Mel Biggs: Carving the Air

Judy Minot: Hey musicians, wouldn't you love to turbocharge your practice time? Why not discover the joy of playing and practicing in an immersive weekend in the beautiful English countryside? I'm Judy Minat, author of the award-winning book Best Practice: Inspiration and Ideas for Traditional Musicians. My name's Mel Biggs, I'm a melodeon player and folk music educator, and this summer I'm coming to Walsey Manor to run a brand new music making course with the fantastic Judy Minot. Amateur musicians, especially adults, often struggle with the nuts and bolts of practicing. How much time should we spend? What should we focus on? There are so many options, so many tunes, so many YouTube videos. It's overwhelming. How can we silence that voice in our heads that keeps telling us we're no good? Plus, how do we fit all this into a busy schedule of life stuff? The course is designed to get people to recognize the skills of practice. We're gonna look at what it is to practice more efficiently and what that then leads to is playing with more joy, and that is with yourself and with other people around you, of which there'll be plenty of opportunity to do at Halsey Manor in the wonderful spaces that we've got there to play in. You'll sharpen your skills, meet new friends, and leave your troubles behind in this inspiring natural setting. This three-day creative retreat will let you fully devote your energy to deepening your connection with yourself, your instruments. And your musicianship. Any instrument is welcome and you can be working at any level on your instrument. You don't need to be able to learn by ear or read music. Paulsey Manor is the national centre for folk arts in England. It's set in the beautiful Quantok National Park. Space is very limited, so sign up soon. Me and Judy are really excited to meet you and we're really looking forward to delivering our very first course together. Welcome to the podcast Best Practice for Musicians, where we discuss how to practice more efficiently and play with more joy. I'm Judy Minat and I'm so happy to talk with Melodeon teacher Mel Biggs today. Mel is well known on the UK folk scene as a musician, Melodeon teacher, and performer and morist dancer. She's gotten a very strong reputation as a thoughtful, perceptive, and mindful Melodeon teacher. With a thriving online group of students and a really deep library of videos on practice and playing. You should check them out. Some great interviews there also with other Melodeon players. You'll find out all you want to know about Mel on Melbiggsmusic.co.uk. So, kind of full disclosure, Mel and I met a few months ago when I did a workshop ⁓ with her students, and we did an interview after the fact, and we just found we had so much in common. That we decided to do a weekend workshop together on practicing skills. Anyway, Mel, so great to see you again. Yeah, you too. So you think a lot about practicing. What do you think is the biggest issue that your beginner students face as far as practicing goes? I think mostly it's people don't think they have the time to do it. That's kind of the thing that comes immediately to mind that people have fed back time and time again. It's like, ⁓ I don't have the time to do it and Therefore I've not practiced and it was always trying to kind of hack, you know, let me try and help you find ten minutes in every other day or, you know, whatever it would end up being, because the bottom line is anything's better than nothing. But people are busy and generally when they pick up this instrument, they've retired, maybe their grandparents, you know, they've got childcare in their life again. And it it is a lot to fit in, but it's always trying to make them realise that they picked it up for a reason and that my job is to try and keep that dream alive and enable them to make progress in however they come to me, however they land in front of me. And I think that's really important as a tutor just to try and motivate the person that's in front of you where they're at there and then, irrespective of how much practice they've done. I love that. We should probably talk a little about the Melodeon, because I think some people People aren't familiar with it. You've got three of them sitting in the shock behind you or four? There are many behind me, yeah. In Ireland where I live, they don't call that a melodion. ⁓ they call it an accordion, and a melodion is a one is an instrument with one. A ten button box. And I think that is potentially the correct way. It's just it's commonly referred to in England as a melodion. ⁓ but as I've discovered ⁓ I i Instagram hashtags over the years have changed, but a l I use a lot of different hashtags for this particular instrument because every culture has a different name for it. ⁓ I think the funniest one that sticks out to me is in Holland they call it a trek sac, which is literally like a pushbag. and it's ⁓ just a kind of yeah trek harmonica is the correct, you know, sort of the full pronunciation. But it seems everywhere around the world has got its own way of naming it. But I think the proper sort of educational academic way is Diatonic accordion. Maybe people are more familiar with the harmonica. It's literally just a series of wooden harmonicas with steel reeds in these boxes. So you could just literally take out the reed block and play it like a harmonica. Very good for your brain, especially if you're afraid of you know increasing old age. It's the it's a well known dementia preventer, I think, for sure. I couldn't think of the word for dementia. Do I have dementia? Tell me what made you get so focused on practicing? I mean, I know it might sound like an obvious thing. You're a teacher, you gotta help people practice, but at the same time, I've worked with many teachers who never really focused on what I would do when I went home. What gave you the idea of getting so into practicing? I wanna start off by saying that I not the most disciplined practiser. You know, I'm not here as some sort of like guru, ⁓ but I think when I am teaching I'm always putting myself in my students' shoes and thinking about what could really help them? What do they need? How can I kind of ⁓ create a a Melinar tutorial or, you know, a a a sequence of lessons or a group workshop? How can I tailor it to what they are needing in their life that they might not recognize is a barrier or something that they need help with? You focus very much on on sort of mindfulness and a mind-body awareness. And d w how did you come to that? Just basically nerding out on neurobiology. so like full disclosure, I have a bachelor's degree in molecular biology. and I think that for me it was that n the neurobiology sort of side of things just really fascinated me and the neuroplasticity and how the brain can evolve and adapt to new impetus and new stimuli. Wh wherever I come up against it in sports science or in music, in in applying yourself to a discipline. it really intrigues me how we can create routine for ourselves in and that can look like many different things, but putting new information in our brains and our bodies, as musicians, we know we need our body on board with all of that. But then you have all of those neural pathways, the motor neurons that have to kind of develop a alongside the bits of the brain that are needed to light up those particular like minute sort of muscle movements. There's a really, really good book if anyone else wants to geek out in the way that I did about this. It's Oliver Sachs' Music ⁓ Music Aphilia. ⁓ yeah. And it's