Audio Coaching

Hearing Impaired?

Read the Transcripts for Audio  Coaching May 4, 2023 HERE

Hi drummers,

Happy Thursday.

This is Mickey Stewart coming to a day later than planned because yesterday was my husband's birthday, so I took most of the day off to get caught up with some things and to make his favourite meal for him.

But it's funny how my mom can make the exact same meal. It seems like she blinks and whips it up out of nowhere.

Yet, it takes me almost five or six hours to make the exact same meal. And my kitchen looks like a cyclone has gone through it by the end of it, but it was well worth it.

And so anyway, I'm back with the VOLUME #3 of our Slowdown Series, I have a really great blog posts to share with you. I had a lot of fun creating this one for you.

But I have to tell you that in creating this series for you, it's really inspired me, and last Thursday, I got my fiddle out for the first time in a while, and I forgot how much I loved it.

I'm going to share with you not just the Amazing Slow Downer that I share with everybody and tell everybody and shout from the rooftops how much I love the Amazing Slow Downer, but here's a tool in there that I use with my students, but I haven't actively used it as much for myself as a tool, and it is so good.

It came about from Bruce Gandy, who stays with us. He is a World-class bagpiper, and he has really great book called, 'Performance.: Delivering Your Own Awesome.'

There's a quote in there (he's lots of amazing content inside), but there's one particular quote that jumped out as I was going through the book last week.

He said, 'Learn to love the discipline of practice'.

That really landed with me, and I thought, 'I'm going to apply that when I take my fiddle out. I'm not just going to jump all over the place and play half of this tune, half of that tune, and well, I did a little bit of that first. I was trying to find some tunes I remembered, so hands up, I did a little bit of that.

But once I got my Amazing Slow Downer out and was about to start to work on the King George IV strathspey, my all-time favourite strathspey that buddy MacMaster plays, I realised I didn't have the track on my phone.

I'm working on an old laptop, but my new computer's coming tomorrow, thank goodness. I'm thinking, 'How am I going to get this track from my computer to my phone so I can put it into my Amazing Slow Downer app because I don't have the software on this particular laptop?'

So I thought I would screenshot that whole process as I did it and show you exactly how I did that. But what was really cool and what really helped me focus with this tune, especially the hard part, is the LOOPING TOOL inside the Amazing Slow Downer.

So I'm really drawing attention to that inside the blog post. Because King George !V strathspey, it's so good, but the fourth bar of part one has these nasty little 16th notes, little semi-quavers, that as soon as I get there, my my bow can play faster, but my crunchy little fingers can't quite keep up there . And boy, did this looping tool help with that.

Here's what I did.

1) I isolated Part 1 by stopping the track as the repeat finished.

2) Then I tapped the Looping Tool and pressed play allowed me to play the track through my earphones, over and over and over again. (See the attached blog for images and notes on exactly how to do that)

Doing this made me realise that after only two times, part of me wanted to go faster, even when my fingers couldn't keep up, and I still wasn't playing it right!!! It was an A-ha moment.

In the blog I share how I think just like you.

I think just like a learner who wants to play fast and sound like their favourite fiddler (or drummer), and I think that helps me as a teacher because I understand where students are coming from.

It gives me a bit of an inside scoop and how to meet them where they're at.

The CD I used was 'Judique on the Floor' CD that Buddy McaMaster recorded back in . . . I'm just looking at the album here. I had this on cassette years ago, but picked up the CD last year.

It was recorded in Ontario in 1989, and I picked it up last year when I was home in Cape Breton.

We went to the Big Fiddle in Sydney, right on the waterfront. We visited my aunt, Kathie, who woked in one of the shops. I wandered down to another little store, and lo and behold was our friend Allister MacGillivray. I used to teach his kids at the Gaelic College, and they used to come to our house in Sydney Mines for lessons when they were in the band, The Cottars, but they're all grown up now.

Allister and I got chatting, and honestly I think I was in there for an hour and a half or two hours, but I promised mum and Cameron I would take them to lunch. If I was there myself, I would have stayed for the rest of the day. It was one of the best musical conversations I'd ever had with anyone, a delicious conversation to say the least.

We started talking about irregular time signatures, and Paul Brady tracks and things like that, and just feeding off each other.

Allister shared with me the process of typesetting music back in the 80's and how awkward it was, and how easy it is now.

I didn't realise until I was buying the cd from him, the Buddy MacMaster 'Judique On The Floor' CD featuring John Morris Rankin on piano, that he actually produced it.

Mark and I both taught with Buddy MacMaster for many years at the Gaelic College, and when I was in the Halifax Police Pipe Band, John Morris used to play concerts with us in the late 80s, early 90s. Everyone knew everyone back then. The music world is a small very circle.

Allister shared some stories about that, the whole recording set up and things like that. Buddy wanted John Morris in the same room with him rather than recording the tracks on their own. I guess it had its own complications as a producer to deal with.

So as I dug out my fiddle and got it all tuned up, I had this image of Buddy and John Morris being in the recording studio and Allister on the other side of the glass, ready to press record, and it made me love the track even more.

I didn't have the audio track on my phone, so I'll share the process of moving it from my old laptop to my phone in order to open it in the ASD app.

It's not always easy to import a track into the Amazing Slow Downer, but it is easy to use if the content is already on your device. (Check the blog post for all the instructions on how I did that.)

I hope that makes sense and really serves you.

I hope you're enjoying this series. Next week I am going to give you another free tool.

I'll be on my new computer by then, so I'll be working so fast I'll feel like Bradley Cooper's character in the movie, Limitless.

Working from my mobile phone and my old, slow laptop, where everything takes so much longer to create, has made me realise how we have it so easy now. Right?

We want everything so fast, and that affects us. It makes us want to learn faster. We have a shorter attention span than we did decades ago.

So keep that in mind when you're learning a new tune on a new instrument. It takes a lot more time, a lot more repetition at the slower tempos, much more than people realise, so give yourself a little grace there.

Pretend you're in the 80s, with no internet, and you only have one CD to work with. Just keep it really simple.

I suggest you do what I did - take one part of a tune you're working on, put in the Amazing Slow Downer and try that Lopp feature.

Have a great day.
Bye

Mickey