Box is very humbling. You think you're accomplishing something, then you get recorded....and it doesn't sound the way you thought you played it.
I thought I was really nailing some things. Sounded really nice to me. But hearing the recording, I was really 'punchy sounding', not at all smooth. It seems to happen whenever I take things faster than 'slow'. I wonder if I am changing my technique or something...
My teacher and I have been taking the occasional couple of pieces up to session speed. I am keeping up at speed maybe 60% of the time despite knowing the music and the fingereing. But overall, it just sounds like c**p.
My initial response is to go back to Ilig's and SWFL' mantra to take things slow. But there I am ok. How to you get to the next level and stay smooth on the box. I have to keep up with those lightining fast fiddlers!
Any advice from folks who have been down this road?
Slow makes fast. Slow makes fast. Slow makes fast.
Play less: don't try to do it all. A tune sounds very busy at a session because someone's putting in some twiddle at each point in the tune, not because everyone's putting in a twiddle everywhere in the tune.
More box-specific, I find I play at my best when I hit a sweet spot with the left-hand pressure. It's easy to push and drag too hard when you're trying to play fast. Play quiet and fast, see how that works.
Keep close in, don't let your bellows get too long.
Recordings are very humbling anyway... you never hear what you play exactly as it sounds. One thing we do, when we record stuff, is to have a few takes, and then NOT listen to them just after, but leave some days, before choosing the one that sounds best... And do take Jon's advice. The most difficult thing to master on box are definitely the bellows. I teach my pupils to learn a tune by playing slowly, and give a slight punch on every note - even if a set of notes are played on the same movement (2-3 notes on the draw, and son on...). Helps you get the best bellow control !
I notice that my left hand tenses a bit when I am playing for my teacher and especially when I am recording. I have never recorded well even on my other instruments.
Strange. I can play in front of 1000 people on the piano and can be totally relaxed. In front of a microphone.....forget it.
Same old story - 'Take one' and your fingers become 'sides of beef'. If it's any consolation there comes a time in your life when you realise that you are never gonna sound as good as the person you've been listening to on the record. You're never gonna be satisfied with your performance anyway. I still find myself asking the question 'Why am I setting myself up to be critised by all and sundry when I could be at home in front on the Telly. Then again maybe 'all and sundry' are wishing I was. Enjoy your playing and if somebody else likes what you do, then that's a bonus.
My dog and my three year old grandson seem to like my play...
And Herself is tolerant. As I have always said, as far as interests go, the box is not blonde or a red sports car...and she does know where I am at when I am playing.
But, you know...I am going to keep pushing that stone up the hill until I get things right....or the stone rolls over me on the way back down the hill!
the imperative to play up to session speed is pernicious. don't give in to it. the goal is not to play up to session speed. the goal is to become a beautiful box player, with all that includes about tone phrasing, etcetera, speed being a secondary subpoint under the umbrella of that larger goal. at some point on the path of achieving that larger goal of becoming a lovely box player, one begins to play at faster speeds that include session speed--and how you know when you've reached that point is, it becomes fluent and natural to do so, rather than "work."
the above applies especially intensely to diatonic button box. i don't know why, but the back-and-forth character of the thing interacts diabolically with fingering. i believe that the medium-speed period on box could and perhaps should, go on for a very long time.
one suggestion is to throw all the propaganda against written music out the window. learn the tune by ear if you like, but then write it out with your fingering notated and practice that way. it works.
We were recently recording in a basement studio, and when we played it back, my accordion was fading in and out. The microphone was in front of me, not pointed at the 'grille' of the accordion. Our theory is that my movement as I played pointed the sound at the mic, and then away. When we rerecorded, we put the microphone on my right and had no problems. So the problem might not be your playing.
But once you sort out the recording issues, a recording is a good way to hear things to correct in your playing. But the ultimate goal is to hear those things as you play.
Zip, I know what you mean about recording, I HATE IT! Throws me off my game every time.
I totally agree that slow "right" practise beats fast "wrong" practise! With a couple of caveats -
(1) If you put off playing faster until you are "perfect" you'll never go faster! And you might then also develop a hang-up about playing fast. So I think occasional fast playing, especially alongside a teacher or other tolerant and competant player is a good exercise.
