many years???) What tunes/songs are easiest to add to a beginner's collection of memorized tunes? Any suitable genre would be OK.
Disappointing response - At first glance I find every tune I don't know to be difficult, and every tune I do know to be easy.
My technique, which works for all tunes I have ever encountered, is to eschew memorization and just work on remembering the tune. (Semitics sure, but what a difference in my anxiety.) I listen to the tune (or play it from the sheet) enough times that I can sing or dum dee dum the tune accurately. Then I abandon working on the tune for a week or so and just sing the tune. When I do get back to it, playing the tune from memory is sooo much easier.
IMO, YMMV etc.
I have noticed that if I don't like the tune sufficiently to sing it for a week, I am not going to like playing it.
Cripple Creek, Old Joe Clark come to mind for jamming.
Children’s songs such as Row Your Boat, 3 Blind Mice among others are good ear training pieces you are already know.
Not all the clams are at the beach
Arrow Manouche
Arrow Jazzbo
Arrow G
Clark 2 point
Gibson F5L
Gibson A-4
Ratliff CountryBoy A
I think the biggest thing for me was to learn how to memorize a song. It is a lot more work and requires a lot more repetition than I realized. If you go through it about 10 times a day for a few days in a row you should have it down. and then if you don't do it for a few months you might forget it and have to brush up. It's a bit of work, but it can be fun.
pulling it off in a situation where you are nervous will require even more repetition and ease with the material.
Marc
Listening until I find myself humming it is the best way I learn - and remember - a tune/song.
Distill it down to skeleton melody - Evan Marshall calls it a skeledy - where only the important melody notes remain, generally the ones on the downbeats...
Soldier's Joy, Arkansas Traveller, Bury Me Beneath the Willow, Liberty are a few to work with and generally called at jams.
Northfield F5M #268, AT02 #7
I'm with bigskygirl, Step 1: Can I whistle the melody? Step 2: Get it below my fingers.
This is really my thought process! The music informs my ear, I hear the melody in my brain, I echo that through my fingers.
f-d
ˇpapá gordo ain’t no madre flaca!
'20 A3, '30 L-1, '97 914, 2012 Cohen A5, 2012 Muth A5, '14 OM28A
Biggest motivation would be the tunes that are played in the session you would like to attend. I agree with Big Sky Girl's and Fatt-Dad's approach. Also, I don't know how you are learning these but if from notation, then put away the sheet music as soon as possible. Get the tune in your head by humming or whatever. Then go away and try to remember it. Sometimes you just need to remember the first few notes. Maybe write those down only to remind you.
You say any genre but why not pick one. Angeline the Baker is mostly old time but if you want Irish it is mostly a much different genre. In that case an nice Irish waltz or jig would be good.
Also pick tunes you like to play or are attracted to the melody.
Jim
My Stream on Soundcloud
19th Century Tunes
Playing lately:
1924 Gibson A4 - 2018 Campanella A-5 - 2007 Brentrup A4C - 1915 Frank Merwin Ashley violin - Huss & Dalton DS - 1923 Gibson A2 black snakehead - '83 Flatiron A5-2 - 1939 Gibson L-00 - 1936 Epiphone Deluxe - 1928 Gibson L-5 - ca. 1890s Fairbanks Senator Banjo - ca. 1923 Vega Style M tenor banjo - ca. 1920 Weymann Style 25 Mandolin-Banjo - National RM-1
It depends a lot on how you best learn a new tune. As some have stated above, getting the tune firmly in your head is a big part of it, but also whether you learn best by watching or reading.
You can go to mandoLessons.com and look under Lessons/By Difficulty and there will be a big list of fiddle tunes separated into Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. Baron breaks each one down into phrases and walks you through each one. That method worked really well for me. From there, he also has demo tracks to play along with (which you can use the little gear icon to slow the speed down) and downloadable tabs/music.
That said, the easiest songs to learn for me were:
Will the circle be unbroken
Bury me beneath the willow
I'll fly away
Nine pound hammer
Long journey home
And fiddle tunes:
Boil them cabbage down
Cripple creek
Old joe clark
Bag of spuds
Liza jane
Spotted pony
"Keep your hat on, we may end up miles from here..." - Kurt Vonnegut
I don’t do so called jams but I expect folks there do mostly genre popular songs or rather the A-side tunes. I’ve always been on the BCD side of music
Some of these are really fast. Is it acceptable to play a slower version in a jam setting?
Definitely. You can get a feel for the general tempos of the group by the first few songs, and decide whether you feel comfortable with the typical speed. When it's your turn to call a tune, you get to decide how fast to play it, and it's a good idea to let everyone know.
When you are looking for a jam to join, there will be some that call themselves a 'Slow Jam.' That means they are (usually) beginners and/or folks who just like to play tunes slower. It's a great place to start getting comfortable with playing in a group. Or just ask someone there 'is this a Slow Jam?' At our local festivals' (remember those?) parking/jam area, there's one group with a big flag that has a turtle on it. That's the 'Slow Jam' place.