like a series of case studies, ⁓ all about music and the brain. It's like short little case studies that you can like dip in and out of very, very quickly. So some of them that stuck with me were ⁓ I can't remember which symphony orchestra it was, or if it if it was a symphony orchestra, but they strapped them up to sort of brain scanning machines and they gave a certain period of time for people to practice with their instrument and then without their instrument. And when they compared the brain charts, the activity charts, they were absolutely the same. So that for me just kind of, you know, and I read this morning in your in your Bible, I which I'm gonna plug because I don't think you plug it enough, but it's incredible. Judy's book, Best Practice, about playing mute. So not actually with the instrument, but just imagining in really good detail. And this is where that mindful approach comes in, is just find somewhere that you're not being distracted and try and put yourself in the space where you're with your instrument and imagine yourself playing something that you know well, you know, so that you can try to recall it, how it feels and how it sounds, what's your body doing in that moment to create that little note change, that interval, whatever it might be. And I think that that for me is something that I take on board myself as somebody who's still on a learning journey and still playing and putting things in my body that I want to be able to do musically. ⁓ but also very much that's a huge part of how I teach as well, because a lot of people want quite complicated things, but for me it's about showing them how to get there. And a lot of the time what they're missing is that brain body connection and that awareness of how that's such a huge part of the whole Practice of being a musician. Developing your ability to imagine music in a very clear, clear way. It's something I've heard over and over from talking to ⁓ really great musicians. I did a whole Melinar tutorial last year that I called ⁓ visualizing your success. And essentially it was all about the idea of the sound that you want to create as a musician is already within you. And it's just about finding ways to unlock that. And usually that's to do with your inner voice, what you're telling yourself. But also your awareness of the connection with your instrument and how your body is implicitly connected with the sound that it creates. Whatever that is, whether it's one of these charming squeeze boxes or a piece of a brass instrument, Woodwind, you know, you've got your voice connected with that in a lot of ways, you know, that kind of the breath and the vocal cords connected with that, which I don't think there's anything more pure than somebody's voice, you know, whether you're singing or whatever, but it's such a vulnerable sort of thing to be. aware of but also learn to express and learn how to harness that brain-body connection to express what it is you're really trying to sound like. ⁓ and you don't have to be the most top flight musician to be wanting to express yourself in the most sort of authentic way. You know, everybody that I've ever taught has always got an idea of, ⁓ I want to sound like that, but I'm not getting it. How can I get that sound? And did a lot of research and reading about, you know, different ways to think and give yourself like mental patterns and routines to get into and physical things, you know, exercises and practice techniques that you can take away. So that's on my Patreon, by the way, for all of my melinars are on a membership platform. Yeah, it's so it's only on your Patreon you have to become a member of your Patreon. Yes, Melinar is Mel's branded term for like a little workshop that she does online. And there are some fantastic fantastic programs on there. And I tha that sounds really great. The idea of imagining what you want to sound like and then the ability to listen uncritically. One of the I think difficulties we have with listening to ourselves is that the critical mind comes in so quickly that we almost aren't able to hear our own selves because we're so busy criticizing. And if we could instead just say, ⁓ I see. That's not like I'd like it to be. It could be more in time. Instead of The self critic is is a killer. A hundred percent. And I I have a very a very vivid inner critic. It's definitely a journey and it can be bad some days and through therapy and through kind of mindful techniques and learning how to kind of keep a lid on it and let it out of the window, like get get it out of your life. I've definitely found ways to control it, but it's incredible how sometimes it can just raise its ugly head and then it just like tears you down out of nowhere. You have to be able to get in a place where listening with a neutral sense. And the way that I for myself try to do that is listen as if you're listening to somebody else, because we're usually kinder to other people than we are to ourselves. So if that's a wave to help you guys sort of do that and make the steps towards recording yourself, being able to listen back as if you're listening to somebody else, and then be kind. Try and name three things you like about it before you say what you want to change about it. And you know, go f it sounds easy but it's really hard to do, but it's worth working on. Excellent advice. I think somehow in our brains we think that the critical mind is helping us. You know, I suppose there's aspects where you want to say, I'd like to do that better, but I wouldn't call that being critical. I'd say that's an aspiration. And that's a very different approach than saying that wasn't good enough. Nobody's gonna want to listen to that, which is absolutely not true. How do you teach interpretation or phrasing? ⁓ because we were talking a little bit about finding your own voice. For me, on the instrument that I play, and predominantly that's the instrument I'm also working with in my students as well, they they're very sensitive instruments. I ⁓ they sit over our major organs. Generally we're sat down while we're playing them. So physical movement can have a real response in the instrument, to rhythm and pulsing and dynamics. ⁓ particularly like in the bellows, the sort of the shift between loud and quiet is about bellows pressure. ⁓ and that's generally, yes, connected with the left hand that's moving the bellows, but it's also in how the shoulders are moving and the waistline and the hips on the seat and things like that. You can really affect so many different timbras with the instrument. And that for me is like a creative palette. It and it's almost never ending 'cause that you'll always see another musician doing something, you're like, I've never found that. Like and look at what they're doing and And it's always like exciting to see other people's like interpretations and like magic that they kind of get out of this crazy box of sounds. so I think when I'm sat in front of a student who's at a point in their journey where they can play tunes competently, they can keep time, for me that's when they're ready to take on that extra information of playing around with a tune and being able to, yeah, phrasing, put little pauses in hiatus marks. ⁓ How to taper a note off really controlled so that it kind of like comes to a nice ending. all of these real subtleties to do with carving the air, as I call it. It's like we then learn to take the air knife and we go into the tune like it's a block of marble, and we've spent ages hewing this block of marble, and we've got the tune, it's right there in front