Find Your Lilt
Step into the world of Irish fiddling with "Find Your Lilt," the podcast where your fellow fiddler, Hannah Harris, guides you through the ebbs and flows of mastering the real feel of Irish music.
Find Your Lilt
From Stagnation to Mastery in Irish Fiddle Practice
Love what you're hearing? Send Hannah a text!
This episode explains the different types of music practice—naive, purposeful, and deliberate—and how they impact skill development in Irish fiddling. Hannah discusses practical strategies for each type, encouraging listeners to engage in better practices to achieve their musical goals.
• Exploring naive practice and its pitfalls
• Recognizing the shift to purposeful practice
• Importance of feedback in practice sessions
• Deliberate practice and pushing through challenges
• Building mental representations for memorizing music
• Encouraging a balanced approach to practice and enjoyment
This episode was inspired by the book Peak by K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool.
Want to share your thoughts on this episode or suggest other discussion topics? Join Hannah's free podcast community over here!
I'd also love to keep in touch with you via my Sunday Irish fiddle newsletter -- sign up for free here!
Welcome back to the Find your Lil' Podcast. This is Hannah Harris and today we have a solo episode. So normally I have all the bells and whistles I even when I do solo episodes, I get into my recording software, I have my mic plugged in, all the works but today I am literally just recording a voice memo, because it's quick, it's efficient. I'll be traveling this week, so I want to make sure that I get this material out to you. And again, as I said in my last episode, if you heard that intro, I'm trying to get these out on about a bi-weekly basis, so every other week getting a new episode out to you, and while I'm getting other interviews recorded and edited, I will sometimes throw in a solo episode just to keep things consistent. So that is what this one is. So just a quick disclaimer if you are into the professional top audio quality sound, this is just a voice memo on my phone. This week it is going to be a shorter episode, but just a little heads up that it is different from my usual audio quality. So hope that that is acceptable. And as long as you can hear me clearly and hear what I'm saying, then that's the main goal. So today I want to talk to you about practice, and I know that a lot of my episodes are centered around practice. We cover this concept in many different interviews and also I know I've done a few solo episodes as well that cover it.
Speaker 1:And today I'm actually drawing on this really great book that I've been reading I'm actually on my second read-through through it now. It's called Peak and it's by Kay Anders Erickson and Robert Poole. So it's this great collaborative work of both a scientist, who you know collected all these great findings around becoming an expert in any given field, and then also a science writer, so someone who can take academic academia jargon sometimes I'll call it jargon and distill it down into plain speech that ye old mortals, the rest of us, can understand. So it's just a really, really good read and I highly recommend getting the book. So I will link that in the show notes so that you can see what it is and, you know, get a copy of it. But I do want to summarize a little bit, share a few of my takeaways, without giving away too much of the book necessarily, because I'm conscious that it's you know, their work and not mine here.
Speaker 1:But I wanted to talk to you about the three different types of practice and how that can pertain to us as Irish traditional fiddlers and maybe which level of practice is the best for you. So the book itself really covers deliberate practice, which is the main concept. It's the framework, the pathway if you will, for getting to the very, very best that you can be in any given skill, any given field. And they use musicians as a primary example. So it's a great read for you know, having the context with you, know the violin, the fiddle, and also just the concept of becoming a skilled musician. So there's a lot of things that can directly translate into our field, us being Irish fiddlers.
Speaker 1:And right at the start of the book there is a breakdown of the three different types of practices. So there is naive practice, there's purposeful practice and there's deliberate practice. So today again, most of the book is about deliberate practice. But today I really want to share with you a summary, just a basic idea of what each of these types of practices are and how they pertain to Irish out when we find ourselves in one versus the other. And it really does help at least in my case it's helped to light a fire in some ways and think, you know, maybe lately I may be playing at an advanced professional level, but I've been doing a lot of naive practice, so maybe I should get back into purposeful and deliberate. So here we go. I will start off with naive practice.
Speaker 1:Now, it's really easy to get stuck into naive practice. So this is the type of practice where, basically, you assume that just because you are playing something through like, let's just say, you're learning a new tune and you're like, okay, I'm playing this tune five, six, seven times in my practice today, surely because I am putting in the seven reps, the eight reps, the nine reps, so on, so forth that means I'm automatically going to get better. Now, in Irish music we do a lot of learning by ear, and so there's this general rule that when you play something seven times through, you'll have it committed to memory. But that said, we don't always play the tune through the same time, the same way, seven times through, and if you're playing the tune wrong, then you might get the wrong note stuck in your head for seven times through, and it really doesn't matter how many times you play through the tune. If you're not playing it the right way, then again that's kind of just goes out the window and it can feel really frustrating when you're like. You know I have put in so much time. I spent an hour with my fiddle today and I feel like I'm getting nowhere, making no progress. I've been playing through my tunes. What's happening? Why can't I get to this next level of how I want to play?
