Things with Strings

Some people ask me how I have time to practice all the instruments I play. First of all, I play primarily stringed instruments, and there are some similarities between many of them. And second of all, I don’t practice each instrument daily. I practice the instrument or instruments I’ll be playing in upcoming performances daily, and when I take on a new instrument I practice daily in order to establish some muscle memory for the instrument.

Playing fretted instruments that vary in string number, neck width, and fretboard length, is not too big an issue. If I’ve played a lot of tenor banjo, and then pick up a guitar, I find myself undershooting the strings and frets for a few minutes until I adjust. But the strumming is the same as the mandolin, and even the chord shapes are, since each are tuned in 5ths. Likewise, mandolin to violin has the same general string length, and the same tuning, but the position is different for the left hand, and then there’s the bow… And so on.

But the fact is that once you know the tuning, develop the muscle memory for getting from note to note, and develop good technique for playing smoothly and musically, and with good tone, you can learn to play anything. I don’t have any experience with wind or brass instruments, so I have always limited myself to things that don’t require air (other than singing), and my most difficult instrument so far to get a good grasp on is the concertina. The layout of the notes is not only confusing at first, but there is a different note when you push the bellows than when you pull. So a lot to keep track of. It’s not at all intuitive for me.

Having a background in piano (since age 4) certainly helped in more than one way: I learned to read both treble and bass clef, and I learned to do coordinate left and right hand doing different things. This is why it’s great to start children on piano first. My parents told us we can choose our second instrument in the 3^rd grade as long as we had at least 2 years of piano. I chose violin.

I’ve noticed that my adult harp students who played a melody instrument growing up, and not piano, have a more difficult time with learning to read the bass clef, and with putting both hands on the harp to play separate things. But there is hope even for those students! I have a book series for harp that takes a student through all they need to learn to get that two-hand coordination. The series is called “Harp Newbies” and is available on my website at: https://verlene.com/books.html#newbies

Back to things with strings, here are some videos of me playing several of my instruments:

https://youtu.be/zNqpF9iwDYA

https://youtu.be/fOSkFlA5ogQ

https://youtu.be/PMh9HzzCEOg

https://youtu.be/gAQLyNIAnAE

Enjoy!

Unlocking the Memory Vault

I’ve noticed a big difference between memorizing and recalling music (tunes, chords, structure, etc.), and memorizing and recalling lyrics to songs. I have no problem playing a tune I’ve memorized – the recall is quick as long as I have the initial few notes. But with lyrics, it’s a whole different ball game.

The problem is that memorizing is one thing, and then recalling is another. When you memorize, it goes into a mental vault that needs a kind of a key to unlock it so that you can access the memorized bits. In music, that key might be the first few notes of the tune, along with a template of the possible notes that are within the key (musical key, such as “key of C”). And you may find a folk song easier to recall than a complex jazz piece.

This I think is due to the number of possible notes in a tune. A folk tune rarely has more than 6 or 7 different pitches, whereas in jazz, several of the non-diatonic notes are also possible. And yes, I find singing a jazz standard easy enough if I’ve done it a lot, but with the ones I don’t regularly sing or play, I find myself going astray more often. When you compare the possible 12 notes of the chromatic scale to the 7 diatonic notes in folk music, it makes sense that it will be easier to recall what the next note will be in a folk tune.

Locking into the chord progression can help with the non-diatonic notes, since they are often tied to the chords. But that’s another level of complexity in jazz that we don’t have in folk. For jazz, you can modulate through several keys, with potentially all 12 major chords, all 12 minor chords, all 12 diminished chords, and so on, whereas in folk, you are usually working with 3 to 6 chords. So there’s a difference due to the number of possible correct notes and chords that make memory recall more difficult with more complex pieces.

Now let’s look at lyrics… Language is so vast that there are many ways, possibly hundreds of ways, to say any individual thought or concept. To memorize and recall the exact lyrics of a song, what is the key that opens the vault? It has to be more than just the start of the first verse. When a song has several verses, they may be in a logical enough order that you can think “What comes next?” and come up with the next verse. But some songs have verses that can be interchanged, as well as lines within verses that can be interchanged. So for those songs, we would need to unlock each and every line in each and every verse!

There are a few websites out there that deal with ways to memorize lyrics, and I do many of these already. But I find that I still have that hiccup from time to time where I sing a different word in the middle of a phrase, and then that one wrong word makes the rest of the line mean something else. Or not make any sense. Or throw me off track enough that I can’t recall the next line. So in addition to listening over and over, writing it out over and over, picturing the scenes like a movie, making an emotional connection with the song --  all of which appear on these online lists, I’ve come up with a few of my own:

1. “Taste each word.” Hmm… I guess I mean how does it feel in my mouth to pronounce each word. Roll it around and “taste” it. The muscle memory of tongue, lips, and jaw…
2. “Lecture the song.” This means I’m going to put on my teacher hat and explain the nuances of each verse the way an English professor might dissect a poem – the sound, the rhymes, the structure, and the meaning.
3. “Back-story each phrase.” This is something I learned in a theater class at SJSU. The back-story will give you a personal connection to the lyrics complete with characters that have provoked or spoken each phrase. 

