Mr.Gumby wrote:
I have always made playing music an end in itself, not particularly motivated by playing in public. I do get a buzz playing with others, if things 'click', but again it is not the be all end all. I have been playing out less in recent years and mostly turn down invitations to play at concerts nowadays (unless unavoidable). So in that sense not an awful lot is different now. I do normally tend to go out to listen and usually bring new tunes home or get reminded of tunes I have gone out of playing for a while. Over the past week I have caught up with a backlog on tunes I heard over the past few weeks, learned them and written the new ones down (I tend to learn tunes and then forget I learned them at all so about a year and a half ago I started using a Moleskine mss book to write new acquisitions in, so I can see what I have). Other than that, just playing away and generally coming out of hibernation with the light returning after winter.
Learning new tunes seems, to me, a fluent affair, some tunes will 'stick' quite readily while others never get much playing at all. Hearing a lot of music helps, often I will find the tunes that 'stick' are ones that I have heard for years without realising it, quietly seeping into the subconscious until they get 'woken up', while others, perhaps learned from a book, just sit there until I hear them played. Of the latter for example is one I learned perhaps twenty years ago, a slightly odd reel, contrary, if you like, that I played for a bit but that never really stuck. I never heard anyone play it until two weeks ago I heard Patsy Hanly and a bunch of Carberrys play it on the television. It came back immediately and I have been playing it a lot since. All it needed was waking up.
I have this a lot--I sit down and try to learn a new tune and sometimes it's like walking though cement, and other times I sit down with a tune and in five minutes I have it. It's true from me with instrument I play well and it's true with the flute, which I don't play well
Lately Ive been hypnotized by Mike Rafferty's version of "the Hard Road To Travel." Damn, he was good