I posted this at the end of the MGs drive discussion but I fear it may be dead. So here it is again.
I hope this thread isn't over - I am unplugged on weekends and missed the whole thing!
Consider this - in a session with more than five or six musicians, it really becomes impossible to listen to everybody as an individual and focus on playing yourself. Big sessions like this can get messy, or often any rythmic subtlety is sacrificed for some common denominator. But I've been in big session where the whole thing "clicked" and there was that thing that this thread is about. This is my theory -
Since it's too difficult to listen to five+ other players and try to react to all of them, I think that all of the players tacitly decide on the same "version" of the tune. What I mean by version is this (sorry if this sounds a little new-agey): imagine a tune, some reel, say the Five mile chase or something like that. Now imagine all the different possible ways of playing it. Maybe it helps to think of different people playing the tune, the Martin Hayes to the Paddy Glackin. So I imagine that all of these versions are floating around and when someone goes to play the tune, they try to grab hold of one of these versions. The firmer their grip, the better. The best you can do is fully articulate the "version" you were trying to go for. When your rythm falters, even a tiny bit, this is your grip loosening.
So when a bunch of people play together, they don't necessarily have to listen to everyone - they have to figure out which version everyone will go for. If they can decide on the same one, all each individual has to do is grab that version. So when it all comes together, I imagine that each person has a "hand" on that version, which is sort of hovering somewhere in the middle (I warned you.) It's this idea, or tune concept, or whatever you want to call it, that keeps everybody together.
And I like the idea of torque, I think this is a big part of what characterizes a "version." Swing and groove are really the same as this, I think. So here's the taxonomy - at the top is groove. This is how much swing there is, how much backbeat, how much ahead or behind the beat (angle). Drive is a sub-category in that you need the groove first. I think we mean drive to describe a certain high energy, on or a little in front of the beat kind of grooves. How's that?
"High energy... in front of the beat... groove". So "drive" *is* just reviewer-speak for "making a good job of playing fast". LOL. I'd like to hear what people understand by words like "groove", "lift" and "swing" on this thread too.
Here's another one of my theories. (Oh goodie!) I think THIS (above) is what makes someone a good (OK, very good) player. Let me try to explain what I mean. I think there are two factors that play a very large role in dtermining how good a player is. First, s/he must have a very well defined concept of how s/he plays. This is closely related to the groove thing above in that the player must be able to conjure up very clear "versions" of tunes. Second, the player must be able to articulate his/her version of the tune. Or in other words, articulate the idea - reproduce the music that's in the head. I don't know how good an explanation this seems, or if it seems obvious, but I think alot of folks don't get this.
I've worked with people before who were I guess what you would call "intermediate" players trying to get better. And usually the thing that thet're missing is the concept, the music in their head. They focus on details, bowing, onamentation, variation, but have no big concept. So there is nothing there for them to grab onto, and they get bogged down with details. (Tony, you out there? You know what I'm talking about!)
On the other hand, there are players who have a great concept, well articulated, sounds great in their head, but can't articulate it well. I realized at some point that I was one of these when I accidentally heard a tape recording of myself playing - not nearly as close to the music in my head, what I thought I sounded like, as I wanted. Ever since then I have tried to listen objectively while I'm playing (hard!) and try to compare to the idea (what I think I should sound like.)
Separating these two things helped me understand alot of stuff. For example, I can now say that Martin Hayes is a great player, but I don't like his music. (Before I just used to think he was crap, which is stupid.) This makes sense now because I can separate the two things - I don't like his "idea", but I think that he articulates it superbly. And I have a huge ammount of respect for that. I also understand better why I like some players so much. I love John Carty's "idea", AND I think he articulates it brilliantly.
Great stuff, Chris. As an aside, I reckon it's vital for people to listen to themselves play...
Having very little access to other flute players (except for recordings, really) I'm not sure how I rank, but probably on the lower side of intermediate - and definitely my biggest problem is what you're calling articulation... I'd always lumped it in with "phrasing", but that has other connotations.
Anyway, it was horrifying to listen to what others must hear when I play, after recording something a little while ago - but it turned out that that once I knew what sounded wrong, it was pretty easy (although time-consuming) to fix as I knew what to concentrate on. Mainly the problem was with groove, or lilt, or drive, or swing, or whatever...
Now, if only I can figure out how to get the groove on when I'm not sitting in front of a mic with a replay button but a mouseclick away...
Hmmmm I thought articulation meant "notes clearly sounded", which is a good thing but does it have anything to do with phrasing?
I must admit, I think I have no idea what Chris is talking about. At all. Except for the part about the version of the tune. For me, that would be the version my teacher has taught me, or the version on a particular Cd I've been playing over and over lately.
But then again, I am only an intermediate player at best.
Hi Andee, I know that I've been guilty of what Chris is saying above. In the past I have learned tunes and spent too much time worrying about all the little details, ornaments, phrasing so I could breath, etc and have sometimes missed the big picture of the tune. Or I never really got the true skeleton of the tune. I have a friend who's a very good musician but sometimes his tunes get extremely busy and bogged down with so many wild variations and fancy ornaments that the back bone of the tune gets lost.
And I think it's a great idea to record oneself. It's been a painful and horrifying process for me, but it does get better over time. I find that what I'm doing with the flute and what I want the music to sound like are two very different things. I hope to narrow the gap over time, patience, and experience. But it's not going to happen over night.
Groove? Swing? Drive? Lift? I don't know how to define those terms. I could define players' styles as groovy, swingy, lifted or driven if I wanted to but I usually just lump everything together by dividing players into "rhythmic" or "melodic". Melodic players aim to voice the tune so beautifully it makes you want to cry or call your mother and rhythmic players aim to make you jump up and down on the table and smash beer glasses against the fireplace (unless you know how to stepdance).