"Keep your hat on, we may end up miles from here..." - Kurt Vonnegut
Around these parts, some nice ol' timey jam songs that pop up nearly every time are; You Are My Sunshine, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, I'll Fly Away, Amazing Grace, and Angel Band.
Some more contemporary songs that come up often are; The Weight, Shady Grove, Mr. Bojangles, You Ain't Going Nowhere (Byrds arrangement), Wagon Wheel, Folsom Prison Blues, and Wild Horses.
Every jam gathering is different. This is just what I hear around the circle.
“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free.” -- Aldo Leopold
Most tunes can be played slower. Pre-pandemic I lead a mixed old time jam with some players who have been playing for decades and some who are only a year or so into it. I always tried to include everyone and would ask the more beginner folks to pick a tune to lead or request and we would play it at a speed that they liked.
If you can find a similar jam in whatever genre you prefer, get there a bit early and talk to the folks who run it. Tell those folks your situation. Then pick one tune to work on for the next time and ask if you can play that one at a tempo you are comfortable.
Jim
My Stream on Soundcloud
19th Century Tunes
Playing lately:
1924 Gibson A4 - 2018 Campanella A-5 - 2007 Brentrup A4C - 1915 Frank Merwin Ashley violin - Huss & Dalton DS - 1923 Gibson A2 black snakehead - '83 Flatiron A5-2 - 1939 Gibson L-00 - 1936 Epiphone Deluxe - 1928 Gibson L-5 - ca. 1890s Fairbanks Senator Banjo - ca. 1923 Vega Style M tenor banjo - ca. 1920 Weymann Style 25 Mandolin-Banjo - National RM-1
Dang I wrote two long paragraphs on my thoughts concerning the word JAM, then reconsidered and deleted not wanting to be tarred and feathered
I do think that practicing, working with a teacher and/or time spent working with a more advanced player and listening to music a lot is one of the best path to advance musically and I'll leave it at that
Hey Sherry! Some of the relatively easy fiddle tunes we play in Nacogdoches are:Angeline the Baker, Soldier’s Joy, St Anne’s Reel, Liberty, Red Haired Boy, Over the Waterfall, Shove That Pigs Foot and Whiskey Before Breakfast. Songs on the other hand are much more varied. The ones that I sing often are: Keep On the Sunny Side, I’ve Endured, The Wandering Boy, I’ll Fly Away, 8 More Miles to Louisville, What Does the Deep Sea Say, No Distinction, and You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere. Other songs my buddies sing are: Columbus Stockade Blues, Sittin’On Top of the World, The Old Folks at Home, The Texas River Song and Lazy John. My advice is listen to all of the tunes and songs that everyone has posted and learn the ones you like the best. Good luck! You asked why don’t I move to Irving? My answer, the traffic.
Santa Clara Fiddlers Association run monthly old time jams. Next one is 4/4/21. They have some good resources: Beginner's tunes and slow jam tunes.
I would think that these Zoom sessions pretty low stress since no one can hear you but you can play along with the leaders.
Jim
My Stream on Soundcloud
19th Century Tunes
Playing lately:
1924 Gibson A4 - 2018 Campanella A-5 - 2007 Brentrup A4C - 1915 Frank Merwin Ashley violin - Huss & Dalton DS - 1923 Gibson A2 black snakehead - '83 Flatiron A5-2 - 1939 Gibson L-00 - 1936 Epiphone Deluxe - 1928 Gibson L-5 - ca. 1890s Fairbanks Senator Banjo - ca. 1923 Vega Style M tenor banjo - ca. 1920 Weymann Style 25 Mandolin-Banjo - National RM-1
An effective trick to learning tunes: Start from the back!
Get the last line, maybe just last measure or so, down solid, then add the next earlier line or measure and play to the end. Once you work back to starting from the actual beginning, by the time mental fatigue sets in you'll be into the most familiar part of the tune.
Hey, it even works with a whole orchestra, mandolin or otherwise!
The truest statement here:
- Ed
"Then one day we weren't as young as before
Our mistakes weren't quite so easy to undo
But by all those roads, my friend, we've travelled down
I'm a better man for just the knowin' of you."
- Ian Tyson
You have swerved into something that plagues some of the jams I go to. Its the idea of a dorky tune. Tunes that are so overplayed and popular that some folks won't touch them any more. Some of my thoughts:
A so called dorky tune, or your more polite A-side tune, is usually a really good, really effective, really fun tune, and because of these characteristics it has been over played and people are tired of it. Or it has become associated with newbies because anyone with any experience is tired of it.
It is my opinion that the tune didn't change, but people got so over familiar with it that they play it mechanically. They phone it in. They endure it. All of that is not the tune but the player. If you try and play every tune as if you loved it and were really excited about it, as if you wanted to introduce the other jammers to something really cool, a lot of the war horses and dorky tunes so called, would be reborn into the hey do you know this one category. So I give a musical challenge. Take one of these war horse tunes, something so overplayed it feels dorky, figure out what made it so popular, what is great about it, and play it in a way that it re-attracts everyone.
