Playing Faster 1

Start with a helpful attitude!

Does playing faster come naturally? Is it a skill you have to learn? How fast is fast enough? In this and two more posts, we’ll try to answer these questions!

If you’re worried about being able to play fast enough, know that with persistence, you will play faster as the instrument, and your favorite tunes, become more comfortable. But there are things you can do to learn to play faster, and sooner than you might expect.

Sometimes beginners worry about whether they can play fast enough, but they also have a lot on their plate, so this is usually just one of many goals. The speed problem usually weighs in more for intermediate learners. However, as we'll discuss, even relative beginners can learn to play a tune up to tempo, as long as they work on it in manageable bits.

Intermediate fiddlers have some playing and listening experience via sessions, performances and CDs, where they often hear musicians play faster than they themselves can manage. It's pretty natural for them to think, "How will I ever keep up? And will it happen in my lifetime?"

How fast you play is about the tempo, the beat, and therefore primarily about the bow. Of course we want to learn the notes, but the bow provides the beat. If the bow is able to do its job, the notes make much more sense. We’ll consider some games/exercises to work on this in the next post.

But before working on playing faster, it’s important to have the right attitude. To set yourself up for this, think about how fast you are able to speak — and how many letters go into the words that breeze by in an average conversation. Try saying the word "straight" out loud. It takes a quarter of a second. Now spell it out loud. This takes about two seconds. You can say the whole word in the time it takes to spell out the first letter!

This is how playing music works too. If you choose to think of a tune as merely a sequence of notes that you have to play in the right order and at the right time, you're going to get bogged down.

Just like speaking or singing, music is made up of “words” (beats), and these words fit into phrases (usually two measures per phrase) and the equivalent of sentences (A part, B part). In fact, if a song has lyrics, this is exactly how the words match the music.

If, when you learn a tune, your goal is to simply read or memorize the notes in order, you’re likely to sound mechanical, as if you were pronouncing every letter in a sentence instead of having something to say. This makes talking — and music — difficult to understand. And putting out the mental energy to be aware of all those individual notes makes it nearly impossible to think fast enough to speak naturally or play music at a listenable speed.

While it's impossible to speak letter by letter, it's not much easier to pronounce one word after another without knowing how and why they fit together. We don't say "Pick. Up. The. Fiddle. And. Play." We say "Pick up,” “the fiddle," "and play." We also speak with good timing if we want to be understood — we make clear which syllables are the important ones: "PICK up the FIDdle and PLAY." Without those three accented beats, that sentence would sound confusing or could come across as mere mumbling, and probably not worth paying attention to.

Allow a tune to flow at a reasonable speed by focusing on beats and phrases. Know what you're trying to say (the phrases) and let them flow in the right order.

You can clap your hands, tap your toes, jump, or dance 100 times per minute. But you can’t do these things 400 times a minute, which is how fast you’d need to think if you’re thinking about every note in a reel (which usually has four notes per beat). Learn the notes in groups, in beats, in “words.” If you do, speeding up a metronome can help you play faster. But if you’re reading or thinking of a tune as a sequence of notes, speeding up a metronome will drive you to drink. (Of course, playing in a good session could drive you to drink too, but for very different reasons!)

I’ve tried to help people develop a sense of phrasing as they learn tunes by including it in all the audio, visuals and videos on my site www.fiddle-online.com — this leads naturally to playing faster and more musically, and helps you remember the tunes better, because you’re learning them, not memorizing them.

In the next post, we'll get into some practical tips to learn to play faster. In the post after that, we’ll take a look at how to decide what speed to aim for. Stayed tuned!