Most intermediate players are a bit confused by the unfathomable range of possibilities and don't know whether their tunes ought to weep or cheer, so they get stuck on the notes or become stylistically erratic, following up a Martin Hayes-y version of one tune with a Shooglenifty version of another.
I think once you decide what kind of player you are and embrace it you are halfway up the chairlift that separates the blue square from the black diamond players (to borrow some terminology from the slopes).
As an aspiring rhythmic player, when I am in a session with too many players I aim to make the overall picture more rhythmic by playing sparsely with exaggerated snappy bowing and double stopping here and there. If everybody just plays the notes we've agreed on, the tunes sound like an impenetrable wall of diddly with no discernable rhythm and don't make anybody want to smash beer glasses (or stepdance).
Hi Joyce! I definitely understand what you're saying about trying not to get bogged down in the notes, ornaments etc, so you don't lose the feel of the tune. But is Chris saying much more than that? I think he is, but I don't understand it.
Kerri, I *wish* I could play a tune just like Martin Hayes, and then the next one just like Tommy Peoples or something, but that's not going to happen! I think I play them like my teacher, mixed in with a little bit of me. Hopefully the "me" will come out more in the near future....
I think I know what Chris is getting at; it is the difference between being a technician and an artist. But why do the brain waves all sychronize sometimes and make artists of mere technicians, thus dissoving The Great Wall of Diddly?
Michele
I guess I was unclear about a couple things b/c I used words that commonly mean something different than what I meant.
By articulation, I mean the degree to which a musical idea is successfully expressed. Analogous to articulation in speech - usually it means speaking clearly, but it can also mean how well you can express an idea that YOU have to OTHERS. I mean this second sense. NOT notes played clearly (although this mundane sense is necessary to get the second.)
By version, I mean stylistic version, not notes version. I mean tempo, feel, rhythmic inflection, etc.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you should be able to hear what you want to sound like in your head, as clear as listening to a recording. Then when you play, you try to do the best possible immitation of yourself that you can. If you don't have this reference, then it's like talking about something you don't know anything about - blah, blah, blah.
I'm not so sure I could do that Chris. For me, what I sound like and what sound I'd like are really one in the same. I'm not saying I don't hear stuff I'd like to improve, it's just that, for me, the two things you make a clear distinction between I find are a simbiotic coupling. They both evolve simultaneously.
The articulation of a tune happens in the same way normal speech does. It just comes out, like a conversation. It's not like Laurence Olivier practicing every nuance of a soliloquy.
You say the thing to do is to reproduce the sound in your head. I reckon it's better not to "re"produce anything, but just to "produce" something fresh, every time.
Yeah, but that way you're teaching a rigidity that shouldn't be in diddley music. It's like you're saying you have to learn a classical way of doing it before you unlearn it and free yourself up.
Chris mentions that the "mundane" sense of articulation (either being able to form vowels and consonants, or being able to form notes on an instrument) is necessary to get the other sense of articulation, ie the "degree to which a musical idea (or word) is successfully expressed".
I disagree. when a small child talks with typical jumbled pronunciation, you still get a wonderful sence of what they are on about. And the same is true in music of many a learning/unskilled musician I know.
Rigidity? What we're talking about is the difference between what a person imagines they're going to play and then what actually comes out. It's the difference between living in La-la land and sharing the real world with everyone else.
Sure, La-la's pretty from the inside, and the sky's a lovely colour, but how long do you really want to live there?
I appreciate your point, but if the toddler continues to babble into his teens, we have a problem. We think it's cute that we can understand youngsters even though they are inarticulate, but we know that this is a stage that they must go through to (hopefully) become articulate.
Likewise, you say, for musicians! And I would agree. But I'm talking about people who have been playing for some time, and should (by their own feeling) be past the stage of babbling.
I lived with a girl for a while when I was living in Galway who was learning the fiddle. She was incredibly musical, a great singer (her dad is a well known singer/musician), and her "babbling" was quite nice to listen to from the beginning. Her playing was really simple, but she had a great idea of what she thought the music should sould like - the music in her head was very clear to her, Paddy Canny-like, I think. But she quit playing out of frustration. Why? Mostly because she was REALLY lazy and never practiced. She couldn't articulate to her own satisfaction the music she wanted to play. Now, other people would hear her and think it was charming, lovely, whatever. But it wasn't good enough for her.
The music in the head part came easy for her because she'd been around the music all her life. But for those who don't have this background, I think it's necessary to build up a musical idea, or whatever you want to call it, before they can just produce something. The production of the music has to come from somewhere, have some grounding. I feel like I can hear it when it doesn't, and to me it sounds like crap. (Sorry - that sounds harsh.)
Ofcourse I agree that developing your skills is very important. But it's all relative. To be able to play diddly music wonderfully, you don't really need that much skill, in the scheme of things. To any decent classical or even jazz player, our skill level is laughable. But we know that our music is just as splendid.
I'm not talking about people with low skill levels that play wonderfully. I'm talking about people with moderate skill level (relative to ITM) who play incoherently - anything but wonderfully. I agree, of course, that the music is splendid. But I also know there are alot of people out there who play it badly, including many who can handle their instruments fairly well. So they must be missing something. That's the point I'm trying to make, while offering my own guess as to what they're missing. There is definitely some degree of skill necessary to play, but this is clearly not enough. (Listen to any classical violinist play a reel - it stinks. And I certainly agree that listening to an ITM fiddler playing a Bach partita would probably stink more.)
I just reread a couple of posts ago and realized that my little anecdote WAS about someone with not very much skill playing wonderfully. But it was to illustrate the point that someone who has been around the music all her life might get away with this while someone who hasn't probably can't. Because there's no base experience or knowledge of the music - low skill with out this is just low skill.