I guess this last one is similar to both the “scenes from a movie” and the “emotional connection,” but with a more specific analytical approach. Ask yourself “Why does this happen? What could have happened to cause this? Who is to blame, or credit?”

These are new ones for me, but I’m working on applying this so that I don’t need to rely on having a music stand just for the lyrics. The music stand creates such a barrier, and I’m happiest when I can connect with my listening audience while I sing and play music!

I’m hoping to perform my live-stream concert on January 28^th with all lyrics firmly memorized and easily recalled!

If you are interested in attending and have not yet reserved your seat (free to attend!) here is a link:

https://tinyurl.com/LifeStagesConcert

Translating Music Terminology

I have taught workshops and private lessons mostly in the US, but have also had the opportunity to present workshops in The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Italy. In addition, with Zoom classes open to anyone around the world, my classes have become more and more international. With these experiences, I have learned that there are some differences in musical terminology that are important to consider…

In a workshop in the Netherlands, I was explaining where the 9 is in a chord. I pointed out that B is a whole step higher than A, but one student insisted it was F#, not B. This isn’t a difference in terminology, but in pronunciation… When I said “A” (pronounced long “a” or “ehee”) she heard the sound they make for the letter “E.” No worries, we figured it out, and I tried my best to say “Ah” for the note A.

Then in Germany, I was discussing perfect 5ths in a workshop on chords, and there was some quiet discussion in German amongst some of the class. Finally, the one with the best English let me know that they wanted to know what makes it perfect, and wondered if there are imperfect 5ths as well. I said “hmm…That’s just what this is called instead of major and minor fourths and fifths they are called perfect and diminished… She finally said “oh you mean ‘klar!’” which translates “clear.” Which sounds like a great way to describe those intervals. There is a clear, open sound due to so many overtones in sync. After all, what’s so perfect about them?

When I taught workshops in Italy, to avoid the “a” vrs “e” dilemma, we used solfeg – not the “Movable Do” or “Tonic Sol-fa” system we’re used to here in the US, but the “Fixed Do” system, where C is always Do, D is always Re, and so on. The solfeg syllables are pronounced the same in Italian as in English, and actually were first introduced by Guido d’Arezzo, an Italian music scholar in the eleventh century. They’re based on the first syllable of this Latin hymn to John the Baptist:

Although Ut was changed to Do and the 7th step was Si which is still in use today for fixed do, but was changed to Ti in Movable Do/Tonic Sol-fa in order to not have two syllables starting with S. More on this if you’re interested can be found in an article I wrote for the publication, “Vocals” in 1989: https://verlene.com/pdfs/SightsingingVocalsArticle.pdf

There are also differences in terminology for note values in Great Britain and several other countries. In the US we use the terms: whole, half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes, which they call: semibreve, minim, crotchet, quaver, and semiquaver. Why is a whole note only “semi” breve? Well, turns out that the double whole note (which would show up in 4/2 time) is called breve, and a whole note is half the value of the double whole, so -- semibreve. Makes sense.

And I love when we get to the thirty-second, sixty-fourth, hundred twenty-eighth, and two hundred fifty-sixth notes, which are respectively (and respectfully): demisemiquaver, hemidemisemiquaver, semihemidemisemiquaver, and demisemihemidemi-semiquaver notes. That seems so much more logical! It’s like saying half of a half of a half of a half but so much more fun to say and much less of a math problem than saying “what’s half of an eighth?” And how many counts does a half note get. The answer is not a half a count, or even half a measure unless it’s in 4/4 or 2/2 time.

I have forever struggled to explain to my students that in 3/4 time and 6/8 time, a whole rest gets the whole measure, but the whole note doesn’t fit. “Why not?” they ask. “Because that’s the way it is!” I exclaim, I mean explain. The British note naming system takes the issue of “whole” equal to 4 equal to whole measure out of the equation, so that a semibreve is not considered to be the “whole” of anything, but just a note value that has a mathematical relationship to all the other note values. The standard note tree still works:

I won’t be changing the music terminology I use for my American students, but will remember when I am working with students from other countries, that there may be some music terminology translation needed!

 

For those who would like to attend my first-ever live-streaming concert (free to attend!) here is the link: https://tinyurl.com/LifeStagesConcert