of us, but now we can go in with our air knife and we can carve bits out of it and soften certain bits and smooth them over. And then that for me is all about. physicality. Again, bringing it back to that kind of relaxation in the body and how the breath can really help. You know, your physical breath, if you're relaxed, then the instrument and the sound is relaxed. You're not rushing to get to that next note. You can just leave that little hiatus and then move forward in the tune and kind of build up the phrasing and ⁓ the pattern. And then it becomes a lot more like a fingerprint. You know, it's it's your interpretation after that of how you want to tell the story with the piece of music that you're playing. ⁓ And I think that's where I think phrasing and dynamics and all of that stuff just becomes the piece is your own after that. It's your own expression. Showing students just lots of different ways of controlling the sound that they're making and then like leaving it up to them, just really trying to give them the tools to make the decisions in their own way. I think most instruments you spend a good part of your time, especially at the beginning, just trying to get a sound. And then just where are the notes? But at certain point, you know, you start to get into into the little nitty-gritty details of how do you begin a note? How do you end a note? You know, what are the things you can do in the middle? Absolutely. That's where the music is, isn't it? Would you agree with that? Like it that's that's playing music. We can all play tunes, and I and I'm not taking anything away from that, like you say, just to get a tune out of an instrument. I mean, we're lucky with these lovely push-button things because we don't have to craft the note, but fiddle players or ⁓ you know, fretless players, you know, every instrument has its complexities to overcome just to get the block of marble, just to get the tune there. ⁓ and then I I always say to students like you've got to realise it you've taken a long time to get here. Enjoy that because there's nothing wrong with you just playing the tune. But there's always aspiration. I want to do more, I want to do better, I'm not good enough yet. And it's just monitoring that negative self-talk but also keeping them motivated towards what their goals are. Harness it. Harness it. ⁓ you play a lot for for Morris and and you do come from the British tradition, which I think ⁓ you know I must correct you this, sorry, it's English tradition. It's very much an English tradition. I must admit to not having ⁓ a very great idea of the subtlety between British, English and UK. So say English you would distinguish yourself from Scotland and Wales, basically. And Northern Ireland as well. But b you know, that being Great Britain, so British being, you know, that general area, but you know, general area. They're they're distinct cultures and populations. But yeah, Morris dancing is the English traditional dance, yeah. And it and there are regional differences and stylistics, but ⁓ yeah, it's only found within England. Well, you do find it elsewhere, but it originated here. But then again it didn't, 'cause it i there are similarities to lots of like northern African dances and things that are now found in Spain and the Basque region that are very similar. So at some point it's traveled from a motherland that we're not entirely sure. There are definitely intelligent people out there that are researching it academically. But you're gonna find a lot more Morris players and dancers in England than pretty much anywhere else, and that is what we'll say it came from with that name. One of the interesting things about Morris playing versus a lot of other dance playing is that for most other dance playing that I've heard. It has a beat and the beat goes yada da da da da da da. Whatever it does. But with Morris it's it's the dance has hops and things like this, so that the dance very often isn't metronomic, I guess is the way I would say. You have to very often watch the the the dancers and see how high they're gonna leap and make sure that you come down in the right place. I imagine that makes you a much better observer and listener as a player than ⁓ you would otherwise if you didn't have that. experience playing for those dancers. Yeah. Just before I go into detail about that, s specifically the regions of England that got n diff different traditional dances and some are very metronomic. I mean northwest playing is typified by clogs and very straight lines and usually a big band with lots of drums and it's very you know, this kind of it's not a military influence but These days i there's lots of kind of snare drums and that kind of military drumming that goes alongside the North West traditions which come out of the the fabric mills and, you know, where there was regimentation and a four a forewoman that was there with a whistle. So we still see that kind of linkage, but that's very precise, you know, and the dancing is very much marched out. Whereas I think the type of dancing that you're referring to, as typically I would expect from somebody not from this land, is Cotswold Morris, and that's the big white hankies and you know, white Costumes that we tend to see, and the moves are a lot more balletic. If the dancers are able to, there's a lot more airtime. ⁓ so yeah, where they take off from the ground and land again actually does need a little bit of pullback in the way you play. So yeah, you have to be observant of that as a musician. And then if you're playing one-on-one with just playing for a jig, a solo jig, that's a really beautiful symbiotic experience of you know, feeding off of each other's. ⁓ musicality within the dance and the music. But also if you're playing for a set of dances which could be sort of six or eight dancers, your job I think as a musician is to try and sort of unify that movement. And even within that you'll have people that can jump a bit higher and those that don't and it's trying to kind of level up the the whole experience and the of the visual. That and that's why very much as a dance musician, I'm taking cues off of the visual of the hankies or ⁓ the way that the knees rise. Also the the sound of the bells really helps to keep me in time. ⁓ because the bells won't speed up or slow down. They they are uniform with the set and you know you can kind of really get a lot of information off of that rhythm of the the bells on the legs. And yeah the physical the physicality of the body, like it sounds weird, but I tend to watch the navel area a lot of dancers. So I'm looking at belt buckles or, you know, kind of like bellies. And that's For me, the area that I can in my peripheral see the feet, but I can also see the hankies and the and the shoulders. And that gives me a lot of information as to where the lift and the landing is in the dance. And then musically I can kind of, yeah, respond to those cues and be with them rather than speed them up to get them to land quicker or whatever. You know, it's all about airtime and grace. So yeah, Cotswold is a very different beast to play for. Predominantly now I play for Border Morris, which is typified by ⁓ tattered jackets dancing with sticks. and it's from the borders of England and Wales. And again, I would say that's pretty metronomic. It's a lot slower than Northwest. and at some sides will dance faster, some will dance slower. But I I like to be kind of steady and on the back of the beat and kind of really holding it down. ⁓ but there's still a lot of lift in Border Morris. It's just a bit