Well, Michael, there are many very good technically skilled Irish players, and it's a bit of an insult (both to those technically skilled folks who worked hard to get there, and those who are sweating it out to get the technical skills right now and haven't got them yet) to say that you don't need much skill to play this stuff wonderfully, when most people patently do not play this stuff wonderfully, or at least as wonderfully as they want to. (Granted that I know that you're not trying to make such a sweeping statement, but keep in mind that not everyone who reads this thread will know that.)
As for "drive", I think it's possible to have drive even when you're playing slowly and melodically.
Chris, the thing is that many people don't understand that when you learn to play Irish music without having the technical skill of playing your chosen instrument, you're actually learning three things at once:
1) You're learning to play the instrument
2) You're learning the tunes (and unless you have a background in, say, jazz, you're probably learning to learn the tunes)
3) You're learning the genre and style, and all that goes with that (including learning to listen and being able to hear those things)
That's at least three balls up into the air, with each containing it's own subset of balls to throw up there and keep up there.
Will tried to teach me to juggle a couple of months ago. He said that I was actually rather quick at learning. In the process, I chased more balls around the garage of Aimee and Richard than I can count, and Richard and Will chased even more of my balls for me when they came their way, I hit myself in the face with a ball at least twice, I dropped a ball or mis-threw a ball or missed a catch countless times, and there were a couple of times where I just stood there, frozen in a moment of indecision and terminal confusion as balls rained all about me. Quick?! This was quick? My impatient self boggles at the thought of not picking it up any quicker than I did, which is to say, not quickly at all.
Yet people expect to pick this stuff up just like that? If you're missing any of the three different bits listed above, you're not going to get there, period.
I remember once back when Dirk and I were just starting to play together, about three or four years back now -- I played a phrase for him bowed one way, and then again bowed another way, and asked him which way he liked better. He said that he didn't hear any difference between the two.
Just a few months back, I did the same thing with a different tune we were working on, and he not only heard a difference but much preferred one way over the other, for a list of reasons that he gave me. Granted, perhaps it was I was so bad back in the beginning that he didn't hear a difference because there *wasn't* any difference (*smirk*), but I like to think instead that maybe Dirk had learned to hear the difference by training his ear.
Perhaps those you're talking about, Chris, still have yet to train their ears in that sort of way, and may indeed never do so if they never find out that it's a good thing to do so.
I've already contributed to this thread what my feelings are concerning "drive" and "lift", but the discussion seems to have drifted slightly into the realm of what you think you sound like vs. what you really sound like. This is definitely a hurdle to overcome - but it's not easy to do. Fortunately in this day and age we have recording devices to help us determine what we actually sound like; I call them humiliators. And anyone that's ever made a recording will confirm that the experience is humiliating, but an experience you can grow from. Most accomplished musicians I know have used the recording tool as a way to step back from the canvas and get an over-view. Some of the players I know who have made astonishing improvements have recorded themselves and played it along side their mentor’s recordings until they matched.
Concerning Chris' experience with his girlfriend in Galway, I had a similar experience, not with a girlfriend, but rather a Dubliner who came to me for some whistle lessons once. He came from a well-known Dublin musical family in that his dad played himself and was often visited by some of Irelands best and most celebrated musicians. This fellow, having never taken up any instrument, became interested when he arrived here in SF and saw that so many of us where completely obsessed and enamored with ITM. The first day he showed up I asked him what he'd like to learn and he picked up his brand new whistle and started finding the notes for "Kid on the Mountain" as if I had already given him lessons for some time. I asked if he had ever even attempted to play whistle previous to that day, and he said, "Not really.” But just like Chris pointed out, his innate sensitivity was beyond the scope of any other student I had ever encountered on a first lesson, or even after a considerable amount of lessons, undoubtedly because he already understood how it's supposed to sound. Now he not only plays whistle, but he's taken up the pipes as well.
That's a good posting Zina. I agree with everything you say. Infact there seems to be a lot of general agreement here which I'm glad about.
The most important thing you say is "it's possible to have drive even when you're playing slowly and melodically." This goes back to the "torque" I talked about in the Drive thread. The amount of torque on an axis/tune is independant of the rotational speed of the axis/tune.
I know what Chris is on about & I think I have a good feeling what others are on about & I think they are two different things.
Chris is getting at making what in your head a reality for others to listen to. It's an incredibly rare skill, he touched on that in the opening bit of the thread.
Others argued bit & pieces; they took it apart like a frog in formaldehyde. Funny enough, to dissect & conceptualize 'drive' is the very way to kill it.
To get on the path of what Chris is saying, go & record yourself singing, or lilting (funny enough how 'lilt' means both good swing & singing) the tune. Put in all the good stuff, let yourself really get into the tune. Then go back & learn that setting of the tune.
Dissect? Yes. Conceptualize? No. If you can't conceptualize something, there's no way to understand and/or do it. Good to hear from you, Brad, how's stuff?
Just for the record, Jack, it wasn't my girlfriend. Just a housemate.
There's notyhing wrong with talking about drive, and doing so says little about your chances of achieving it, whatever it is. There have always been people who liked to talk about and analyze the music and those who didn't. If you're in the latter group, what the heck are you doing here?
Since Chris mentioned me by name and I took lessons from him for two years and play in a session with him most Sundays, I thought I'd offer my perspective on the discussion. It seems to have begun with a conversation about drive (lilt, lift, oomf, whatever) in a session and morphed into one about individual virtuosity and how to achieve it. A whole group of people who have arrived at the latter do not necessariliy produce the former.(Put a bunch of lead dogs on a sled and the fight will be spectacular but the sled won't go anywhere)
Just for back ground, in my lessons with Chris I was, at first, determinedly focused on playing the right notes which produced the phenomenon of hesitation everytime I played, to me, a wrong one. I would eventually get through the tune, but it was less than musical. As things progressed I got a beter sense of the structure and flow of tunes and discovered that cuts and rolls and crans were rythmic rhetorical devices whose placement became obvious to ME in relation to my understanding of the idea of the given tune. The result was that I got to think less and play more. I found that I was simplifying the busyness of most tunes but getting much more bang for the buck. Which brings us to the group-think of a session.
