Your opinion: Most difficult...?

[Jack Macleod]

Stemming from a conversation I had with several musical cohorts, which instrument would you say is more difficult to learn, flute or fiddle? Why?

We agreed pipes was most difficult of all...whistle easiest.....

Surely, personal ability, time to practice, proximity to a competent teacher, etc., will affect learning.

Opinions will vary I'm sure.

[Cayden]

I think it is equally difficult to learn any instrument well, sure it's easy to start on the whistle and go toot toot on it call out 'hey look at me I am a musician'. And for the concertina you only have to push the right buttons and there you have it, in tune and all. On pipes and fiddle you may take some time to get out of the scratchy and squeaky territory but playing anything really well, play music bring the notes to life, is always difficult and demands dedication.
As Jackie Daly always says 'it's dark and lonely work'.

[Antaine]

Kazoo is easiest

Pipes have to be one of the most difficult for several reasons. 1) you are being required to do so much as far as different movement is concerned. You use both hands, both arms, your leg, and the wrist of the right hand (while the right hand is doing something else!) On top of that, standardization is iffy at best, and the instruments are very tempermental.

Of fiddle and flute, I would say that I've found fiddle easier than guitar (even without frets), and guitar easier than flute.

Every instrument has its ambrochure (in violin it's wrist and bow position, in flute it's lips, in guitar/mandolin/banjo it's pick technique, in pipes it's whole body position) and intonation (in violin it's finger placement, in flute it's lips (again), in guitar/mandolin/banjo it's also finger placement, and in pipes it's bag technique)

[fancypiper]

I find the flute to be the hardest to play between the UP and flute (maintainance and fiddling with reeds apart) and requires more practice to "honk" on it properly.

Anything with strings is impossible to play, IMHO. I wish I had known that when I was fussing around with a guitar all those years.

[lixnaw]

mandoline is rather easy, there's only four strings. the grip is much easyer then a guitar, and you can play mandoline as simple or as difficult as you like.

[Caj]

Concertina ain't so hard, but lessons are harder to find. And lessons, even a few lessons, make a big difference. More than I thought they would.

Getting to level II on a concertina is not really a matter of form or posture so much as developing oomph and nyaah. This involves stylistic habits such as adding more silence between notes, pulling and pushing more impulsively, ect ect. Getting to level III is a pain in the buttinsky, because you have to develop considerable flexibility in your little-used fingers, and get them working independently of one another.

Re: flute vs fiddle, I been told by a flute player that some days he just can't get a single decent sound out of the instrument. It's apparently like learning to drive stick, but more slowly: you think you have it down, but once in a while you regress and can't get the thing into 1st gear for the life of you. Flute players: does this happen to you?

Caj

[Nanohedron]

Yes.

[The Sporting Pitchfork]

Me too. Yes.

Actually, just to throw everybody off here, I've been finding my uilleann pipes to be easier to play than my flute at the moment. Weird as that may sound...To an extent, it can depend on the technique and tunes in question. There are things I can do on the flute that are a headache to accomplish on the pipes (lots of octave jumps, for example) and there are a lot of things I can do on pipes that just get damned tedious on the flute (doing a lot of crans over and over and over). For me, my embouchre and stamina on the flute just haven't up to snuff this month, whereas I don't have to worry about my lips and lungs when I play pipes.

For some people, playing a fiddle is much easier than playing a flute. I for one would probably never be able to produce a decent sound from a fiddle if I had all the time in the world and my life depended on it.

I agree with Peter, though. Once you get past the intermediate stage, it can be equally difficult to play any instrument "well."

[MarkB]

At 57 years of age, I have had to learn many new things in my life that I didn't specifically wanted or needed to learn, but wanting employment I had to do it.

I didn't have to learn to play the flute. I am a decent whistle player, and better bodhran player, twelve years of both. At times I teach beginner tin whistle and bodhran. Why then did I decide two years ago to play the flute.
I am in some way still asking that question. Maybe a natural progression, maybe being the butt of everybody elses jokes about bodhran players, although I set them right right off the bat in demonstrating that I know my instrument and the music.

The flute (mine is Burns Mopane in D) is the hardest thing that I have ever had to learn. I had no teacher. Reading, posting, more reading on this forum and others, hours and hours of listening to flute music. Days...weeks...then months of almost angry frustration with it and that was just with the mechanics of it let alone trying to play a tune.

But I decided that it wasn't going to get to me, it cost me $1,400 CDN and I am to stubborn to let that go by. I hung in there and measured my progress in small increments .... holding and balancing it correctly one day while I worked on my embrochure, making more obscene sounds than a musical note/s. Next day my embrochure would work, but I couldn't hold it still long enough to play a scale.

