Supercharge Your Practice (Old Granny Rattle Trap)

First I will make a couple of announcements . I wanted to thank two people who left reviews . Thank you so much . These were on Apple Music . Thank you to Heather . Actually , I know H eather , we play together in Baltimore . Friends leave friends reviews . Thank you , Heather , they're really nice .

Review from Idaho Fiddler , who said some nice things about the books and the podcast , and thank you very much to Idaho Fiddler as well . My other quick announcement this week is that my new course is out . If you go to fiddlestudio . com and click on courses you'll see all my courses . The new one is how to Play Faster .

I've covered a lot of the topics over the last month or so and what I'm talking about today is also involved . But you can go there if you want to see the videos , kind of the outline what I cover in it , the different tunes I use to teach the concepts , and it's a $50 course . I tried to price it at about the cost of one lesson . It's more .

It's definitely more material than I could fit into one lesson , but that was my thinking in the pricing . I actually changed the prices on the fiddle studio website for this new year . I wanted to make the material a little bit more accessible . All of my courses are now $50 and the membership , which gives you access to everything , is $25 a month .

You can start it or stop it at any time there . Advertisement is over . I know this title is a little bit clickbaity how to Supercharge your Practice . One of my kids said now that you've talked so much about how to play fast , you should do a podcast on how to play slow , which is kind of an interesting idea .

I might do that soon , but I'm finishing up my final concept that I've been working on with speed and we're going to be talking about mindful practice versus mindless practice . So the too long didn't read upfront . I'll just tell you the system that I've been experimenting with with my own practicing is to break it into thirds .

I usually only have time for like 30 minutes at a time , so I'll do 10 minutes of slow mindful practice . I'll do 10 minutes of going through things in different rhythms or different keys . No-transcript , mindless practice , basically building muscle memory . And then I'll do 10 minutes where I just play what I want to play . Ha ha ha . Joyful practice .

I've been calling it so one-third mindless , one-third mindful and one-third joyful . You might not be the kind of person who takes a very organized approach to their practice and has systematic ways to approach it . That's a little bit how I am . I come from a family of people who do that . So if what you're doing is working for you , definitely stick with that .

But if you like to try out different things and see how they affect your learning and your playing , you can give this a try . Let me know how it goes . This practicing technique is , I will say as a caveat , separate from oral understanding and meaning listening , knowing what the tunes and the style sound like .

So I didn't say anything about listening , but obviously you want to be listening enough that any tunes you're learning you've got really well in your head , any style that you're working on , you've got an idea of what it sounds like . You can well , I won't say hum it , jaynee , won't let me say hum it . You can sing it in that style .

You know what it sounds like . So mindful practice . Let's start with that . Mindful practice is slow practice . Yes , it's slow . I've been doing this third of the time . As I said , you know if you're playing slow enough because , instead of making mistakes and then correcting them , you're getting it right the first time .

So if you're working on your tone and you're still squeaking , you're not going slow enough . If you're working on relaxing your shoulders and you keep finding them up around your ears , you need to slow down more .

If you're , for instance , tripping over your rolls and not sitting them all the way into a tune , trying to work on Irish ornamentation , you've got to slow the whole thing down more . That is my mindful practice For right now . I'm working a lot on how to shift my hand around on the button accordion . The button accordion is very difficult .

It's like if you were learning the fiddle but you had to shift right from the beginning . So there's a lot of very slow practice where I have to play very easy tunes very slowly so that I can think through where I need to shift my hand around , keeping in mind , like , what's coming up in the melody , is it going to go down ?

Do I have to find a way to shift down ? Is it going to go up ? Do I have to find a way to shift up ? Generally , of course , slow practice on the fiddle means working on your tone , working on technique .

Relaxation Could be shifting for sure if you're doing hard stuff like that Could be finger patterns , you know , getting the hang of something tricky that goes on back and forth on different strings or back and forth between low and high fingers , anything like that . Okay , we'll talk about mindless practice .

You know there's that saying go slow to go fast , and I don't agree with that . I don't think going slow works on what you need to go fast on the fiddle . I just agree with it . I think it's muscle memory , it's your autopilot that helps you go fast . It doesn't necessarily help your autopilot to play things really , really slow .

What it takes really is repetition . Some kinds of what I would call mindless practice are just really at the heart ways to do a lot of repetition . If you're playing something in a lot of different keys , hitting those patterns around , a lot of different resting tones , that's repeating .

If you're playing something at different tempos , using the metronome at 60 and at 70 and at 80 , again you're repeating . If you're playing something with different rhythms , it's another way to do it .