(2) The other thing, on an instrument where there are various fingerning options (box) is that poor fingering often works okay when you are playing slow, but isn't efficient enough when playing fast. This has caught me out plenty of times. I try to speed the tune up very gradually (metronome helps) and then I usually find the bad points in my fingering and can change and relearn them.
Relearning them is a drag, so ask your teacher, or other astute players what they consider to be good fingering patterns, and try to practise these as exercises seperate from learning tunes. Over time, this should get into your playing and you will make better fingering choices from the baginning.
I think I will leave the metronome alone! That will generate a thread unto itself!
What is diabolical is that after practicing slowly, you get into a session and it is off to the races. It's amamzing that things I learned two years ago, I can almost play at speed- and that is after trying them at speed a few times.
I agree with the comments from Kris. you do have to actually try playing fast at some point, and as she says, the exercise weak points should show up.
I'd also agree that you need to be very sure of your fingering. I do wonder whether, on the button box in particular, adopting other people's fingering patterns wholesale is a good idea.
My own approach has been to put a lot of time into developing my own fingering and finding patterns that work for me. Tips from others have proved incredibly valuable in this process and I have incorporated many great little tricks from good players into my own playing as I have progressed. But doing it this way, it's always remained _my_ own style, which has changed incrementally over time and is now pretty stable.
But when I look at complete fingerings for tunes written out by others and try to follow them, they are really like a foreign language. Maybe Zip you need to break free from your teacher - great musician though he is - and learn to fly on your own?
The other elephant in the room - maybe - is physical tension. To play fast, you really have to let go, and trust your fingers and your body to get it right.
I agree with Jon Kiparsky. Keep it quiet and light, especially on the bass.
My tutor advised me to use a single reed voice and any timing discrepancies between left and right will show up - jigs always used to do it for me until I was advised to cut the reeds out whilst the timing was mastered.
As just about everyone else has said, get the tune(s) into your proprioceptive (motor) memory, so that you do not need to worry about where your fingers are going and you then feel like a third-party listening to your playing - it then gets easier to sort out the relative timing.
As usual, it boils down to practice but, if it is any consolation, you are not alone: every single box player on the planet has to work through this one
My former guitar teacher, Matt Heaton, always told me "don't practice mistakes." This means not practicing so fast that you start fudging or simplifying the melody, and also, even though you are playing slow, to use the techniques that would work well at a faster speed (which is what kris was talking about in his caveat number 2). Good advice from all, thanks for offering it--I got some good ideas from the thread!
I'm somewhere between beginner and intermediate on a B/C box, and I'm very interested in the best practice methods too. Right now my ideas are:
- learn all tunes by ear only, maybe check out some dots later for variation ideas. This includes re-learning my older tunes if I learned them from dots - this leads to nicer versions in many cases.
- never practice faster than I can keep it together, particularly keeping the rhythm well in hand (much as AlBrown and others said above)
- establish best fingering as early as possible - again as AlBrown said, work on technique that will survive at higher speed.
- learn some ornamentation initially if it's important in the version I'm listening to, otherwise don't worry about ornaments until I have the tune well enough that fingering and timing are not an issue at all.
I've got Damien Connolly's tutor/DVD which dictates fingering patterns for a whole bunch of tunes. The result of learning from the dots+fingering is a bit dry/lifeless as are dots alone, BUT the fingering techniques I'm picking up by using Damien's notation have made a big difference to the freedom I feel in learning new tunes by ear, and I'm arriving at better fingering patterns more quickly.
Just to be clear, I am only a novice on the box, but serious about learning fast and aiming high. I've got a couple of good ideas from the thread too, so thanks guys.
I appreciate all hte comments. Some really good ideas...and reassurance/reinforcement of som things I (should) already know!
One thing I have focused on in the past day or so after posting this was evening out the bellows effort. Toning the bass down was helpful. It is a strange feeling focusing on smooth bellows movement as opposed being choppy which the recording mercilessly showed.
The toughest part was playing slow enough to hear each note played clearly.
A recommendation from a well-known B/C player that I've got a lot of mileage out of in the past was (bows head, says a small prayer of appeasement to an Lurgaigh, ancient and redoubtable foe of the metronome):
Practice a few select tunes with a metronome. Find a comfortable, slow, speed, and play along a few times. Turn up the tempo one notch, and play through a few times. Repeat until you get into trouble.