Then with discipline that I set for myself, slowly ever so slowly it started to come together. Hitting the embrochure without fishing around for it with my tongue, the bottom D coming easier all the time, the second octave starting to sound more like it should and finally a recognisable tune.

Then slowly another tune with the mechanics starting to settle in the background as if every nerve and muscle was starting to identify with other pieces of anatomy that yes I am playing this instrument..get use to it!

This past Tuesday night at our session, I surprised myself by trying jigs/polkas/hornpipes and some reels at speed. About 80% of the time I made the tune at speed with the others. Yes there was mistakes and flubs but it was there! Two of my mates said so.

I practice two to three hours a day every day! I have come to love the instrument and the sounds that I am making with it. Practicing is more rewarding----playing is beyond words for me...a real natural high.

So you want that natural high again---back to practicing, listening, reading and posting.

I am very happy that I made the decision to put in the hours with this flute. And since there are very few flute players in my area, I am working at becoming the best at it... be the best you can be,has always been my motto and my drive in everything that I had tried, the flute will not be different.

But it was the hardest thing that I ever had to learn. Would I do it again? I really don't know. Will I learn another instrument...bought a second hand guitar earlier this year....why...why...why....I really can't tell you.

Learning something on your own, that was a struggle to begin with then seeing the progression towards actually being competent in it is very rewarding...Natural highs are addictive...so you want the challenge just to see that it wasn't a flook and that you can really do it.

Now how does that chord go!

MarkB

[Martin Milner]

I found Beth's concertina totally non-intuitive - buttons play different notes on the push & pull, some notes appear in more than one place, one common note (C#) only appears once, so can only be played on the push with the right hand.

Compared to that the fiddle is simple - same note no matter which way the bow is going, strings tuned in 5ths, all very logical.

[Antaine]

the more instruments you learn to play, the easier it is to learn the next, much like languages.

I started with piano, having a few lessons. I then taught myself whistle, violin, trumpet, pipes, mandolin, harp (did have a couple lessons), guitar, and now I intend to tackle the flute. (Bodhrán in there, too, but I'm not counting precussion).

Each time I tried something new, it took less time to get to the point where I could play ten songs well. Even though the instruments weren't all related, each one made the next easier.

For instance, piano took a couple years, whistle was about a year before I had ten songs and could sightread really well. Violin took about 9 mos, trumpet about 6. Pipes were also about 6 mos for ten songs solid plus sightreading up to speed. Mandolin and harp about 3 mos, and guitar 2. I'll keep you posted on flute.

What about you guys? Were the pipes your first instrument? If not, what led up to it?

[Guest]

Clarinet, Sax, Trumpet etc

Irish trad has always leaned very heavily on TW even though today one would imagine the Flute or Fiddle to be the center of it.

The fiddle is the hardest to play really well.

[Pat Cannady]

I've played some saxophone and guitar...I did the world a favor by quitting the guitar, believe me.

Which is the hardest instrument? I agree with Peter, they're all hard to play WELL, that is, with a balanced combination of technical mastery and artistic insight. I've seen pipers with all the tricks I thought sounded flat and rather canned. I've seen others with perhaps less fluent technique that were intensely musical, soulful players.

If you mean which is the hardest for a beginner to get going? IMO it's a close run thing between the fiddle and the pipes. They're both an absolute bitch for beginners. You will work your ass off on either one to develop merely passing competence. But neither instrument is an insurmountable obstacle: I think acquiring and maintaining a good set of pipes can be much harder than playing a good set of pipes, at least until you start working on upbeat or syncopated vamping with the regulators in dance music. That's where the fun REALLY begins

When learning any instrument the biggest obstacle you will have to overcome is yourself.

[The Weekenders]

You asked between fiddle and flute. Beats me which is harder though I would imagine fiddle is harder to master. But many others opened it up to other instruments. So: I play classical guitar and find it to be as hard an instrument to play beautifully, gracefully and effortlessly as can be. You are balancing melody and harmony and rarely get the satisfaction to do either completely unless accompanying others. There are a million little ways to disrupt the smoothness, not the least of which is the plucking of the string by flesh and fingernail in itself.

Whistle is the easiest thing I ever picked up. That's why it's so damn fun. The rolls are giving me some challenges but I use all the technical strategies I learned on guitar to apply to this instrument and it sure has helped.

[brad maloney]

Wouldn't this really be a person to person issue? Some people have a strong aptitude for one instrument over another. On average I think flutes are easier to learn tunes on than the fiddle in the very begining. But good tone, timing etc etc of either instrument is going to take a long time & will vary from person to person. My first few months of playing fiddle were harder than my first few months of flute, but then again I had been dicking about with flutes for 10 years before I started really working on playing them for real.

Nonetheless to be a really great player it's just as hard on any instrument, they all have advantages & disadvantages.