Happy Enchilada Tunes

We all have our Happy Enchilada tunes. By that I mean tunes where you mis-hear some of the notes so that your fingers play something that isn't quite right. Happy Enchilada comes from the John Prine song That's The Way The World Goes 'Round. The actual lyrics are "that's the way that world goes 'round, you're up one day, the next you're down, it's a half an inch of water and you think you're gonna drown, that's the way that the world goes 'round". But instead of "half an inch of water" you hear "happy enchilada". I also call these Brass Miracle tunes, after the Prince song Raspberry Beret. She wore a (brass miracle ring), the kind you find in a second hand store.

You might sing along with these songs for years until you finally get to see the written lyrics and realize you had part of it wrong. It's the same with tunes we are trying to learn by ear. Try as you might, someone still trying to develop play-by-ear abilities is going to have many Happy Enchiladas in their version of the tune. A minimal amount of Happy Enchiladas is OK. A large amount of Happy Enchiladas is also OK. The latter just means that you've unintentionally "composed" your own tune. It may be best to play these so-called original compositions in the comfort of your own home!

You can also play something that sounds correct, but represents a misunderstanding of the theory behind it. Like if you're someone who says "for all intensive purposes" instead of the actual saying "for all intents and purposes". It may be hard to aurally pick up the differences but there their. Is this a mute point?

The point being that the occasional misheard phrase is within an acceptable +/- range when trying to play something by ear. Sometimes this is to your benefit. For tunes like Dinky's, Dusty Windowsills, or Gravel Walks you might be better off relying on your ear rather than consulting the notation, because if you look at the notation you might see more notes than your ear was hearing that actually makes it harder to play from a technical standpoint.

Most of the time I do think it's beneficial to look at the notation, albeit after you've had a little bit of time to digest the sound of the tune. You don't want to be blatantly playing notes that exclaim "she wore a brass miracle ring" when you could be playing "she wore a raspberry beret". And you don't want to be playing notes that express "wet your appetite" when it should be expressing "whet your appetite". That's why a minimal amount of theory knowledge can come into play. 

You might be able to say the sentence "the small dog chased a red bull", but if you have no theory training you won't pick up the nouns (dog, ball), the verb (chased), and the adjectives (small, red). Secondly, you won't be able to interpret this in your own style by saying "the little pup hunted a crimson sphere". 

Melodica for Irish airs, O'Carolan tunes, and other slow pieces

As sometimes happens with me, about a week ago out of the blue I decided that I should get a melodica for playing some of the slower session tunes in the Irish session repertoire. Here's why:

• The F to C span (low to high) of a 32 key melodica fully covers the range of almost any Irish session tune I can think of. Your lowest note F is one whole step lower than the lowest note G that gets played in tunes such as The Castle and Farwell to Ireland, and your highest note C is one half step higher than needed, since very few tunes have a note higher than B.
• Although the melodica is not a traditional instrument, it is a wind instrument and wind instruments are definitely part of Irish trad music (flute, pipes, whistle, concertina, et cetera). So by playing a melodica, you are kind of taking part in that wind instrument tradition. Wind instruments tend to be very expressive and melodica is no exception.
• One of the instruments that is played in Irish traditional music is the piano accordion (Jimmy Keane, Alan Kelly, Karen Tweed, and more). A melodica has this same piano style layout, so the right hand fingerings used for Irish piano accordion can be applied to the right hand when playing melodica. If it can be done on one, it can be done on the other.
• The melodica has a similar sound to a harmonica, concertina, and accordion. Although it might look different than those, the sound itself is in line with other instruments that are commonly heard taking on Irish melodies.
• The melodica is a cost efficient instrument choice. A good starter melodica, such as the Yamaha P-32D 32-key Pianica, will only set you back about $70 brand new.
• Melodicas are unplugged and completely acoustic. No power cables, speakers or wires are needed. It is powered by your breath and the action of pressing the keys. 
• My primary instrument is the banjo which has a staccato sound that doesn't really suit itself to certain O'Carolan tunes and other slow pieces. The melodica, with its ability to legato, is arguably more able to interpret these slower airs than the banjo is.
• Finally, the benefits of playing a second instrument. In Irish trad, the tune is king regardless of the instrument used to bring it to life. If you are primarily a strings player, like I am, it can be extremely beneficial to try and re-learn a tune on another instrument, especially one that is played in a completely different way. It's really good for the ear because instead of just routinely putting your fingers on the frets where you think they should go, you really have to listen to find those notes on a keyboard layout. This can even help you identify notes that you were mishearing when playing the tune on your primary instrument.

