Too Many Tunes
Last weekend I acquired a copy of Ryan’s Mammoth Collection: 1050 Reels and Jigs, Hornpipes, Clogs, Walk-arounds, Essences, Strathspeys, Highland Flings, and Contra Dances, with Figures, and How to Play Them on a trip up to Evanston to visit Hog Eye Music. The collection is apparently the primary source material for Cole’s 1000 Fiddle Tunes, a favorite tune book of fiddler, archivist, and social media content creator extraordinaire Charlie Walden.
The book is surprisingly slim, given the volume of material. They manage to pack five or six tunes to the page, and there are no chords given. It’s fun to look through, but if I want to learn tunes out of it I’ll almost certainly need to copy them into my notebook. Additionally, there’s a series of exercises and studies included in the back of book, described as being “designed for those not having the advantage of a teacher.” I sometimes begin my practice sessions by playing scales, but I’ve long thought it would be useful to have a set of exercises. So that might be the first addition to the notebook out of the Mammoth Collection.
Meanwhile, a collection of 100 essential Missouri fiddle tunes, recorded by various great Missouri fiddlers, and curated by the ever productive Mr. Walden, has been released on Bandcamp. My initial thought was something like “why couldn’t it have been 20? I can’t possibly learn this many tunes…” because obviously if they’re essential then I ought to learn them. Not that I’m a Missouri fiddler by any stretch of the imagination, although I do quite enjoy the style and have learned a good deal from it. I don’t really think of Missouri as part of the Midwest because it feels too much like the South to me, but maybe that’s because I’m from Cleveland, and everything south of Interstate 70 feels Southern to me.
In any event, its unlikely I’ll learn many tunes from the recordings – I have learned tunes that way, but lately I have found it easier to learn from the page. I think this is because learning from the page allows me to learn a tune slowly, practicing specific passages and assembling a tune piecemeal. This is particularly true for the trickier tunes I’ve learned, like “Little Roy’s Breakfast” or “Dinah” (which I’ve got very nearly down pat, with the exception of one troublesome passage). My hope is that learning this way will help build my technique in anticipation of summer.
I have numerous plans for musical excursions over the summer where I’m sure I will learn tunes directly from others (although I suppose in many cases I’ll record folks playing tunes and learn from the recordings). But in any event, I expect I’ll spend a good deal of time trying to figure out what someone else Is playing, and I figure that’s the best way to develop my ear. If I really get things together, I might be able to transfer tunes learned by ear into my notebook.
Listening to others while playing a tune is another thing I hope to work on this summer. Practicing alone has been really important for me in building a repertoire, but I can easily be thrown by another person’s playing. Last week I was playing “Bill Cheatum” at a jam, and kept falling off at the beginning of the B section as my neighbor would play it differently. And sometimes I just get distracted listening to a guitar and forget what I’m doing.
At some point I want to spend some time exploring the world of tune books – I have the Fiddler’s Fakebook, O’Neil’s Music of Ireland, and a few others – but for now my mind is on the accumulation of tunes that I can actually play. There are too many tunes to learn, but, on the other hand, there’s always something to new to play.
Better get to practicing.