Speaker 1:Chances are, if you've been feeling this, you might be stuck in a naive practice schedule cycle. You might just be doing the motions, going through the motions and assuming that time alone is going to help and you don't really have a strategy or a specific method for improving whatever it is that you need to work on. Naive practice also counts as going to your local session and counting that as your practice for the day. So one of the things in the book is that really you see more effective results when you take individual practice time. So this is when you know you can hear yourself. You're not worried about blending in with anyone else. There's lots of great things you can do at a session to become a better musician, to be better with playing with others and listening to other people playing, and I'm absolutely not knocking this as a practice method and definitely a good thing for you to go out and do. In fact, I encourage you if you have a local session nearby, please do get out there and play tunes.
Speaker 1:The danger comes if you are only getting your practice in or practice in quotes by going to sessions and you're not spending individual time with your instrument to really assess your playing and take the time to break down the tunes. You know you're not just playing through the tunes straight, you're actually stopping when you hit a trouble spot and you're really hashing out what is going on there. If you've been learning with me, listening to me or reading my weekly Sunday emails for any length of time, you will know that metaphors are just how I make sense of the world. So I'll throw a metaphor at you here for this naive practice. So I do a lot of strength training and as part of my gym practice I have a very set structure of exercises that I do and this is something that I learned from my strength training coach.
Speaker 1:So the danger sometimes of going to a gym and you know you have all these different equipment pieces in front of you and you can just be like where do I start? What am I focusing on? What am I targeting? What do I want to get better, get stronger in. Like am I going to do arms today? Am I going to do legs, core back, like what? What do I want to focus on? And it can feel very overwhelming because you have all these options laid out in front of you Again. Lots of tune types, lots of tunes out there in the world, more than we can ever learn. So you have all these options in front of you and you're just like I don't know which one is really going to help me get to my specific workout goals. And you'll see people at the gym that do this. So they kind of, you know, walk around the different machines and they do a few exercises here and there and then they switch over to another one and then they're just kind of they don't really have a set structure and maybe they don't do the same ones every week, maybe they just kind of are on a goal to try every single machine and then maybe eventually they'll come back around and they'll make some sort of structure with their favorite ones. So if you find that this is you when it comes to practicing your traditional Irish fiddle tunes, then I say resist the urge to try everything all at once.
Speaker 1:I would narrow down what it is that you really want to work on. So, is it tone? Is it rhythm? Is it wrist flexibility? Is it getting really good phrasing? Is it fitting an ornament into a jig pattern? Is it fitting an ornament into a reel? Is it getting the feel for the reels? And really get clear on what it is that you really want to be working on. Because, going back to our gym analogy here, you really don't make progress if you don't go back and repeat the same exercises. There's no way to track what it is that you're making progress in. Like you could do one machine one week and switch to another one the next week, but how do you know if you don't go back to that same machine? Did you increase your weight? Did you increase the number of reps that you were able to do? How are you improving if you don't have that building block and that measuring space to go back to? How would you know if you're getting stronger if you're just using a totally different machine and you're not coming back to that routine exercise?
Speaker 1:This leads us directly into our next two practice types, which are purposeful and deliberate. As a little review and we'll start with purposeful here, because this is the, let's just say, intermediate level, and then deliberate is going to be advanced, slash the pro level. So intermediate practice, purposeful practice is when you actually have more of a focus. So you're going in and instead of saying I'm playing my tunes through five times today, you're saying I'm going through and I'm going to play my tunes five times, but those five times are going to be perfectly in rhythm and I'm not going to miss a note. Now, if you're anything like me, you're going to end up playing the tune more than five times in your practice session that day. But when you get five times in a row playing it correctly, that really does give you more of an advance than just willy-nilly playing through five times, not really paying attention, not really thinking about what's going wrong. You don't take the time to sit down and really isolate any problem spots and go over those and then, once you've got those ironed out, then you play through the whole tune.
Speaker 1:And I will say so again deliberate practice this book Peak is very much about becoming the absolute best, the expert, becoming a master of a skill. And if you're coming to Irish music and you're like you know, I don't really want to be a pro. I don't want to be the best Irish fiddler out there. Then I just want to be able to play tunes with my friends at a session and have them sound nice and pleasant to listen to. Then that is an amazing goal. I love that goal.