Either go back to your starting tempo and start the whole process over again, or back up a couple of notches and carry on, or try another tune. Make this a regular part of practice until you don't need to anymore.
What I got out of this (I still have several tunes at different tempos that I'm working on) was:
1. A clear idea of what "playing in time" means at different speeds.
2. A better understanding of how much work it is to get a tune up to speed, and why my approach to fingering might have to change to accommodate faster tempos.
3. Where my inability to play a particular tune faster is the result of fingering issues, lack of practice, or the tune itself.
4. A certain amount of confidence - I know I can play the tune at a reasonable (insert your average session speed here) tempo. The only reason I'm not doing so is because I'm out in public, and I need to take a step back and let my fingers do the playing. This applies to most of "my" tunes, not just the ones I've practised with the metronome.
For those who don't like metronomes, don't use one. My belief is that it's a tool to educate your ear to hear how your fingers can stray relative to an external beat. This is especially important for accordions, where the best players (IMO) have an uncanny grasp of time. Your pal John Williams would be one example.
Gzeg, re paras 2 and 3 of your post ... that's exactly the process my piano teacher applied during lessons when I was a lad, except that she took control of the metronome settings.
So it's indeed a teaching method of respectable antiquity
a given reel or jig played at 85 is a completely different tune when played at 112 ok the notes are in the same order but that's all
to accommodate this:
fingering - find the bits that are hardest at 85. Deconstruct your existing fingering for those bits, reconstruct them to make it flow then work outward from the hard bits to accommodate the fingering changes necessary in the bits before and after the bottlenecks
take out any ornaments and all accents apart from the most important
dont use the basses
play light
pick a set of tunes you know very well, that way you can let your fingers get on with the job while your mind concentrates on the phrasing
don't bother to play fast unless the other fast players are making sense of the tunes - when you listen to speedsters you're probably listening to a tune you've heard a million times and therefore know where its going and don't notice the blandness or lack of rhythm- ask yourself whether it would sound as good if you were hearing it for the first time
and when you've done it, ask yourself whether it was worth it
it can be, but don't waste your life trying to catch up with whistle players
I looked through past threads & have sussed out it is possible to have good phrasing on box. Not me, I don't play box. On flute when my phrasing is spot on the tune sounds better and speed is less an obstacle.
Last night I picked up my silver flute & had to slow everything down. The fingerings felt odd after having played mostly open-holed flute & whistle. Just the same I focused on phrasing (albeit slowly) & let the fingers find the correct keys. I tended to leave notes out rather than play bum notes. I was able to smooth out the playing by focusing on the phrasing rather than technique. That's all.
If you want to play Irish dance music you've got to phrase it properly. On the box, like all instruments, the mechanics of apparently logical fingering don't always suit the phrasing you'd like to use.
In the english tradition I am told that many old fiddle tunes have become "melodeonised" - changed rhythmically - because of the unwillingness or inability of box players in that tradition to address the conflict between easy fingering and good phrasing.
My experience has been that you've got to raise your fingering game if you want to phrase properly. My reference in the earler post to finding the hard bits of fingering and deconstructing/reconstructing them alluded to this matter. Sorry I didn't make it clearer.
Box player question.
Box player question.
Box is very humbling. You think you're accomplishing something, then you get recorded....and it doesn't sound the way you thought you played it.
I thought I was really nailing some things. Sounded really nice to me. But hearing the recording, I was really 'punchy sounding', not at all smooth. It seems to happen whenever I take things faster than 'slow'. I wonder if I am changing my technique or something...
My teacher and I have been taking the occasional couple of pieces up to session speed. I am keeping up at speed maybe 60% of the time despite knowing the music and the fingereing. But overall, it just sounds like c**p.
My initial response is to go back to Ilig's and SWFL' mantra to take things slow. But there I am ok. How to you get to the next level and stay smooth on the box. I have to keep up with those lightining fast fiddlers!
Any advice from folks who have been down this road?
# Posted on October 26th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Box player question.
Slow makes fast. Slow makes fast. Slow makes fast.
Play less: don't try to do it all. A tune sounds very busy at a session because someone's putting in some twiddle at each point in the tune, not because everyone's putting in a twiddle everywhere in the tune.