What I believe constitutes grove ( drive, oomf) is a tacit agreement among the players to find a path through the tune where certain points are arrived at and emphasized by everyone at the same time but via their own particular routes. I play in a number of sessions of varying degrees of proficiency and the difference lies in the ability of the players to make this agreement hence giving the session a single voice that is not that of any of the individual players. When players are rigidly tied to a single sequence of notes at a specified speed as I was (am? you're call Chris) the tunes have a feeling akin to two people trying to get through a door and be polite at the same time . . .after you . . . no after you. Which I believe is Chris's point about not being able to listen to each individual player in a session and trying to match what they're doing. What is possible is to find those points of agreement that define the tune and play them together. The result is Oomf.
yum and thx AOG really.. your explanation verbalized a lot for me.. may I hope to re-articulate and example your concept...? This is what I think..we have a tune...taken out of someones memory, or oneills or the fiddlers fake Book, or some recording by Crabh rua or Johnny mc gloney or..,,WHATEVER the source, the tune will have a skeleton and inferences is ornaments, rolls, drumbeats, harmonic arrangement, but the melody remains intact,, ie one must be at a certain place at a certain bar or else sabotage the tune's structure...
so, everything else, the quirks and expression, trills,delays, florishrs languishments, are all expressions of the comfort zone of the player in his articulation...
mm.. i don't feel like going on and on cause I knoe i am already at end of thread,, if you wanna talk about htis more let's post a ew one,, k?
It has been brought to my attention that I personally am being blamed for the apparent disappearance of Chris from this site. So please at least let me explain myself before you put me before the firing squad.
For the record, I wanted to point out that my comment was actually meant as a light-hearted ironic send-up of Brad and Zina for suggesting that "dissecting" drive kills it. In other words, their suggestion was that the act of analysing drive makes it impossible to actually achieve.
By logic this implies that, since Chris began the thread by attempting to analyse drive, it would mean that he supposedly wouldn't be able to achieve it.
Like him, I was of the opinion that "there's nothing wrong with talking about drive", so I laid on the irony thick, forgetting that (particularly) Americans tend not to understand when they're having the piss taken out of them.
That was a mistake and I'm sorry for that.
Mind you, even if I had meant it seriously, I was never uncivil. This is a discussion. People are going to have different viewpoints.
However, as it happened I didn't mean it seriously, and if you don't believe that I meant no harm by it, look at my other contributions to the thread. All the clues are there "this discussion is getting interesting, keep it up lads" etc. So for christ's sake, stop deliberately misunderstanding me and making a point of inferring the worst possible meaning from everything I post here! Stop assuming that I'm a bad person before you've even met me!
I would have liked to discuss whether or not it is actually true that you can't achieve drive if you analyse it by talking about it, but hey.
Oh, and one more thing. Since I don't know what drive is (I still think it's meaningless jargon but that's just my personal opinion which btw I feel as though I should be allowed to express), I was willing to learn from Chris (as a human being who plays trad) what his conception of it was. If people are famous or have appeared on recordings then great, good on 'em, but they should be prepared to have people disagree with them or simply post their diverse opinions. I have a real problem with this idea that you should be unseen and unheard if you're a beginner, and that you should just listen and learn and not contribute at all. After all, nobody's perfect; we're all on the learning curve somewhere. I also think that people of any age have something to offer when it comes to music. For example, you know how kids absorb stuff like sponges. Far from being emotionally underdeveloped, some kids have been through more life experience/trauma than your average adult. To dismiss this is a great mistake I think. And that applies to people of all ages - any human being with grey matter in their heads.
As for me, I don't give an absolute flying frig if people don't want to listen to what I say or respect/value my opinions. I know that there are a lot of members out there who hate me for expressing my opinions, thinking that I expect people to respect or value what I'm saying. Well, I *don't*. But if I'm going to be made to feel bad for expressing an opinion (even if I haven't been uncivil), then, you know what? Chris is right. What the heck am I doing here?
Drive and more . . .
Drive and more . . .
I posted this at the end of the MGs drive discussion but I fear it may be dead. So here it is again.
I hope this thread isn't over - I am unplugged on weekends and missed the whole thing!
Consider this - in a session with more than five or six musicians, it really becomes impossible to listen to everybody as an individual and focus on playing yourself. Big sessions like this can get messy, or often any rythmic subtlety is sacrificed for some common denominator. But I've been in big session where the whole thing "clicked" and there was that thing that this thread is about. This is my theory -
Since it's too difficult to listen to five+ other players and try to react to all of them, I think that all of the players tacitly decide on the same "version" of the tune. What I mean by version is this (sorry if this sounds a little new-agey): imagine a tune, some reel, say the Five mile chase or something like that. Now imagine all the different possible ways of playing it. Maybe it helps to think of different people playing the tune, the Martin Hayes to the Paddy Glackin. So I imagine that all of these versions are floating around and when someone goes to play the tune, they try to grab hold of one of these versions. The firmer their grip, the better. The best you can do is fully articulate the "version" you were trying to go for. When your rythm falters, even a tiny bit, this is your grip loosening.
So when a bunch of people play together, they don't necessarily have to listen to everyone - they have to figure out which version everyone will go for. If they can decide on the same one, all each individual has to do is grab that version. So when it all comes together, I imagine that each person has a "hand" on that version, which is sort of hovering somewhere in the middle (I warned you.) It's this idea, or tune concept, or whatever you want to call it, that keeps everybody together.