more grungy somehow ⁓ and sort of really sitting into that groove. And occasionally there will be certain figures in the dance that I like to highlight with a bit more of a stylized way of playing. Like if we do a stick chuck, I like to leave a lot of air in the tune because then it's like, ⁓ look at that stick flying through the air. You know, you kind of like you can really highlight moments like that. ⁓ in other words, the stick chuck being where they pass the stick, they Yeah, like literally throw it across to you know, and you're swapping sticks by throwing them through the air. Usually it's like cut out the third beat or something. So you can kind of like just literally just remove part of the tune. just to highlight this moment. and yeah, it's nice to kind of play around like that just to highlight certain things within the dance. But for me, Border Morris isn't traditionally as stylized. It's just something that's in the contemporary view of of what the dance is now. And there's lots of contemporary views, lots more dark, kind of gothic ways of dancing and the kind of like spooky music and ⁓ so the yeah, the the scene on for Border Morris is quite diverse. Must be fun. Yeah. Do you think you take some of those ideas back to your other playing, to your performance, into ⁓ even your writing? Yeah, a hundred percent. And I'm very inspired as well by like continental Europe, Belgium and France predominantly. But I think I am at the heart, at my roots are English, you know, Southern English Morris, ⁓ that kind of Southern English country dance style. and that's where my original inspiration was from and the the musicians that kind of are part of that scene. Some of which will be names that you know and some are just amazing players in pubs or Morrisides that just come out for the season and then go back home. The beating heart of my playing and my rhythm and my style is definitely from Morris. Yeah. Yeah. You were talking about breathing and melody and and I have always felt like ⁓ playing an instrument with a bellows, it it's a beautiful benefit that you have a breathing instrument and Therefore it connects you to your breath. Do you ⁓ do you feel that way? I have had a student in the past who almost passed out because they were I can't remember the tune now, but we were looking at playing across the road. So the bellows were growing and growing and growing and he wasn't breathing. And yeah, genuinely went quite lightheaded and wobbly at one point. And ⁓ I thought I might have to enact my public liability insurance. You do have a tendency to go Yeah It's very hard not to. It doesn't always, you know If the bellows grow, you're breathing in. It's not always like that. And I wouldn't necessarily encourage you to breathe along with the instrument. ⁓ but it can certainly be a way to ground yourself with it as like a warm-up exercise and to for you to take some deep breaths and also learn to extend the bellows. Cause I think that for this instrument, occasionally we do need big bellows. If we want to drone a note for a long time, learning to keep that steady and control the arm. As you move away further from your mid body, that gets harder when the instrument's out there 'cause it's quite heavy and you've got to make sure you can control that thread of sound without wavering. So it's worth doing those sorts of practices. But ⁓ yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't encourage people to breathe with the instrument. I think it can lead to some hyperventilations or or worse. But it's interesting though on any instrument, ⁓ for example on the fiddle, you have parts of the bow that are harder to play with, you know, 'cause the balance of the bow is at the long end if you're playing by the frog. And you so people have a tendency as beginners to learn to play in the middle of the bow or at the tip of the bow where all the weight is on there and they really can lighten their use of their hands. And you're right, as a melodeon player or an accordion player, you s you start out by, you know, just using sort of the middle easy range, but to be able to spread it out is a technique that you have to practice because there's gonna be different balance issues. ⁓ I remember being taught by a voice teacher. that this happens with your voice too. There's a you have kind of a sweet spot in your voice that's real easy to belt it out. And a lot of singers just live there. But what you really want to do is learn to be just as comfortable upper and just as comfortable lower. And I think no matter what instrument you play, maybe worth finding that on your instrument. Yeah. Extending your range, either pitch, you know, obviously like you say as vocalists, but in terms of levels of challenge, I suppose I've always termed it. And you know where we're most comfortable is not a growing space. It's a comfortable space. It's a happy space. We absolutely want to spend most of our time there. But if we're looking to grow our skills, we need to be in that area just outside, you know, ⁓ it I can't remember now. I've seen a diagram, isn't there? There's like three levels of, you know, the growth phase is just outside the comfort zone. And then is it panic phase or something? Or I can't quite remember, but where you're too stressed to to to take anything in. There's a comfort level Where you're like, Yeah, but this is kinda nice. I don't wanna go out of this. You said there's a panic level too. So I think it's in the context of group learning. You want people to feel comfortable, but they're there to learn. So, you know, there needs to be structured and contained exercises that allow them to go outside of that comfort zone. And even into the high I I don't know if it was panic or just high stress, kind of where this is really, really challenging. I'm not sure if I'm gonna get this, you know, that kind of I think that's good to let them experience that so that they know where their ceiling level is right now, but they also know where they're aiming for. But then to bring them back to the comfort level, you know, this is like on a timeline of a workshop or a weekend or a week or however long you've got this group for. and sort of allowing them this opportunity to safely go out of their comfort zone, but also then return to it and and expand, you know, expand their comfort zone so that they will be able to sit in that challenging space and feel okay and feel like they're achieving and know that they're pushing their ceiling. And you can see from that how we might go in our weekend in Halsey. Definitely. Which we have spent some time this morning just before this episode, didn't we? We were planning it. It's so lovely to feel like and I knew it would be because we've felt it before, but we're on the same page with it. We've got our kind of story arc of where we want people to land at the end of the weekend. And yeah, we've been filling in how we're gonna get them there. I'm really excited. And to see the the growth ⁓ I I just love that to see spark in their eyes and the kind of light bulb go on and it's wonderful. Hey musicians, wouldn't you love to turbocharge your practice time? Why not discover the joy of playing and practicing in an immersive weekend in the beautiful English countryside? The course is designed to get people to recognize the skills of practice. Amateur musicians, especially adults, often struggle with the nuts and bolts of practicing. How much time should we spend? What should we focus on? There are so many options, so many tunes, so many YouTube videos. It's overwhelming. How can we