More box-specific, I find I play at my best when I hit a sweet spot with the left-hand pressure. It's easy to push and drag too hard when you're trying to play fast. Play quiet and fast, see how that works.
Keep close in, don't let your bellows get too long.
# Posted on October 26th 2009 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Box player question.
Recordings are very humbling anyway... you never hear what you play exactly as it sounds. One thing we do, when we record stuff, is to have a few takes, and then NOT listen to them just after, but leave some days, before choosing the one that sounds best... And do take Jon's advice. The most difficult thing to master on box are definitely the bellows. I teach my pupils to learn a tune by playing slowly, and give a slight punch on every note - even if a set of notes are played on the same movement (2-3 notes on the draw, and son on...). Helps you get the best bellow control !
# Posted on October 26th 2009 by Nikita Pfister
Re: Box player question.
I notice that my left hand tenses a bit when I am playing for my teacher and especially when I am recording. I have never recorded well even on my other instruments.
Strange. I can play in front of 1000 people on the piano and can be totally relaxed. In front of a microphone.....forget it.
Thanks
# Posted on October 26th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Box player question.
Same old story - 'Take one' and your fingers become 'sides of beef'. If it's any consolation there comes a time in your life when you realise that you are never gonna sound as good as the person you've been listening to on the record. You're never gonna be satisfied with your performance anyway. I still find myself asking the question 'Why am I setting myself up to be critised by all and sundry when I could be at home in front on the Telly. Then again maybe 'all and sundry' are wishing I was. Enjoy your playing and if somebody else likes what you do, then that's a bonus.
# Posted on October 26th 2009 by Free Reed
Re: Box player question.
My dog and my three year old grandson seem to like my play...
And Herself is tolerant. As I have always said, as far as interests go, the box is not blonde or a red sports car...and she does know where I am at when I am playing.
But, you know...I am going to keep pushing that stone up the hill until I get things right....or the stone rolls over me on the way back down the hill!
# Posted on October 26th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Box player question.
Do your dog and grandchild get up on your shoulders? The next question is about giantism, and shoulder problems.
# Posted on October 26th 2009 by Atahualpa Quigley
Re: Box player question.
the imperative to play up to session speed is pernicious. don't give in to it. the goal is not to play up to session speed. the goal is to become a beautiful box player, with all that includes about tone phrasing, etcetera, speed being a secondary subpoint under the umbrella of that larger goal. at some point on the path of achieving that larger goal of becoming a lovely box player, one begins to play at faster speeds that include session speed--and how you know when you've reached that point is, it becomes fluent and natural to do so, rather than "work."
the above applies especially intensely to diatonic button box. i don't know why, but the back-and-forth character of the thing interacts diabolically with fingering. i believe that the medium-speed period on box could and perhaps should, go on for a very long time.
one suggestion is to throw all the propaganda against written music out the window. learn the tune by ear if you like, but then write it out with your fingering notated and practice that way. it works.
# Posted on October 27th 2009 by ceemonster
Re: Box player question.
We were recently recording in a basement studio, and when we played it back, my accordion was fading in and out. The microphone was in front of me, not pointed at the 'grille' of the accordion. Our theory is that my movement as I played pointed the sound at the mic, and then away. When we rerecorded, we put the microphone on my right and had no problems. So the problem might not be your playing.
But once you sort out the recording issues, a recording is a good way to hear things to correct in your playing. But the ultimate goal is to hear those things as you play.
Zip, I know what you mean about recording, I HATE IT! Throws me off my game every time.
# Posted on October 27th 2009 by AlBrown
Re: Box player question.
I totally agree that slow "right" practise beats fast "wrong" practise! With a couple of caveats -
(1) If you put off playing faster until you are "perfect" you'll never go faster! And you might then also develop a hang-up about playing fast. So I think occasional fast playing, especially alongside a teacher or other tolerant and competant player is a good exercise.
(2) The other thing, on an instrument where there are various fingerning options (box) is that poor fingering often works okay when you are playing slow, but isn't efficient enough when playing fast. This has caught me out plenty of times. I try to speed the tune up very gradually (metronome helps) and then I usually find the bad points in my fingering and can change and relearn them.
Relearning them is a drag, so ask your teacher, or other astute players what they consider to be good fingering patterns, and try to practise these as exercises seperate from learning tunes. Over time, this should get into your playing and you will make better fingering choices from the baginning.