And I like the idea of torque, I think this is a big part of what characterizes a "version." Swing and groove are really the same as this, I think. So here's the taxonomy - at the top is groove. This is how much swing there is, how much backbeat, how much ahead or behind the beat (angle). Drive is a sub-category in that you need the groove first. I think we mean drive to describe a certain high energy, on or a little in front of the beat kind of grooves. How's that?
# Posted on June 13th 2004 by Chris McGrath
Re: Drive and more . . .
"High energy... in front of the beat... groove". So "drive" *is* just reviewer-speak for "making a good job of playing fast". LOL. I'd like to hear what people understand by words like "groove", "lift" and "swing" on this thread too.
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by Dr. Dow
Re: Drive and more . . .
I wanna know what all this jargon means so I can go down the next pub session and look as though I know what I'm talking about
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by Dr. Dow
Re: Drive and more . . .
Also - (this is the MORE part)
Here's another one of my theories. (Oh goodie!) I think THIS (above) is what makes someone a good (OK, very good) player. Let me try to explain what I mean. I think there are two factors that play a very large role in dtermining how good a player is. First, s/he must have a very well defined concept of how s/he plays. This is closely related to the groove thing above in that the player must be able to conjure up very clear "versions" of tunes. Second, the player must be able to articulate his/her version of the tune. Or in other words, articulate the idea - reproduce the music that's in the head. I don't know how good an explanation this seems, or if it seems obvious, but I think alot of folks don't get this.
I've worked with people before who were I guess what you would call "intermediate" players trying to get better. And usually the thing that thet're missing is the concept, the music in their head. They focus on details, bowing, onamentation, variation, but have no big concept. So there is nothing there for them to grab onto, and they get bogged down with details. (Tony, you out there? You know what I'm talking about!)
On the other hand, there are players who have a great concept, well articulated, sounds great in their head, but can't articulate it well. I realized at some point that I was one of these when I accidentally heard a tape recording of myself playing - not nearly as close to the music in my head, what I thought I sounded like, as I wanted. Ever since then I have tried to listen objectively while I'm playing (hard!) and try to compare to the idea (what I think I should sound like.)
Separating these two things helped me understand alot of stuff. For example, I can now say that Martin Hayes is a great player, but I don't like his music. (Before I just used to think he was crap, which is stupid.) This makes sense now because I can separate the two things - I don't like his "idea", but I think that he articulates it superbly. And I have a huge ammount of respect for that. I also understand better why I like some players so much. I love John Carty's "idea", AND I think he articulates it brilliantly.
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by Chris McGrath
Re: Drive and more . . .
Great stuff, Chris. As an aside, I reckon it's vital for people to listen to themselves play...
Having very little access to other flute players (except for recordings, really) I'm not sure how I rank, but probably on the lower side of intermediate - and definitely my biggest problem is what you're calling articulation... I'd always lumped it in with "phrasing", but that has other connotations.
Anyway, it was horrifying to listen to what others must hear when I play, after recording something a little while ago - but it turned out that that once I knew what sounded wrong, it was pretty easy (although time-consuming) to fix as I knew what to concentrate on. Mainly the problem was with groove, or lilt, or drive, or swing, or whatever...
Now, if only I can figure out how to get the groove on when I'm not sitting in front of a mic with a replay button but a mouseclick away...
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by Q
Re: Drive and more . . .
Hmmmm I thought articulation meant "notes clearly sounded", which is a good thing but does it have anything to do with phrasing?
I must admit, I think I have no idea what Chris is talking about. At all. Except for the part about the version of the tune. For me, that would be the version my teacher has taught me, or the version on a particular Cd I've been playing over and over lately.
But then again, I am only an intermediate player at best.
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by Andee
Re: Drive and more . . .
Hi Andee, I know that I've been guilty of what Chris is saying above. In the past I have learned tunes and spent too much time worrying about all the little details, ornaments, phrasing so I could breath, etc and have sometimes missed the big picture of the tune. Or I never really got the true skeleton of the tune. I have a friend who's a very good musician but sometimes his tunes get extremely busy and bogged down with so many wild variations and fancy ornaments that the back bone of the tune gets lost.
And I think it's a great idea to record oneself. It's been a painful and horrifying process for me, but it does get better over time. I find that what I'm doing with the flute and what I want the music to sound like are two very different things. I hope to narrow the gap over time, patience, and experience. But it's not going to happen over night.
Joyce
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by JMH
Re: Drive and more . . .
Groove? Swing? Drive? Lift? I don't know how to define those terms. I could define players' styles as groovy, swingy, lifted or driven if I wanted to but I usually just lump everything together by dividing players into "rhythmic" or "melodic". Melodic players aim to voice the tune so beautifully it makes you want to cry or call your mother and rhythmic players aim to make you jump up and down on the table and smash beer glasses against the fireplace (unless you know how to stepdance).
Most intermediate players are a bit confused by the unfathomable range of possibilities and don't know whether their tunes ought to weep or cheer, so they get stuck on the notes or become stylistically erratic, following up a Martin Hayes-y version of one tune with a Shooglenifty version of another.
I think once you decide what kind of player you are and embrace it you are halfway up the chairlift that separates the blue square from the black diamond players (to borrow some terminology from the slopes).
As an aspiring rhythmic player, when I am in a session with too many players I aim to make the overall picture more rhythmic by playing sparsely with exaggerated snappy bowing and double stopping here and there. If everybody just plays the notes we've agreed on, the tunes sound like an impenetrable wall of diddly with no discernable rhythm and don't make anybody want to smash beer glasses (or stepdance).
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by Kerri Brown
Re: Drive and more . . .
Hi Joyce! I definitely understand what you're saying about trying not to get bogged down in the notes, ornaments etc, so you don't lose the feel of the tune. But is Chris saying much more than that? I think he is, but I don't understand it.