silence that voice in our heads that keeps telling us we're no good? Plus, how do we fit all this into a busy schedule of life stuff? We're gonna look at what it is to practice more efficiently and what that then leads to is playing with more joy. You'll sharpen your skills, meet new friends, and leave your troubles behind in this inspiring, natural setting. Space is very limited, so sign up soon. Me and Judy are really excited to meet you and we're really looking forward to delivering our very first course together. You approach a new tune that you want to learn, what's the first thing that you would do? I listen to it. So I find a source online, usually YouTube, that I really like listening to. Could be any instrument, could be any band or whatever, or just a solo, whatever ensemble. And ⁓ yeah, just put it on repeat and I'll just walk around with it while I'm doing other things and just listen to it way too many times. I'm quite obsessive like that, but just set a loop so that then basically it becomes part of me and it's in my brain, earworming me 247. ⁓ and then I'll go to the instrument and work it out from there. I mean sometimes I'll I I'll be humming it and I always recommend that people are able to ri like sing it back to themselves. And then yeah, it's usually quite a slick process depending on the complexity of the key signature and that kind of thing. But it's something that just pops out now. ⁓ but yeah it did took took the work in the beginning. Like I it's not an easy process but it is for me now as a professional that does this For a living, you know, something that's quite quick, but it's taken a lot of hours to to be able to do that. For anyone who's who's in a l learner stage on an instrument, getting it from your brain into your fingers is often quite ⁓ frustrating and takes quite a bit of time. And I think that you're right that having it really solid in your head lets you know when you've when you've gone a awry a bit. Yeah, because you can by trial and error try and work it out, but then you know, ⁓ I've just made a note on the instrument that's not linking up with that bit in my head. But I do work with a lot of people that struggle with that. Either they're not natural at it and it does take them time, or they just don't have that skill. And that's something I've had to learn as a tutor, is not everybody does have the ability to hear something and recall it. ⁓ but they have this like intense drive to be able to play by ear or play this instrument. So that's always a glorious challenge of like. working with them with that frustration, but like looking at you know other alternative ways of getting the tune into them. Often for me it's about playing along with the track. So you're not having to memorize it, but you can play along with the track and you're still learning to build that ear coordination, you know, by slowing things right down. And then it's just basically like a sequence of notes where it's like you know, just can you find this note? Can you hear that it's the same? And it's ⁓ it's a slow process, but that's that's the way I've found to work with people that can't naturally memorize things. But you do get better at it. Generally, everyone is able to contain information and work on that memorising, that recall skill. ⁓ but I think it's an important thing that I learned. I can't remember when, it was it feels like years ago now, but I came up against somebody that just really couldn't. And no matter how simple I took them, ⁓ and Part of it was their panic and I worked through that with them. And then it was just discovering that, ⁓ maybe this is just a thing that some brains just can't do this. ⁓ but that's okay. We can find other ways around it. I'm I'm a dog with a bone. I don't want to ever tell some like I have so many students that have come to me and been told in their childhood that they haven't got pitch and they can't sing and they can't pl and I'm like, that's horrendous. I would never tell somebody that. Like that's just to me so damaging to people. ⁓ so I'm a dog with a bone, I don't wanna give up, you know, I've always gotta try and find a creative way to solve the problem, whatever that might be, you know. It's just a fascinating way of well, this is how it is for me, but I'm not gonna assume that everyone can work like that. So let's find other ways to do that same thing. And then you just have an auxiliary kind of lineup of alternative methods. It's ⁓ you know, good to have that in the back pocket. A good friend of mine, who's a musician, has something called apantasia. And aphantasia is the inability to picture something in your mind. ⁓ and I I don't know what the the corollary is for audio, but I I imagine there are people who have more or less ability to recall audio. Some people just don't recall tunes. As you say, you wanna you need to find an alternate way. And sometimes that is using sheep music. ⁓ you know, I do use sheep music in my teaching. I'm ⁓ in a minimal way, and usually for me it's as a backup rather than as the forefront of you know, what we're doing. ⁓ but yeah, sometimes for those students that can't recall or really, really struggle and get such panic about it that it's kind of th the the lesson is pointless after that. It's like, well let's just have a quick look at the sheet music, just the first bar. ⁓ there it is. Great. Well now we don't need the sheet music. We've got it in our head again. So it's just, you know, being sympathetic to the way different brains work. But I have a lot of students I think I read it in your book this morning as well. Just like a couple of bars of notes, you know, and they'll just write that out or put a PDF together and sit there with their tablet in a session and there's so many people that we see in sessions just, you know, using a tablet to remind themselves of what they know. It's great with your phone, nobody really needs to know what you're doing with your phone. Yeah, you're right. It it it's sometimes the panic is what gets in the way. It's not the fact that you couldn't remember, it's that you're panicking. So talk a little about listening. How important do you think listening is? ⁓ it's everything. I think it is the key thing as a musician. ⁓ of any level, of any standard. First lesson number one is listen to the kind of music you enjoy. ⁓ listen to the musicians playing the same instruments as you. Find the ones you really enjoy and want to emulate. and also really I think listening is key for rhythm. and rhythm is king, rhythm is what h glues everybody together. Whether you're playing by yourself or whether you are playing in a session, ⁓ you have to be in time with yourself or the source that you're joining in with, you know, if you're playing along with a track or something to learn it. it's it's listening that's gonna tell you that initially and then putting it in your body. So we were talking part of our planning, little spoiler for Halsey. ⁓ we're gonna be doing a lot of work on playing in time together because that is important as a musician. But it can be a really difficult skill for people to get to grips with. So again We've both got our auxiliary of tools behind us and it's just trying to find different ways that we can play games with keeping time. First that's listening, but then it's kind of okay, we we can hear the beat, can we move to it? Great. Once we can move to it, can we breathe with that? Can we be relaxed with that? Are we rushing to get to the next beat? If we are, we're not completely relaxed. So then once it's in our bones, we can pick up the