# Posted on October 27th 2009 by kris
Re: Box player question.
I think I will leave the metronome alone! That will generate a thread unto itself!
What is diabolical is that after practicing slowly, you get into a session and it is off to the races. It's amamzing that things I learned two years ago, I can almost play at speed- and that is after trying them at speed a few times.
Thanks for the advice!
# Posted on October 27th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Box player question.
I agree with the comments from Kris. you do have to actually try playing fast at some point, and as she says, the exercise weak points should show up.
I'd also agree that you need to be very sure of your fingering. I do wonder whether, on the button box in particular, adopting other people's fingering patterns wholesale is a good idea.
My own approach has been to put a lot of time into developing my own fingering and finding patterns that work for me. Tips from others have proved incredibly valuable in this process and I have incorporated many great little tricks from good players into my own playing as I have progressed. But doing it this way, it's always remained _my_ own style, which has changed incrementally over time and is now pretty stable.
But when I look at complete fingerings for tunes written out by others and try to follow them, they are really like a foreign language. Maybe Zip you need to break free from your teacher - great musician though he is - and learn to fly on your own?
The other elephant in the room - maybe - is physical tension. To play fast, you really have to let go, and trust your fingers and your body to get it right.
# Posted on October 27th 2009 by Jeeves Tones
Re: Box player question.
I agree with Jon Kiparsky. Keep it quiet and light, especially on the bass.
My tutor advised me to use a single reed voice and any timing discrepancies between left and right will show up - jigs always used to do it for me until I was advised to cut the reeds out whilst the timing was mastered.
As just about everyone else has said, get the tune(s) into your proprioceptive (motor) memory, so that you do not need to worry about where your fingers are going and you then feel like a third-party listening to your playing - it then gets easier to sort out the relative timing.
As usual, it boils down to practice but, if it is any consolation, you are not alone: every single box player on the planet has to work through this one
# Posted on October 28th 2009 by SpeyBox
Re: Box player question.
My former guitar teacher, Matt Heaton, always told me "don't practice mistakes." This means not practicing so fast that you start fudging or simplifying the melody, and also, even though you are playing slow, to use the techniques that would work well at a faster speed (which is what kris was talking about in his caveat number 2). Good advice from all, thanks for offering it--I got some good ideas from the thread!
# Posted on October 28th 2009 by AlBrown
Re: Box player question.
Great piece of advise for practicing! Some good common sense.
# Posted on October 28th 2009 by leoj
Re: Box player question.
I'm somewhere between beginner and intermediate on a B/C box, and I'm very interested in the best practice methods too. Right now my ideas are:
- learn all tunes by ear only, maybe check out some dots later for variation ideas. This includes re-learning my older tunes if I learned them from dots - this leads to nicer versions in many cases.
- never practice faster than I can keep it together, particularly keeping the rhythm well in hand (much as AlBrown and others said above)
- establish best fingering as early as possible - again as AlBrown said, work on technique that will survive at higher speed.
- learn some ornamentation initially if it's important in the version I'm listening to, otherwise don't worry about ornaments until I have the tune well enough that fingering and timing are not an issue at all.
I've got Damien Connolly's tutor/DVD which dictates fingering patterns for a whole bunch of tunes. The result of learning from the dots+fingering is a bit dry/lifeless as are dots alone, BUT the fingering techniques I'm picking up by using Damien's notation have made a big difference to the freedom I feel in learning new tunes by ear, and I'm arriving at better fingering patterns more quickly.
Just to be clear, I am only a novice on the box, but serious about learning fast and aiming high. I've got a couple of good ideas from the thread too, so thanks guys.
# Posted on October 28th 2009 by Martin_BC
Re: Box player question.
I appreciate all hte comments. Some really good ideas...and reassurance/reinforcement of som things I (should) already know!
One thing I have focused on in the past day or so after posting this was evening out the bellows effort. Toning the bass down was helpful. It is a strange feeling focusing on smooth bellows movement as opposed being choppy which the recording mercilessly showed.
The toughest part was playing slow enough to hear each note played clearly.
Thanks for the help.
# Posted on October 28th 2009 by zippydw
Re: Box player question.