Kerri, I *wish* I could play a tune just like Martin Hayes, and then the next one just like Tommy Peoples or something, but that's not going to happen! I think I play them like my teacher, mixed in with a little bit of me. Hopefully the "me" will come out more in the near future....
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by Andee
Re: Drive and more . . .
I think I know what Chris is getting at; it is the difference between being a technician and an artist. But why do the brain waves all sychronize sometimes and make artists of mere technicians, thus dissoving The Great Wall of Diddly?
Michele
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by Michele Sims
Re: Drive and more . . .
I guess I was unclear about a couple things b/c I used words that commonly mean something different than what I meant.
By articulation, I mean the degree to which a musical idea is successfully expressed. Analogous to articulation in speech - usually it means speaking clearly, but it can also mean how well you can express an idea that YOU have to OTHERS. I mean this second sense. NOT notes played clearly (although this mundane sense is necessary to get the second.)
By version, I mean stylistic version, not notes version. I mean tempo, feel, rhythmic inflection, etc.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you should be able to hear what you want to sound like in your head, as clear as listening to a recording. Then when you play, you try to do the best possible immitation of yourself that you can. If you don't have this reference, then it's like talking about something you don't know anything about - blah, blah, blah.
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by Chris McGrath
Re: Drive and more . . .
I'm not so sure I could do that Chris. For me, what I sound like and what sound I'd like are really one in the same. I'm not saying I don't hear stuff I'd like to improve, it's just that, for me, the two things you make a clear distinction between I find are a simbiotic coupling. They both evolve simultaneously.
The articulation of a tune happens in the same way normal speech does. It just comes out, like a conversation. It's not like Laurence Olivier practicing every nuance of a soliloquy.
You say the thing to do is to reproduce the sound in your head. I reckon it's better not to "re"produce anything, but just to "produce" something fresh, every time.
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by ...
Re: Drive and more . . .
Michael, you've been playing long, and well enough to be able to express what you're thinking naturally and easily.
It's not like that for beginners or, as Chris has specifically been talking about, intermediate types.
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by Q
Re: Drive and more . . .
Yeah, but that way you're teaching a rigidity that shouldn't be in diddley music. It's like you're saying you have to learn a classical way of doing it before you unlearn it and free yourself up.
Chris mentions that the "mundane" sense of articulation (either being able to form vowels and consonants, or being able to form notes on an instrument) is necessary to get the other sense of articulation, ie the "degree to which a musical idea (or word) is successfully expressed".
I disagree. when a small child talks with typical jumbled pronunciation, you still get a wonderful sence of what they are on about. And the same is true in music of many a learning/unskilled musician I know.
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by ...
Re: Drive and more . . .
Rigidity? What we're talking about is the difference between what a person imagines they're going to play and then what actually comes out. It's the difference between living in La-la land and sharing the real world with everyone else.
Sure, La-la's pretty from the inside, and the sky's a lovely colour, but how long do you really want to live there?
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by Q
Re: Drive and more . . .
damn. replace "imagines they're going to play" with "imagines they're playing"
# Posted on June 14th 2004 by Q
Re: Drive and more . . .
This discussion's getting interesting, but it's getting late so I'll have to reread it and comment tomorrow. Keep it up lads...
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by Dr. Dow
Re: Drive and more . . .
MG-
I appreciate your point, but if the toddler continues to babble into his teens, we have a problem. We think it's cute that we can understand youngsters even though they are inarticulate, but we know that this is a stage that they must go through to (hopefully) become articulate.
Likewise, you say, for musicians! And I would agree. But I'm talking about people who have been playing for some time, and should (by their own feeling) be past the stage of babbling.
I lived with a girl for a while when I was living in Galway who was learning the fiddle. She was incredibly musical, a great singer (her dad is a well known singer/musician), and her "babbling" was quite nice to listen to from the beginning. Her playing was really simple, but she had a great idea of what she thought the music should sould like - the music in her head was very clear to her, Paddy Canny-like, I think. But she quit playing out of frustration. Why? Mostly because she was REALLY lazy and never practiced. She couldn't articulate to her own satisfaction the music she wanted to play. Now, other people would hear her and think it was charming, lovely, whatever. But it wasn't good enough for her.
The music in the head part came easy for her because she'd been around the music all her life. But for those who don't have this background, I think it's necessary to build up a musical idea, or whatever you want to call it, before they can just produce something. The production of the music has to come from somewhere, have some grounding. I feel like I can hear it when it doesn't, and to me it sounds like crap. (Sorry - that sounds harsh.)
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by Chris McGrath
Re: Drive and more . . .
Ofcourse I agree that developing your skills is very important. But it's all relative. To be able to play diddly music wonderfully, you don't really need that much skill, in the scheme of things. To any decent classical or even jazz player, our skill level is laughable. But we know that our music is just as splendid.
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by ...
Re: Drive and more . . .
I'm not talking about people with low skill levels that play wonderfully. I'm talking about people with moderate skill level (relative to ITM) who play incoherently - anything but wonderfully. I agree, of course, that the music is splendid. But I also know there are alot of people out there who play it badly, including many who can handle their instruments fairly well. So they must be missing something. That's the point I'm trying to make, while offering my own guess as to what they're missing. There is definitely some degree of skill necessary to play, but this is clearly not enough. (Listen to any classical violinist play a reel - it stinks. And I certainly agree that listening to an ITM fiddler playing a Bach partita would probably stink more.)
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by Chris McGrath
Re: Drive and more . . .
I just reread a couple of posts ago and realized that my little anecdote WAS about someone with not very much skill playing wonderfully. But it was to illustrate the point that someone who has been around the music all her life might get away with this while someone who hasn't probably can't. Because there's no base experience or knowledge of the music - low skill with out this is just low skill.
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by Chris McGrath
Re: Drive and more . . .
