🎻 This one's for you if you like to nerd out about listening

Hi Reader,

Today I want to share one of my favorite listening exercises with you, and it's one I’ve gotten to do a lot of this year so far!

The nice thing is it’s an exercise that touches on multiple skills: note and interval recognition, arrangement awareness and (naturally) listening! More specifically, deep listening.

To set the scene for you, my partner, Bear, has been listening to Tony McManus for years and took classes with him in college. We’ve been lucky enough to catch up and play with Tony several times in the past couple years when he’s had gigs in Detroit.

Years ago my aunt and uncle got my dad a CD for Christmas perhaps not suspecting how pivotal of an album it would be for me (or maybe they did?! Thanks Aunt Sally and Uncle Tom!). That album was Fire & Grace by Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas.

It fueled my love for the Scottish side of Celtic music, and definitely helped get me through periods of not wanting to play my instrument anymore.

As it so happens, Tony and Alasdair have a wonderful duo album together. Their opening track is an absolutely gorgeous piece called Bidh Clann Ulaidh.

Not only is Bear great at backing tunes, he also got his undergrad degree in fingerstyle guitar.

So this arrangement where Tony primarily takes the melody and Alasdair weaves around that really appealed to us as a duo where we like to reverse roles of melody and accompaniment here and there!

Now back to the listening exercise...

I sat down this week and wrote out Alasdair’s line for Bidh Clann.

Here are some of the benefits I get in this exercise:

• Bidh Clann isn’t really a dance tune in that it’s not your standard AABB format (though it does include two As and two Bs). So writing Alasdair’s line helped me clarify the A and B of the tune and the little tag lines intro’ing and closing each part. Identifying the structure helped simplify what needs to go where in my memory.
• When I took a break from playing along with the recording and listened as I wrote notes down, I caught notes I’d missed (it also helps to pause the recording and play the passage on my fiddle to double check the notes).

All in all this probably took me 10 minutes when I actually sat down to do it. But add on to that the past two or three weeks of playing along to the recording almost daily, and I can say it's been a work in progress!

The first time I ever tried this transcription exercise was with music notation software in college. That took me closer to 3 hours to do and countless re-listening (funny enough that was also an Alasdair/Natalie recording — Farewell to Nigg from The Highlander’s Farewell album).

All to say, I found a medium of jotting down arrangements that A) I understand and will be able to recall later on if I revisit this page in my notebook, and B) is quick to transcribe, which removes extra frustration with a difficult brain exercise like this.

Your method may look different than mine, Reader. But I encourage you to try or revisit some kind of deep listening this week that exercises at least two skills, be they listening and writing... or listening and reading along with the notes in TheSession.org and noticing differences in what you see vs what you hear.

Since you're a Tune Library member, you can totally do an exercise like the above with any of those tunes! If you've never written out the notes of the tune as you're listening, this could be something fun and new to try!

Lately I've been trying to remember to give start notes for tunes, but if there's an older tutorial where you need help getting the first note down, feel free to reach out!

(Also you're seeing this message thanks to the magic of custom coding -- so anyone who isn't a Tune Library member and is reading this newsletter is going to see a totally different message. I told you it was magic! 😉)

This week I'm headed down to Tune Junkie Weekend in Knoxville TN (and will see some of you there 😁). It's one of my favorite weekends of the year, and always packed full of good tunes and even better people! I get to introduce Bear to Tune Junkie for the first time, so I'll have to report back to you on what he says!

If you're local to southeast Michigan/love traveling to places with snow in the winter time, we have two shows coming up within the month:

• Feb 20th - Shannon Lee playing at Trinity House in Livonia MI. Tickets here!
• Mar 1 - Music at Main Shannon Lee (Free Concert!) at Clinton Macomb Library in Clinton Township MI.

Happy listening this week -- and if you give the transcription exercise a try, let me know!

~Hannah