Here's a picture of the melodica I got:

Yamaha 32-key Pianica

Some of the pieces that I think would work good on melodica include:

The Wren

Blind Mary

Inisheer

Island of Woods

Shebeg Shemore

The Parting Glass

Midnight on the Water

South Wind

Fanny Power

Josefine's Waltz

The Tennessee Waltz

Ashokan Farewell

Crested Hens

Ash Grove

Most of these are played at the sessions I go to. Since I don't have much of a piano keyboard background, I am going to take a couple lessons from a local music teacher just to make sure that I get off to the right start with regard to fingering and technique. More to come!

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The One Thing I Wish I Had Done More of When I Started Playing Tenor Banjo

It's been over 19 years since I first got a tenor banjo. There are lots of things I wish knew starting out, including don't worry about when you will get "good", don't be afraid to change strings, don't let the fact that there are great musicians intimidate or de-motivate you, don't waste so much money on other instruments (banjo is where it's at), don't go on so many tangents and side trips, stay focused on things that help you reach your goal, know what your goal is, understand that music is more than just what you see as performance and entertainment on a stage, that there is a whole DIY hobbyist music community of peers, and more.

However, the one thing that I wish I had allowed myself to do more of is struggle. When I started playing tenor banjo at age 32 I quickly learned how to read mandolin tab fluently and sheet music on a basic level so I never tried to learn anything by ear. It felt like a seemingly insurmountable hurdle to have to learn entirely by ear with no notation or tab. But what I could have done is give myself like 30 minutes to try and learn or transcribe a tune by ear, then compare what I was playing to the actual notes on the page to see how far off I was. That 30 minutes would have been a struggle but if I had done this over and over and over again the unpleasantness of the struggle would have eventually subsided into a routine delivering positive outcomes. 

It was not until 2017, 11 years after I picked up the instrument, that I started to do something resembling this. In 2017 I became frustrated with almost everything I had been doing related to music. Instead of giving up entirely, I decided to create my own repertoire completely from scratch without any regard to genre, style, tradition, tune type, and so on. I accomplished this by listening to a wide variety of different sounds and then trying to write my own melody based on what I was hearing. I stopped playing anything I had ever played before.

Because of the freedom I gave myself this wasn't actually a struggle. Let's say that I was listening to a track like De La Montaña Venimos by Maso Rivera. What I would do is listen to this piece and then write my own melody inspired by it. I titled it "From the Hills I Go". From the Hills I Go became my tune and part of my personal repertoire. Emphasis on feeling as though it were my own. I never once saw sheet music and my goal was not to try and copy the existing melody. If I heard it a certain way I went with that. Then it would be on to something else. Maybe a track from a 1970's KPM library music LP, or a Jean Luc Ponty tune or a field recording from the Seychelles islands. Within months I had over a dozen of these little melodies to call my own and within a year I had "composed" over 50 of them. It was a fun and all consuming creative project and I can't believe I kept the momentum and focus in place for several years leading all the way into the pandemic.

The funny thing is, one day I actually paid a music transcriber on Fiverr to transcribe De La Montaña Venimos for me. I had my own tune that I was playing which was inspired by this melody but I didn't know how close it was to the actual melody. Lo and behold, I had almost transcribed the head melody to the tune note for note. My tune, the one that I supposedly wrote and felt ownership with and called From the Hills I Go, was essentially a plagiarized copy of De La Montaña Venimos. That was both good news and bad news. The bad news that I couldn't really claim it as my own. The good news was that it proved that you could learn something without needing sheet music! I didn't check the other 150+ tunes that I "composed" during this strange period of my life, but I'm guessing that many more closely mirrored the melody from which they were stolen from.

When I moved to Oregon last year and decided to get involved in the Irish trad community here I used this newly gained confidence to approach struggle with a positive mindset. Wish Irish jigs, reels, polkas, hornpipes, slides, slip jigs, and so on there are almost always going to be tunebook lead sheet transcriptions of the basic tune, but thanks to YouTube and other sources there are also always going to be audio versions to listen to. I treat the audio as my primary source and the notation as supplemental. I try to limit how often I allow myself to look at the sheet music. Resisting the urge to look at the music when you are stumped and letting your mind work through the issue does pay off in the long run. A tune is not static anyway. Your day to day interpretation of it is allowed to vary. One day your version may have a lot of "wrong" notes. Then as you learn the tune better, the wrong notes fade away only to be replaced by other notes that you hear in their place.

When I start a post like this I never quite know where it's going to end up. I think I'd rather go work on some tunes now than try to write anything else.