Well, Michael, there are many very good technically skilled Irish players, and it's a bit of an insult (both to those technically skilled folks who worked hard to get there, and those who are sweating it out to get the technical skills right now and haven't got them yet) to say that you don't need much skill to play this stuff wonderfully, when most people patently do not play this stuff wonderfully, or at least as wonderfully as they want to. (Granted that I know that you're not trying to make such a sweeping statement, but keep in mind that not everyone who reads this thread will know that.)
As for "drive", I think it's possible to have drive even when you're playing slowly and melodically.
Chris, the thing is that many people don't understand that when you learn to play Irish music without having the technical skill of playing your chosen instrument, you're actually learning three things at once:
1) You're learning to play the instrument
2) You're learning the tunes (and unless you have a background in, say, jazz, you're probably learning to learn the tunes)
3) You're learning the genre and style, and all that goes with that (including learning to listen and being able to hear those things)
That's at least three balls up into the air, with each containing it's own subset of balls to throw up there and keep up there.
Will tried to teach me to juggle a couple of months ago. He said that I was actually rather quick at learning. In the process, I chased more balls around the garage of Aimee and Richard than I can count, and Richard and Will chased even more of my balls for me when they came their way, I hit myself in the face with a ball at least twice, I dropped a ball or mis-threw a ball or missed a catch countless times, and there were a couple of times where I just stood there, frozen in a moment of indecision and terminal confusion as balls rained all about me. Quick?! This was quick? My impatient self boggles at the thought of not picking it up any quicker than I did, which is to say, not quickly at all.
Yet people expect to pick this stuff up just like that? If you're missing any of the three different bits listed above, you're not going to get there, period.
I remember once back when Dirk and I were just starting to play together, about three or four years back now -- I played a phrase for him bowed one way, and then again bowed another way, and asked him which way he liked better. He said that he didn't hear any difference between the two.
Just a few months back, I did the same thing with a different tune we were working on, and he not only heard a difference but much preferred one way over the other, for a list of reasons that he gave me. Granted, perhaps it was I was so bad back in the beginning that he didn't hear a difference because there *wasn't* any difference (*smirk*), but I like to think instead that maybe Dirk had learned to hear the difference by training his ear.
Perhaps those you're talking about, Chris, still have yet to train their ears in that sort of way, and may indeed never do so if they never find out that it's a good thing to do so.
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by Zina Lee
Re: Drive and more . . .
I've already contributed to this thread what my feelings are concerning "drive" and "lift", but the discussion seems to have drifted slightly into the realm of what you think you sound like vs. what you really sound like. This is definitely a hurdle to overcome - but it's not easy to do. Fortunately in this day and age we have recording devices to help us determine what we actually sound like; I call them humiliators. And anyone that's ever made a recording will confirm that the experience is humiliating, but an experience you can grow from. Most accomplished musicians I know have used the recording tool as a way to step back from the canvas and get an over-view. Some of the players I know who have made astonishing improvements have recorded themselves and played it along side their mentor’s recordings until they matched.
Concerning Chris' experience with his girlfriend in Galway, I had a similar experience, not with a girlfriend, but rather a Dubliner who came to me for some whistle lessons once. He came from a well-known Dublin musical family in that his dad played himself and was often visited by some of Irelands best and most celebrated musicians. This fellow, having never taken up any instrument, became interested when he arrived here in SF and saw that so many of us where completely obsessed and enamored with ITM. The first day he showed up I asked him what he'd like to learn and he picked up his brand new whistle and started finding the notes for "Kid on the Mountain" as if I had already given him lessons for some time. I asked if he had ever even attempted to play whistle previous to that day, and he said, "Not really.” But just like Chris pointed out, his innate sensitivity was beyond the scope of any other student I had ever encountered on a first lesson, or even after a considerable amount of lessons, undoubtedly because he already understood how it's supposed to sound. Now he not only plays whistle, but he's taken up the pipes as well.
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by Phantom Button
Re: Drive and more . . .
That's a good posting Zina. I agree with everything you say. Infact there seems to be a lot of general agreement here which I'm glad about.
The most important thing you say is "it's possible to have drive even when you're playing slowly and melodically." This goes back to the "torque" I talked about in the Drive thread. The amount of torque on an axis/tune is independant of the rotational speed of the axis/tune.
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by ...
Re: Drive and more . . .
I know what Chris is on about & I think I have a good feeling what others are on about & I think they are two different things.
Chris is getting at making what in your head a reality for others to listen to. It's an incredibly rare skill, he touched on that in the opening bit of the thread.
Others argued bit & pieces; they took it apart like a frog in formaldehyde. Funny enough, to dissect & conceptualize 'drive' is the very way to kill it.
To get on the path of what Chris is saying, go & record yourself singing, or lilting (funny enough how 'lilt' means both good swing & singing) the tune. Put in all the good stuff, let yourself really get into the tune. Then go back & learn that setting of the tune.
This should open the door
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by B Rad
Re: Drive and more . . .
Dissect? Yes. Conceptualize? No. If you can't conceptualize something, there's no way to understand and/or do it. Good to hear from you, Brad, how's stuff?
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by Zina Lee
Re: Drive and more . . .
Ok, Chris, I understand you now, and I really appreciated Michael's and Zina's comments too in getting the point across.
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by Andee
Re: Drive and more . . .
If you talk about drive on this website, how can you expect to achieve it in a real life session. Dissecting drive is just so impure and untrad, man.
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by Dr. Dow
Re: Drive and more . . .
Just for the record, Jack, it wasn't my girlfriend. Just a housemate.
There's notyhing wrong with talking about drive, and doing so says little about your chances of achieving it, whatever it is. There have always been people who liked to talk about and analyze the music and those who didn't. If you're in the latter group, what the heck are you doing here?
# Posted on June 15th 2004 by Chris McGrath
Re: Drive and more . . .