instrument and do, you know, kind of like little exercises that build up that layer cake of Playing in time. I'd say that's one of my strongest skills as a tutor is teaching that journey, that listening layer cake of building up rhythm and strength in awareness of what your ears are telling you to what your hand and your body are telling you. And I never get bored of teaching it. I love seeing that whole process come together for somebody. Great. And when you say in a session, I mean I I know that not everybody has the opportunity to. be in a in a great session. Sometimes they're few and far between in the type of music anyone might want to play. ⁓ but ⁓ there are other people who don't really want to play outside of their own living room and I get that. But what do you think you can get out of playing in a in a session type of a situation, whether it's an Irish session, an English session, a French session, whatever. What do you think for a you know I'm I'm always talking about practicing, you know, what can you get to make yourself better? As opposed to I'm just gonna come in here and play my ten tunes and you know hopefully have a chat with some people and go home. Like how can you help to improve yourself without making it, ⁓ I'm practicing in the session? The first thing that comes to mind is people, which might not be the obvious answer, you know, if people listening might have you know, I'm sure everyone's come up with their own ideas of this, but people are great ⁓ in many, many ways. And when you're learning, you need other people around you that are at the level you're at. that are a slightly better than you and you can really focus on, you know, what they're doing to get where they're going. And then also the sh hot players. The really good players, you need those in there as well to kind of like show the aspiration level. If you can kind of form a little group of people, even just one person that you know has got a smile for you, makes a space for you, you can sit next to them, they might start some tunes for you. Maybe you can meet up outside of the session to have some practice between the two of you at home. I know a lot of my students who do make their own little at home sessions and then they feel more comfortable to turn up at the session because they know they're going with their mates and then that's a safer place for them to feel that they can take some risks and play some new things that they've been working on. Generally I'm quite an introverted person but I do think people are really important in that whole process of learning. So yeah, that'll probably be my answer. That's a great answer. I love it. And when you sit down to practice, what is there anything you do first? Is do you have any method? I've heard other guests of yours say this, but I think it's It depends on the mood I'm in in the day. Like if I just need to sit down and remind myself I can do something, I'll just play my favourites. ⁓ and I'll just reel them off. Or I might obsess about one, you know, but just for the sake of just, ⁓ yeah, I can still do this, I still love this part of the tune, I love using the bellows at this moment, I love this chord that I do, just reminding that but why am I doing it and this is why I and I'm good at it as well. I think that's something I have to remind myself of quite frequently. if I'm more in a headspace of, ⁓ no, actually I wanna nail that thing today, typically I'll sit down and just play it without really thinking about it and then, okay, right, you've got that out of your system. Now let's work on the section that's bugging you. And that for me will often involve metronome work. ⁓ I've got very, very good timing, but I'm very good at it because I practice it a lot and I keep it, you know, for certain tunes where There are phrases that are a bit more stretchy or complicated under the right hand or whatever, or in the bellows movements, or the left hand pattern, maybe there's quite a lot of complexity. I need to make sure that I can play that really solid and really clean. So I'll set the metronome really slowly and really kind of like too slowly, really. I mean, I I can play it faster, but it set it resets my brain. It's like going on an arrowboat holiday at three miles an hour all week, and you're just like, ooh. I can mentally breathe because I can just really feel the movements between the buttons and I can feel the pistons in my fingers. I always talk about having piston fingers and it's like that mechanical movement of my fingers to make this happen. I can really feel every single moment and I want to be aware of that before I think of speeding it up. Because when you're going at speed, you can't think of things or feel them in that much detail. But if you've input it really slowly. This magical thing happens at speed where you've got the muscle memory and you've got the strength in your fingers because you've done the weights at the gym really slowly and you're not just there like buzzing away like at a million miles an hour. So yeah, piston fingers, doing your weights slowly, playing slowly, it builds up the strength, builds up your awareness of what you need to be doing, and the spacing like between things. Like particularly on this instrument, there's a lot of stretching to do if you've got certain chord changes. So, you know, you need to be a hundred percent subconscious. on you know, what what's it called unconsciously competent. Is that the is that is that the hierarchy? ⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that sort of feeling that sometimes a stretch is hard to do. And you just have to say, all right, I'm gonna slow it down enough so that I'm gonna say to my you know, kind of s I say, say to my brain, it's this is the distance. It's not that. It's it. You know. I I do exactly the same and I'm like, it's here, it's not here. It's a little bit more than you think it is, it's not it's not the lazy version. Or sometimes I come up with names. I I did this when I was in the band and I had lots of quick chord changes on at the time unfamiliar chords. ⁓ 'cause on the Melodeon there's kind of like three positions you can have your chord inversions in. Maybe if you're lucky you might have a fourth, but they're all slightly different shapes for the same chord. And I would give them names like dagger and sword, because dagger's a short blade and a sword is a long blade. And it was just like, you know, just telling my fingers how far to stretch. But also on that, on that note, another thing to practice is making things that feel hard and impossible and big and stretchy, just make it feel normal. You just have to practice it enough until it feels normal to do that. And also kind of silence the little voice in your head that's saying, This is hard, this is hard I can't do other kids. It's just to say, okay, I'm just gonna do it. Let's do it. ⁓ you know, you were also talking about this sort of piston thing and I ⁓ I I love feeling on a valve and ⁓ reed instrument where you can feel the place where, you know, you can feel where the reed starts to open. If you go slow enough, you can kind of really sense that. And on the fiddle I've been getting into lately, just like s slow going slow enough that I can f I can almost feel the when does the bow start to vibrate the string, you know. And i it's ⁓ it's it really gives you so much more insight into your own sound. Definitely. Actually I love bowed strings for that, ⁓ like the rosin and the the sort of the sound of the rosin biting the string to begin with. Like ⁓ I'm not a technical