And even if you are playing in a gym , playing with other people repeating the tune you know three or five or 10 times at a jam , that's another way to just get repetitions in . When you're thinking about your autopilot , the question is at what point does the level of difficulty of the different kinds of music you can play intersect with your autopilot ?

Which is to say , when I was teaching a kid that needed a big repertoire for Suzuki or for Fiddled , they need to be able to play a lot of stuff from memory and maybe , even if they can't recall it immediately from memory , they can play along very convincingly with someone else who knows it .

So a kid who needs a repertoire of 100 short classical pieces or 100 fiddle tunes isn't going to have the time to practice all of those every day so that it tunes in like a recently practiced place . They need a good autopilot .

A kid who's autopilot's really amazing meaning their ear-to-hand connection is very , very strong they could play almost all of their repertoire .

Maybe a very recently learned , very difficult piece they might struggle with because they would need more recent practice in their hand to play it , but they could do most of the repertoire just from autopilot , because they remember what it sounds like and if they can remember it they can play it in their hand . Their hand just knows what to do .

Sometimes I would teach kids from other teachers usually , who could play very well and often read music very well , but their autopilot was at a very , very low level . They could only play the simplest things back because they had like a page-to-hand connection so they can read , they can play with their hand what they're reading on the page .

Or sometimes it was a kid who they could practice the song or the piece well enough to play it , but they didn't necessarily listen to it and they weren't always listening when they were playing it . So they weren't listening enough to really know the song like in their head . So all of a sudden they can play it with their fingers .

They maybe are a kinesthetic person , so they're playing it , kind of have to know what it sounds like , but they don't know the music . If I asked them to sing through it they wouldn't be able to do . That Actually happened to me a little bit in college .

I was a little bit of a goof in college , not very serious with my classical repertoire , so there was a lot of music , I learned that I wasn't studying to really know , I was just studying it to be able to play it off the page of my lessons because I didn't really like it , I didn't care if I knew it well .

So that music is hard for me to go back and play because I never learned it . I don't know what it sounds like , it's like new to me Even though I practiced it and learned it when I was 20 , it feels completely new , whereas songs that I know my autopilot kicks in helps me . All of a sudden it's easier to play . I hope this is making sense .

So mindless practice is building that left hand autopilot and I know last week Janie talked all about the right hand autopilot . I like working on the left hand . What can I say ? It's nice to be able to play the notes . You can do both yes and right .

It really is so helpful to be able to have the muscle memory to be able to play what you have in your memory . I mean , if you add note reading to that , you can do almost anything Like the world is your oyster . So we talked about mindful and we talked about mindless practicing , and my third , my third category was joyful practicing pretty self-explanatory .

There's something out there that's fun for you to play . Look , I love playing over the waterfall and that's the kind of tune that everyone makes fun of . I still love to play it . I practice it all the time . I love playing Mari's wedding . I love tunes like Snowflake Reel that have crazy chords in them and you know people roll their eyes .

They're a little ridiculous , but I remind myself that even if my family's heard me play this tune a million times , I like playing it , so I'm going to play it again . Play stuff that you love . It makes it more fun for me . Our tune for today is Rattle Trap , or Old Granny Rattletrap . I learned this tune at an old time jam I went to .

I was staying up in Northampton , Massachusetts , and even though it's in New England , they had an old time jam there . So this month we're going to have old time tunes from up north . It was at a chocolate shop Wow , what a great place to have a jam Ana Bandeira Chocolates . And the jam was led by Natalie Padilla , who's a really great fiddler .

She played a couple of different instruments but when she played the fiddle I was like , wow , she sounded great . A real kind of Texas bluegrass style . She sounded really good on the old time . She also plays Irish . I think she has classical training , one of these musicians who does a lot of different things .

You should check out her music on band camp , Natalie Padilla . The jam was great . It did start pretty early . I think it started at five . By the time I figured out it had already started I was very late . Jams don't start at five in Baltimore and they called this tune Rattletrap has a crazy B part .

I will try to put some fingerings in so you can see how I'm doing this in the B part . When I post the tune on my blog To find the blog , it's either fiddlestudio . blogspot . com or if you just go to my regular Fiddle Studio site , at the top there's a link that says blog . That's where you find the sheet music which might be helpful for this tune .

I did find it online a couple places . The tune archive had a couple transcriptions from Bill Hensley , Madison County , North Carolina , and from Uncle Am Stewart , a Fiddler from Tennessee , the turn of the century , and I guess there's a 1949 recording from Baskin Lamar Lunsford , famous Fiddler Baskin Lunsford .

Anyway , so you can look around for it and we're going to play it for you here . Thank you for listening . You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudio . com , along with my books , courses and membership for learning to fiddle . I'll be back next week with another tune for you . Have a wonderful day .