Last night I was sitting around with the husband and L, watching Return of the King. Like you do when you're giant nerds who don't quite have the time to pull an all-weekend marathon of the trilogy, so you spread it out over about a month.
Says I on Twitter, I don't need to annoy people by picking up my fiddle to learn the Rohan theme. Says Eric, but you will anyway! Then Kiki tagged in, and I was pretty well doomed. I didn't right then, but when we broke for dinner I hauled it out, swore at Spotify until it gave me the right track, and proceeded to learn it off by ear in about two minutes flat.
Put like that, it sounds really impressive. I know that C and L's jaws dropped a fair ways, and I tried to blow it off. Oh, it's an easy key. (It is.) Oh, it's basically a fiddle tune, it's beautiful but not complex. (Also true.) Oh, I've been working on this for awhile. (Most true.) But I simply couldn't view it as anything special. That's just what I do now; I hear something playing that I want to learn, I pick my instrument up, I figure out what key it's in. Once I get that part settled, the rest is easy, or at least easier.
It'd be nice to say that this just happened, that it's some kind of inherent skill. That'd be easy, right? Just one of those things that I just so happen to be good at. The truth is a lot murkier and a lot more fraught with false starts, with delays and confusion and declarations that I'm not actually any good at this and I should give up.
You see, I learned to read music about the same time I learned to read English. Maybe a year or two later, but still well within the normal developmental stage you'd expect a toddler to be able to read. (I was a precocious little shit. That may be the wrong verb tense.) At any rate, due to all kinds of factors including under-exposure to non-classical music, I never ended up developing my ear. This is a fatal flaw, so far as any traditional fiddle community is concerned, so when I decided I was going to shift over a couple years ago it became crucial to figure out how to fix it.
Figuring it out took awhile, and a couple attempts at forming bands, and finally a chance meeting drove me to find a site for ear training. (Specifically, an ex's now-ex-boyfriend. Out of such small things are new goals made and met.) I've been using Teoria for a good six months now, through PT for carpal tunnel and through lessons that got me using Audacity to pick apart sound files so that I could learn new tunes. Twice a day, five days a week, for no more than half an hour at a stretch. I use it as a break between longer stretches of work, frankly, and don't think about it too hard.
So: somewhere in there, even though I didn't believe I was taking it seriously, I learned. I learned to pick out melodies and rhythms and key signatures by ear, and that's pretty fucking awesome. I listen to a lot of music, too, and I'm sure that helps. But I've been hiding it away, doing it all on my own and not even showing my awesome to my husband, and it's about time I stopped that shit. This week, I'm going to work on learning some Martin Hayes, work on the various LotR fiddle tunes when I need a break, and try not to be antsy about getting my recording equipment in and set up. (Though the fact that I'm alternating impatience with terror might help balance that last out.) In the meantime, I did perform a week ago, and I have the recording uploaded right here.
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