Speaker 1:I feel like I work with a lot of students that you know they're just looking for something fun and relaxing and enjoyable to do in their free time, whether they're retired or whether this is just something that they do for fun on the side, and I think that that's an amazing goal. So you really could get away with purposeful practice, which, again, is just a little bit more focused. It gives you that guided path that you can use to really improve your goals. It does include a feedback factor, so this could either be you listening back to yourself and self-assessing what is going on and, you know, researching ways that you can use to improve it. You could work with a teacher, which you know I always love when I have students to work with. So you could definitely work with a teacher to help you identify those areas and also come up with a plan to get through them, and then you can have peer feedback as well. You can be working with friends and, you know, maybe somebody's like oh, I had this problem in my fiddling and this is what I did to solve it and maybe try this. So really, just a bunch of different things that you can do to have that feedback, whether from yourself, from a peer or from an instructor. So purposeful practice has a plan. It is a lot more focused. You have specific goals that you can measure and that you can use to help you get to where you want to be faster.
Speaker 1:Deliberate practice is the next level and this is something that I think, even if you aren't wanting to be a pro fiddler again, you just want to do this for your own enjoyment. I think you can get a lot of value out of using deliberate practice strategies in order to become really really good or become whatever level it is that you want to be, like they talk about this in the book where you don't have have, you can follow this path for as long as you want to. You get to choose where you stop or where you continue. I'm definitely of the opinion of being a lifelong learner and always having something new to learn. It's something that's very exciting and just a really nice thing to be thinking about of like, oh yeah, there is always something that I can, I can get better at, and I can just enjoy the whole process and celebrate along the way when I hit a new milestone. So even if you don't want to go pro with Irish Trad, I would encourage you to listen to this next section about deliberate practice and take some of the strategies away for your own practice routines. So deliberate practice really just builds on the elements of purposeful practice. So that is the focus, goals and the feedback, and it takes it to the next level by adding on a few other elements. So one of the things is to identify who the most skilled and amazing Irish fiddlers there are out there in the world and start copying their methods. You know, it's not a crime to study somebody's approach and to see what it is that they did to build their skills and then to try those methods for yourself and see if that helps you to reach your next level.
Speaker 1:Deliberate practice is also not necessarily fun. It's not meant to be this super enjoyable activity. I mean, you can find ways that you enjoy the process, of course, and I think that it would be, you know, maybe a little discouraging to be like oh, practicing is always just going to suck, which you know. Hopefully it doesn't. Hopefully you do enjoy playing your instrument and working at it.
Speaker 1:But some of the things you know problem spots. Maybe there's a tricky leap or maybe there's this interval that just does not sit well on the fiddle. Maybe a box player wrote the tune and they didn't really think about the fiddles I know we do that to them too. So, again, no shade. But maybe it's just a particularly complex tune that you really really want to get. And it's just a particularly complex tune that you really really want to get. And it's just so frustrating. When you get to that trouble spot You're like I don't know how I'm going to get this, and I just said I can never play this right. And it's very easy to get yourself into that stage. And deliberate practicers work through that. So you have this ability to put in the hours and work through the reps as you will.
Speaker 1:So I'll actually go back to my gym analogy here, because really a lot of these strength training exercises are not super fun Like they. In some ways they are fun, but the actual doing the heavy weightlifting is like oh, this hurts, this. This, I mean not not hurts in a bad way, like it's. It's, if it hurt in a bad way, you'd want to stop um and not injure yourself. But it's like this isn't comfortable right now. I'm I'm pushing myself, I'm pushing past what I'm comfortable lifting and I know that by doing this and by getting to the end of my rep range I am helping my muscles to grow. But it's not really fun in the moment I'm gonna. I'm looking forward to my little two minute rest period in between my sets here.
Speaker 1:So it's one of those things where the process itself the actual, you know, lifting the weight, the actual working through the technique that you really want to master it's not always necessarily going to be fun and yet, once you've accomplished it, it's a really good feeling, like I feel amazing when I've had a really good lifting session at the gym and I leave and I'm like I feel like I worked hard and I pushed myself and I feel really great. So it's that kind of energy that you want to get from your practice sessions of oh, this was hard in the moment. I struggled, I sweated, I maybe cried a little bit Don't cry all the time, but you know. But I put in that effort and I, you know, I made it work and it's just a really good feeling to be like, oh, I did that hard work and I've accomplished this thing. Now I can celebrate that, now I can rest and then I will, you know, move on to the next level or the next thing that I it is that I want to learn.
Speaker 1:The thing that I think can maybe turn us off of the idea of deliberate practice is this concept of just the sheer number of hours that you have to put in to become very good at a skill. So Malcolm Gladwell coined the 10,000 hour rule, which actually Erickson debunks a little bit in his book, but essentially the concept, if you take it as a concept, of you have to put in a lot of hours, a lot of time, in order to master the skill. And it has to be the right sort of practice, as opposed to just again throwing spaghetti at the wall. And it has to be the right sort of practice as opposed to just again throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping that if you play a tune through five, six, seven times that it's going to magically stick. So I do think that we can sometimes let ourself feel a little discouraged when we think, oh my gosh, this is going to take so much time. This is just like I'm about to sign away hours and hours of my life, and so you do wanna make that process enjoyable or at least have the celebrations scattered throughout so that you're not just spending all this time really pushing yourself and not receiving any reward of the effort. So I'm not saying that if you take deliberate practice on, you should suddenly just stop having fun playing your instrument Like that's definitely not where I'm going here.