A recommendation from a well-known B/C player that I've got a lot of mileage out of in the past was (bows head, says a small prayer of appeasement to an Lurgaigh, ancient and redoubtable foe of the metronome):
Practice a few select tunes with a metronome. Find a comfortable, slow, speed, and play along a few times. Turn up the tempo one notch, and play through a few times. Repeat until you get into trouble.
Either go back to your starting tempo and start the whole process over again, or back up a couple of notches and carry on, or try another tune. Make this a regular part of practice until you don't need to anymore.
What I got out of this (I still have several tunes at different tempos that I'm working on) was:
1. A clear idea of what "playing in time" means at different speeds.
2. A better understanding of how much work it is to get a tune up to speed, and why my approach to fingering might have to change to accommodate faster tempos.
3. Where my inability to play a particular tune faster is the result of fingering issues, lack of practice, or the tune itself.
4. A certain amount of confidence - I know I can play the tune at a reasonable (insert your average session speed here) tempo. The only reason I'm not doing so is because I'm out in public, and I need to take a step back and let my fingers do the playing. This applies to most of "my" tunes, not just the ones I've practised with the metronome.
For those who don't like metronomes, don't use one. My belief is that it's a tool to educate your ear to hear how your fingers can stray relative to an external beat. This is especially important for accordions, where the best players (IMO) have an uncanny grasp of time. Your pal John Williams would be one example.
# Posted on October 28th 2009 by Gzeg
Re: Box player question.
Gzeg, re paras 2 and 3 of your post ... that's exactly the process my piano teacher applied during lessons when I was a lad, except that she took control of the metronome settings.
So it's indeed a teaching method of respectable antiquity
# Posted on October 28th 2009 by lazyhound
Re: Box player question.
Hi Zip
a given reel or jig played at 85 is a completely different tune when played at 112 ok the notes are in the same order but that's all
to accommodate this:
fingering - find the bits that are hardest at 85. Deconstruct your existing fingering for those bits, reconstruct them to make it flow then work outward from the hard bits to accommodate the fingering changes necessary in the bits before and after the bottlenecks
take out any ornaments and all accents apart from the most important
dont use the basses
play light
pick a set of tunes you know very well, that way you can let your fingers get on with the job while your mind concentrates on the phrasing
don't bother to play fast unless the other fast players are making sense of the tunes - when you listen to speedsters you're probably listening to a tune you've heard a million times and therefore know where its going and don't notice the blandness or lack of rhythm- ask yourself whether it would sound as good if you were hearing it for the first time
and when you've done it, ask yourself whether it was worth it
it can be, but don't waste your life trying to catch up with whistle players
# Posted on October 29th 2009 by millionyears_bc
Re: Box player question.
I seem to spend my life chasing the fidle players!
# Posted on November 2nd 2009 by zippydw
Re: Box player question.
So do I.
Oh wait, not in that way.
# Posted on November 2nd 2009 by TheSilverSpear
Re: Box player question.
phrasing
# Posted on November 2nd 2009 by Random_notes
Re: Box player question.
can you do that on box?
# Posted on November 2nd 2009 by Random_notes
Re: Box player question.
I looked through past threads & have sussed out it is possible to have good phrasing on box. Not me, I don't play box. On flute when my phrasing is spot on the tune sounds better and speed is less an obstacle.
Last night I picked up my silver flute & had to slow everything down. The fingerings felt odd after having played mostly open-holed flute & whistle. Just the same I focused on phrasing (albeit slowly) & let the fingers find the correct keys. I tended to leave notes out rather than play bum notes. I was able to smooth out the playing by focusing on the phrasing rather than technique. That's all.
# Posted on November 2nd 2009 by Random_notes
Re: Box player question.
If you want to play Irish dance music you've got to phrase it properly. On the box, like all instruments, the mechanics of apparently logical fingering don't always suit the phrasing you'd like to use.
In the english tradition I am told that many old fiddle tunes have become "melodeonised" - changed rhythmically - because of the unwillingness or inability of box players in that tradition to address the conflict between easy fingering and good phrasing.
My experience has been that you've got to raise your fingering game if you want to phrase properly. My reference in the earler post to finding the hard bits of fingering and deconstructing/reconstructing them alluded to this matter. Sorry I didn't make it clearer.
# Posted on November 4th 2009 by millionyears_bc