specialist on strings, obviously, I don't play them, but I've played with a lot of strings players that have talked to me about certain ways that they you know, particular strings or particular rosins, like We've just lost this wonderful man, Dave Shepherd. I'm sure a lot of people listening will know Blozerbella fiddle player, great English musician. And I'm pretty sure he told me he loves cello rosin on his fiddle and on his octave because he likes the grit that it gives. Yeah. And I love the sound of Dave's playing because, you know, I'm I'm listening to the s the mechanical noise of the instrument, if that makes sense, beyond the tuned sound. So I listened for his breath. There's a beautiful recording on one of the Blozerbella albums. You can hear his breath and you can hear this like airy, gritty Rosin scraping on the gut strings that he loved. And it's just so iconically him. and I love the way that that is it becomes, you know, if people are geeky enough to explore different ways of initiating sounds and keeping sounds going. That's such a fingerprint imprinting thing of like your style. Yeah, well it's up to you if whatever you want, but there is this aspect of any instrument is its physicality, you know, and This is like like a long you know, some of the reeds on an accordion are this long and some of them are this long and that's a physical thing. Like some they will take longer to open and they will take more effort to open and more bellows and you know, the it's And also more different ways of like where does that come from in our body? Where does that energy to innovate that reed come from? 'Cause the high reeds don't need a lot of energy. But the low reeds, you know, I ⁓ I call it oranges under the armpits. It's like you're squeezing an orange under your armpit. It doesn't necessarily come from here. It obviously does, but the energy starts from here. And it's, you know, that's how it works for me. There's like lots of different ways that I move my body to activate certain sounds in the instrument. And honestly, the way I've discovered that is just mucking around with it. Also taking some cues from other musicians where I've gone like, I love what you do there. I'm really trying hard to get it. Can you just tell me what you do? And they've been gracious enough to go into their bodies and go, Well I think I'm doing this. And you know, you can learn a lot just by watching somebody play and just try and like move in the same way. but yeah, I think just muck there's not enough said about just mucking around with sounds, particularly on the squeeze box, but any instrument, just look at what it what else it can do. And I'll just go back to what I just said about listen beyond the tuned notes of the instrument mechanically. What's that what's the dampening noise like on a mandolin? Like, can you use that? Do you like that dampening noise? Can you learn to affect that in the way that you remove the fingers. Can you get that dampening noise or a little pizzicato pluck? ⁓ I mean with the Melodeon there's so many like knocks and bashes and palette claps and squeaks and all sorts of things and one of the things it's a really good exercise for keeping in time is listen for the clacking of the palate closing because there's always like a minor delay in you pushing a button and hearing it open and then removing it and it clacking afterwards. It's like fractional it's but it's basically if you can hear the clack of the palette, you know and you know that that's metronomic, you can hear that that's in time. It can often be a way for people to hear into the tune. Like you're hearing into the instrument. You're listening for the extra noises it makes. And then that can help you to build that inner metronome. ⁓ I love that. I love So yeah, I think that's really important for for this squeeze box, but I mean any instrument, find those extra noises and try to play around with them, learn where they are, how are you making them happen, and then how can I put that into a sequence? How can I learn to control that exact dump dump or whatever the noise is that you're hearing? There's a well known ⁓ concertina player here in Ireland, Cormac Begley, who has developed the air button as a sound on his instrument. Yeah. So this this suddenly hear a screat whoosh and very rhythmic. It's t totally part of the tune. Yeah. It's very obvious to me that you love the Melodeon. ⁓ how do you think you came to the Melodeon as your, you know, kind of heart instrument? There was a quite a big delay in when the pl the seed was planted to when I actually picked one up for the first time. I probably I John Spires is the guy that I can ⁓ say was the original inspiration. Pl ⁓ when Spires and Bowdoin were very new. They came and played in my village in 2001. And I was like, whoa. They were like quite young lads on the scene at the time and I'd never seen anyone that was kind of anywhere near my age on the folk scene. It was just not something I'd seen. Not that I didn't enjoy music from older people. I was very used to that and very happy in that environment. But it was like, whoa. And John Spires plays squeeze box and it but it wasn't until 2006 I went to university. and I chose my university based on the local Morris sides that were around at the time. And I I used to travel from Cardiff to Chepstow on a three-hour round trip to go to Widders Border Morris. And there was at the time there was a spare melodeon and I just sort of said, Is anyone playing that? Can I borrow it? And luckily the gaffer said, No, you can have it. and that was that I just absolutely obsessed about it at the expense of my studies. And I can remember as well not being put off by anything that was complex. I don't think I had a sense of what was too hard or not for me. It was like I want to learn that. So I just got about learning it. And some things took a long time. But I just was again dog with a bone, just kind of wanted to learn how to do the complicated stuff. so yeah, I wouldn't say that was everyone's journey, but you know, ⁓ neurodiversity certainly helps, let's put it like that. I'm with you in that I sometimes will take on a challenge that is way too way, way over my head and I'll say to myself, Well, i it can't be that hard. Famous last words. So it never got fr frustrating that you couldn't get there. Mm, I don't remember ever being it was just always I can do better. Just get up the next day and carry on. Just keep plugging away. ⁓ I never remember like throwing it away like in like in a rage or anything. It was always just yeah, I felt frustrated, but I used it as an energy to kind of laser beam my focus at whatever specific thing it was I was struggling with. So I'd narrow the window of concentration. I'd just look at those that bar, that passage, those two notes, whatever it is. And I'd just use that frustration as an energy source just to blast my way through it. And then yeah, it just became something that was completely built into my system of learn teaching myself was just t total dedication and focus And then that became quite a zen place for me at a time in my life that was really quite dark and complicated for other reasons. But music was my sanctuary to like just focus all of that on a different place and yeah. You talked a little bit before about sheet music. Where do you stand on sheet music? Or how do you feel about people that say I can't use sheet music or I can't learn by ear? So I try to encourage them to would you just try? And if that really is well, no, but Okay, well let's start with the sheet music and I'll