Hey Chris, Dow (Mark) is just kidding. We *all* love to discuss this stuff
I wish I had more intelligent input here, but I'm still a struggling beginner trying to do the three things that Zina mentioned above at once!
Joyce
# Posted on June 16th 2004 by JMH
Re: Drive and more . . .
Speaking of Zina, I'm supposed to be meeting up with her sometime tonight in Boston.....need to get my sh*t together...bye or now...
# Posted on June 16th 2004 by JMH
Re: Drive and more . . .
bye for now...I mean
# Posted on June 16th 2004 by JMH
Re: Drive and more . . .
I practice my harmonica while I'm driving...
# Posted on June 16th 2004 by Laughtonb
Re: Drive and more . . .
Since Chris mentioned me by name and I took lessons from him for two years and play in a session with him most Sundays, I thought I'd offer my perspective on the discussion. It seems to have begun with a conversation about drive (lilt, lift, oomf, whatever) in a session and morphed into one about individual virtuosity and how to achieve it. A whole group of people who have arrived at the latter do not necessariliy produce the former.(Put a bunch of lead dogs on a sled and the fight will be spectacular but the sled won't go anywhere)
Just for back ground, in my lessons with Chris I was, at first, determinedly focused on playing the right notes which produced the phenomenon of hesitation everytime I played, to me, a wrong one. I would eventually get through the tune, but it was less than musical. As things progressed I got a beter sense of the structure and flow of tunes and discovered that cuts and rolls and crans were rythmic rhetorical devices whose placement became obvious to ME in relation to my understanding of the idea of the given tune. The result was that I got to think less and play more. I found that I was simplifying the busyness of most tunes but getting much more bang for the buck. Which brings us to the group-think of a session.
What I believe constitutes grove ( drive, oomf) is a tacit agreement among the players to find a path through the tune where certain points are arrived at and emphasized by everyone at the same time but via their own particular routes. I play in a number of sessions of varying degrees of proficiency and the difference lies in the ability of the players to make this agreement hence giving the session a single voice that is not that of any of the individual players. When players are rigidly tied to a single sequence of notes at a specified speed as I was (am? you're call Chris) the tunes have a feeling akin to two people trying to get through a door and be polite at the same time . . .after you . . . no after you. Which I believe is Chris's point about not being able to listen to each individual player in a session and trying to match what they're doing. What is possible is to find those points of agreement that define the tune and play them together. The result is Oomf.
# Posted on June 17th 2004 by AOG
Re: Drive and more . . .
yum and thx AOG really.. your explanation verbalized a lot for me.. may I hope to re-articulate and example your concept...? This is what I think..we have a tune...taken out of someones memory, or oneills or the fiddlers fake Book, or some recording by Crabh rua or Johnny mc gloney or..,,WHATEVER the source, the tune will have a skeleton and inferences is ornaments, rolls, drumbeats, harmonic arrangement, but the melody remains intact,, ie one must be at a certain place at a certain bar or else sabotage the tune's structure...
so, everything else, the quirks and expression, trills,delays, florishrs languishments, are all expressions of the comfort zone of the player in his articulation...
mm.. i don't feel like going on and on cause I knoe i am already at end of thread,, if you wanna talk about htis more let's post a ew one,, k?
no more 200 or 400 long threads K?
# Posted on June 17th 2004 by vboyd100
For the record...
It has been brought to my attention that I personally am being blamed for the apparent disappearance of Chris from this site. So please at least let me explain myself before you put me before the firing squad.
For the record, I wanted to point out that my comment was actually meant as a light-hearted ironic send-up of Brad and Zina for suggesting that "dissecting" drive kills it. In other words, their suggestion was that the act of analysing drive makes it impossible to actually achieve.
By logic this implies that, since Chris began the thread by attempting to analyse drive, it would mean that he supposedly wouldn't be able to achieve it.
Like him, I was of the opinion that "there's nothing wrong with talking about drive", so I laid on the irony thick, forgetting that (particularly) Americans tend not to understand when they're having the piss taken out of them.
That was a mistake and I'm sorry for that.
Mind you, even if I had meant it seriously, I was never uncivil. This is a discussion. People are going to have different viewpoints.
However, as it happened I didn't mean it seriously, and if you don't believe that I meant no harm by it, look at my other contributions to the thread. All the clues are there "this discussion is getting interesting, keep it up lads" etc. So for christ's sake, stop deliberately misunderstanding me and making a point of inferring the worst possible meaning from everything I post here! Stop assuming that I'm a bad person before you've even met me!
I would have liked to discuss whether or not it is actually true that you can't achieve drive if you analyse it by talking about it, but hey.
Oh, and one more thing. Since I don't know what drive is (I still think it's meaningless jargon but that's just my personal opinion which btw I feel as though I should be allowed to express), I was willing to learn from Chris (as a human being who plays trad) what his conception of it was. If people are famous or have appeared on recordings then great, good on 'em, but they should be prepared to have people disagree with them or simply post their diverse opinions. I have a real problem with this idea that you should be unseen and unheard if you're a beginner, and that you should just listen and learn and not contribute at all. After all, nobody's perfect; we're all on the learning curve somewhere. I also think that people of any age have something to offer when it comes to music. For example, you know how kids absorb stuff like sponges. Far from being emotionally underdeveloped, some kids have been through more life experience/trauma than your average adult. To dismiss this is a great mistake I think. And that applies to people of all ages - any human being with grey matter in their heads.
As for me, I don't give an absolute flying frig if people don't want to listen to what I say or respect/value my opinions. I know that there are a lot of members out there who hate me for expressing my opinions, thinking that I expect people to respect or value what I'm saying. Well, I *don't*. But if I'm going to be made to feel bad for expressing an opinion (even if I haven't been uncivil), then, you know what? Chris is right. What the heck am I doing here?
# Posted on August 26th 2004 by Dr. Dow