So here are a couple/three examples.
Who the heck would sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. What? Not again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rd8VktT8xY
Ohh no, not Red Wing. If I hear that one more time... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym3Mt3rvjbg
Yikes! Not Angeline the Baker. How could I make that interesting? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en-SOdBqtz0
So every now and then take up the challenge. Try and breath some fresh air into an old dorky tune, yea even that one, and watch the magic. Watch the tune do its job and grab some new hearts.
Or how about this. Don't phone it in. Ever.
Sorry for the diversion. Back to our regularly scheduled program.
Last edited by JeffD; Mar-23-2021 at 2:27pm.
Writing for myself, I've never learned a tune in backwards segments (working from the last line towards the first), nor have I ever found a need for such an approach.
Like so many other folk musicians, I'll listen to the tune over and over until I more-or-less know the melody by heart, and then I just have at it! The is the "aural tradition" in its most essential form. I don't need to work from standard notation, and I don't need to work from tab, either. Of course, this approach is not unique, and it's quite possible to refer to some notation (or to some tab) as you undertake the critical process of working it out on your chosen instrument. But any notes on a page, should you decide to use them, are just there to guide to the overall learning process. The key point is that you need to familiarize yourself with how the notes sound, and where and when they are played, for each and every tune that you learn. You need to "learn the tune," and not "learn to play the tune while reading it." Learning the tune means having it in your head and hands, and not (just) on some page in front of you. You get there by slowly working it out for yourself, and then gradually building up speed, ornamentation, additional variations, etc. There is no substitute for working a tune out, and it will teach you a lot of what you need to know. If someone sings "Happy Birthday To You" and lands on a wrong note, you darn well KNOW it -- instantly, and without thinking! But, I'd wager you've never seen that tune written out in tab or in notation. Also, I bet you could work out the tune on your mandolin in a jiffy, without any need to refer to a written score. Well, you can -- and should -- treat fiddle tunes exactly the same way. You just need to slowly build up greater complexity, learning new finger and hand skills all the while.
As for those jam tunes going by too fast -- or on CDs/records, or in live performances, for that matter -- a big part of the the solution is repetition. You just need to hear it, over an over, until you know in your head what all the notes are. Learn the tune first. KNOW it. Then build up speed later. The more varied tunes and techniques you learn, the faster you'll be able to play (Up to some personal limit, that is. We all have one).
The "slow jam" concept for bluegrass/oldtime is a relatively new idea, in my experience. I realize that it works perfectly well for some people, and it has helped them to get better. I would never dismiss it as a learning tool, if you like such things. But, sadly, some folks use it as a crutch, and never progress beyond the security and safety of the slow jam setting. You don't want to be one of those people, I'd argue. There is an alternative way to go. Many of the best musicians whom I know never went to slow jams (and they didn't always exist). Instead, they went to jams where all the music was performed up-tempo, often by many experienced folk musicians. The jam music was not quite as fast as in stage performances, perhaps, but it was not played slowly, either. So how did these folks initially make progress when they couldn't possibly keep up with the faster tempos? Well, they did a number of things -- read on!
First and foremost, they sat at the periphery and listened. They assimilated the melodies of tunes being played in their heads. In addition, they learned to listen for when the chord changes happened. Then, they learned to play all the backup chords -- maybe with two fingers at first, then three, then four -- and how to switch chords quickly. After that, they played backup chords at the jams, and they were warmly welcomed for their contributions. Playing backup at tempo is a whole lot easier than playing the melody, and it's an important skill to develop. There is an entire world of rhythm and pacing to learn. Jam etiquette, too.
Meanwhile, these folks started working out the fiddle-tune melodies at home, which they already knew well from the jams (or perhaps from records, too). Bit by bit, they built up speed on picking the most familiar tunes. They continued to go to the jams and play backup. Finally, once they finally had the melodies of one or two tunes more-or-less up to full tempo, they screwed up their courage and asked to take a lead break at the jam, perhaps at a somewhat moderate tempo. And they were warmly welcomed, once again, for their contributions, and complimented on their progress! It snowballs from there, believe me.
My point is that you don't necessarily need to attend a slow jam to make progress. Plenty of great musicians never went to a slow jam. You can go straight to the "full tempo" jams immediately, and soon find yourself making contributions as a backup player, as you (1) learn lots and lots of new tunes and (2) build up speed and technique at home, in preparation for joining the group as a lead player. This works out surprisingly well.
This has been covered to death in other threads, but oldtime and bluegrass are part of the great aural folk tradition. You mainly learn these kinds of music from hearing other musicians play. You can play their recordings, go to festivals, visit YouTube, attend live performances in bars or theaters, whatever. You do not learn these genres by playing notes on a page. Written transcriptions can be terrific for reference (should you get stuck or confused or want to concentrate on some detail), and they can help you to get started. But you need to view them as an aid the process of aural assimilation. This came up in another thread, but it's a bad idea to plan on taking sheet music to an oldtime or bluegrass jam and playing from it.
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