Speaker 1:What really attracts me to the deliberate practice process is not always having to have it be fun, but being able to stick with it and push yourself through some of the harder bits, because you know that putting in that time and that effort is going to pay off and you're going to get the results that you want. One of the most useful things I think you can get from deliberate practice which, again, the process of it is not necessarily fun, but once you've got it mastered is really, really awesome is memorizing phrases. So one of my favorite things to do at a session and I play some really good sessions here in the Detroit area is try and learn a tune on the spot in a session. So I play with some great musicians. They often play tunes that I don't know and it's really nice to be able to put myself in those situations where I don't know every single tune in a session.
Speaker 1:And if you find that that's you as well in your local session, then this is a great exercise to be able to do is can you learn a tune on the spot? Can you recognize enough of the phrasing, the patterns? Are you familiar with different intervals in music that you can easily recognize? Okay, this is a G going to an E, this is a descending third, this is an ascending seventh. And of course it takes me a long time to actually say you know ascending seventh and all that. Ideally, in your brain you just automatically know that's the interval, that's how it sounds, that's how I play it on my fiddle. So it's one thing to be able to say that and, of course, another thing to make it pretty much subconscious right away. So there is a lot going on. I have to say if there's one thing that I've learned I mean obviously I learned a lot in my classical training, but if it's one thing that you know, putting in at least 10,000 hours into practice, I would say one of the best things that could have happened there was just how familiar I am with the different intervals and the different phrases. And now being able to take that and directly transfer it to new tunes and just being able to quickly rearrange patterns is a very fun skill to be able to do, but it does take time to develop.
Speaker 1:So this is in the book. This is what Erickson and Poole call mental representations. So you are making these recognizable patterns. So essentially, this is what I talk about with you know phrasing conversations. So if you're trying to memorize a tune, whether that's immediately in a session or if you're just learning it by ear from a recording on your own time, you're listening for these familiar patterns. You're not necessarily learning it individual note by individual note. You're instead, you know, taking these familiar phrases. You're taking two bar phrases and you're putting them together. It's a conversation. So one phrase is one person saying hi, how are you? And then the other person responds and then you hear that other phrase come back again sometimes and then you go off in a totally different direction to end your a part and your b part.
Speaker 1:So really being able to recognize when you have matching phrases in a tune, and so maybe you know we're typically working with eight different two bar phrases in any given tune. So we have four phrases in the A part, four phrases in the B part. Sometimes your A and your B end the same, so that's one less phrase that you have to memorize. And sometimes you have patterns that come back in your A part and your B part and you just get a lot of shared phrases throughout the tune. So if you can recognize that, suddenly it doesn't become oh, I'm trying to memorize, you know, 64 bars of notes. Instead it's I'm actually memorizing six phrases and I can make those into an easily grouped context in my brain, using intervals and using, you know, recognition from other tunes that I know and making it familiar. So it's a lot easier to memorize a sentence that somebody says rather than a jumble of words that just doesn't really make sense in the moment.
Speaker 1:So to wrap this up, we have our three practices. We have naive, we have purposeful and deliberate, and I'm in the camp of depending on what your goal is with Irish music. I think that a lot of us could get away with being in the purposeful practice sector, and then if you really really want to push yourself, then of course, you can go on the deliberate practice route, but I think that, regardless of your goal, that using deliberate practice strategies to help you improve with your fiddling is a really, really good idea, and it's just something that I think you'll find will pay off so well in the long run. One with the sense of accomplishment that you've had, and just two, with the practice of dedicating yourself to this craft and to really taking the time, the focused attention and energy to get familiar with this music and really really get into the weeds of what it is and what you're playing, what notes you're playing, recognizing the intervals, recognizing what it is that another fiddle player is doing when you listen to them and intervals, recognizing what it is that another fiddle player is doing when you listen to them and can you emulate what it is they're doing. There's just so many different ways that you can use this practice, so I hope that you found this breakdown valuable.
Speaker 1:I hope that you recognized yourself maybe in some of the different areas and you're able to either let that motivate you to move to a different area or to draw on some strategies and have the purposeful and the deliberate and really get yourself moving and get yourself to the goal that you would like in your fiddle practice. And I'm definitely not done talking about this book. I will be talking about practicing with a couple other guests and of course, I'm always curious to return back to this and what it means within different individual examples that come up over time. So of course, I have the example today of the phrasing and the sessions, but maybe I'll have another example that comes up down the road of just how deliberate practice and purposeful practice really is of value, and I'm sure you have many examples as well. So thank you so much for listening and I'll chat with you next time.