wait for certain cues. I can't quite verbalize it, but I just know when somebody's ready to take a risk. So I say, Would you mind just like looking away from the sheet music? Or if I feel like it, could you turn the sheet music over and just play me that back? And the amount of times where they're able to. And then it's like amazing, great. so then we tend to just work to begin with with the sheet music and then learn to put it down and walk away from it. And that might take a year or more, but it's like a it's a nice process to witness and take people down that journey. And if they want to learn sheet music, I mean I can absolutely teach that. But for some reason, like nobody's ever come to me specifically wanting that skill. Typically for me, I'll use sheet music with people like that just for the chords or just for rhythmical structures. ⁓ I won't necessarily teach them the notes by rote, but actually what I want you to learn is that the sheet music is there can tell you lots of other stuff as well. And actually usually rhythm and chords is the important stuff that if your ear can tell you the melody The chords will tell you the direction, and then once you've got the direction, you'll know where to put that melody, and we can kind of work work in that way. Sheet music is very much a tool for me. I think it's just it's a language, and it like with any language skill, the better you are at it, the more fluent, the more you can do with that language. But realistically, for traditional musicians, we don't need to be able to read music to a high level. We're generally working in three key signatures. And it's linear music or you know, eight bar sort of parts. ⁓ and so generally sheet music becomes something that's not necessary after a while because you build up a catalogue of sounds and traditional music is based on ⁓ you know, f I don't know, a small number of similar sounds that are, you know, very similar to other things. So you can quite quickly learn things once you've got a basic catalogue of knowledge of ⁓ that sound is a bit like this tune. Yeah, well let's go and learn that tune and then, ⁓ this is a bit like that tune and then it just kind of like leads on. That's another tutorial I've got actually called ⁓ Learn Easy Tunes for e similar tunes for easy wins. I was re I somebody asked for it and I basically sat down and started with Salmon Tales Up the River, which is a really common English tune. And then I thought, right, that leads on to this and then I kind of built twenty tunes and I could have carried on, but I thought twenty was absolutely enough. For an hour's tutorial. And I just rattled through them and I said, Right, there you go. There's the sheet music. There's all the videos in full. And ⁓ I think it's been useful for people to realize that everything's related and also how easy it is once somebody's kind of shown you how the mechanics of certain tunes work, it just leads you into the next thing, into the next thing, into the next thing. Yeah. The thing I hate the most, and I don't use that word very often, but I really dislike when I hear ⁓ you're playing it wrong because it's not written like that on the sheet music. It's like you do not get the point of sheep music in traditional music. You know, that is not how it should be used. ⁓ it might be in other cultures, but it's not like that in English music. And actually, if we look back in the manuscripts, very few tunes are written completely. So there's always the things that have been handed down to us by written sources are always got to be taken with a pinch of salt, because at some point somebody's made a decision, a creative choice to. Play something in that way and record it in that way and then pass it on in that way. so actually, the English tradition has got all sorts of loopholes and creative crusty bits where you can just, you know, take it in your own direction. And I think that's actually one of the most beautiful things about English traditional music is that there is it's difficult to define. and there are very much players out there defining it in their own way, and it and together that's become. This is what English music sounds like. But if we look at the written sources, yeah, we've we've taken this little seed of four bars and we've built it into this thing that's now recorded and people play it as this. But actually it started out like this. Well, and we all know it was transmitted or orally, right? So someone went from Ireland to work in Scotland and learned a tune that had been played for a dance and then they brought it back to Ireland where they didn't have a dance at all. And so it got changed and changed and changed each time. And Probably got a different name each time, but it's good I think to have a respect for the lineage of tunes and and do your utmost to research, ask questions, find out a bit about the history of it, because then that sets you in a I just think a stronger position to then do whatever whatever you want to do with it. And I think I always teach people to to learn it in the definitive way, in a massive inverted commas. You know, learn it in the way you've heard it, but then learn to do your own thing with it. I think that's a really important thing in traditional music. For sure. So this has been so fun. Is there anything that you were dying to talk about that I f did not ask you? I'm a co-founder of Folk Unbound, which is a week-long workshop event and it's a residential and it's me and Lucy Hussard. ⁓ and it's all about session playing actually. So what me and Lucy and my lovely friend Frankie Insley, we're doing is breaking down session playing and playing together and really looking at all of that sort of scary stuff and and people specifically we run the week for women and marginalized genders, so people that wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable in patriarchal spaces, you know, that you know, historically patriarchal spaces, let me say. ⁓ so it's like looking at ways that we can learn to overcome fears and take risks and learn about contribution in sessions. It's not all about melody all the time. ⁓ and yeah it's a really beautiful week. We did it for the first time last year, but we're running it again and we've got a few places available ⁓ we run it in Derbyshire, beautiful place called Castleton. It's just a really lovely time. Sounds wonderful. Sounds like a great idea for other people to ⁓ in other parts of the world to catch on to because ⁓ yeah, there definitely are people who feel very intimidated in that session environment. Well thanks Mel. This has been a an amazing hour spent with you. I I love hearing your perspective on all this stuff. And I can't thank you enough for doing this with me. So I'm gonna have a post of links at the end and in the podcast notes. ⁓ but thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having on. I've really enjoyed geeking out on all this stuff I don't normally get to talk about, so thank you. Great. Okay, bye bye. Thanks for listening to Best Practice for Musicians, where we hope to provide inspiration for musicians who want to practice more effectively and play with more joy. I'm Judy Minat, author of the book Best Practice: Inspiration and Ideas for Traditional Musicians. For links to anything that was discussed in the podcast, to sign up for the newsletter, or to find my blog, you can find all of that in the podcast notes. And if you have friends who are musicians, why not let them know about this podcast? A special thanks to all my Patreon supporters. You helped make this possible. ⁓