Episode 7: Tips for Making your Tunes Performance-Ready (Even when You're Pressed for Time)

Welcome back to the Find Your Lilt Podcast. I am back. I am super excited to be here today. I have no script, no outline. This is literally just like we are sitting down and having a nice little conversation over coffee or a pint or what have you, and I'm going to be telling you about my weekend. Ooh, super exciting. So what I was doing this past weekend was I actually ended up playing at IrishFest Atlanta, and I was filling in as the fiddler for a band in the area called the Border Collies.

And so I don't live near these people. I have played with them in sessions when I visited in the past. They're great folks, lots of fun to hang out with. And I really didn't have a whole lot of prep time for this.

So what I'd love to do is chat with you a little bit about just like my strategy behind, you know, how I approached this gig, you know, what to do when you feel like you don't have really a ton of time to prepare or maybe you're just between projects and thinking, okay, I've got to focus on this one project, but then I have this other one that's happening in a couple of weeks, and what am I going to do? So I really just wanted to chat through my process with that.

So I've known about this gig for, I don't know, six, seven months. And you would think that maybe I would have put a little bit more prep time in advance, kind of thinking through, what tunes am I going to play? How am I going to fit into the band here? What is going to be happening to make this sound cohesive and together? And maybe we've been playing for longer than just a handful of sessions.

Of course, as life happens, that really wasn't the case. And, you know, we're two weeks out and I get a text from the flute player who's the other melody player in the ensemble there. And she's like, we should probably come up with some tunes that we both know. And I was of course at another event at that time. So I was like, okay, well, let me kind of just focus on getting through this and I can, you know, I've got a concert here and doing a session and all that. So let me just kind of put this like, finish out this project and make sure that I've got all my tunes and my ducks in a row for this ensemble I'm playing with and then I can switch gears and I can fully focus on the next gig. you know, two weeks in advance before the gig, we're talking about the tunes that we're going to play.

A few days go by, I get a little nudge text of, so do you have a chance to look at the tunes I sent you? And of course I'm like, okay, I got to actually, you know, sit down and go through these and I went through the list, I picked out a few tunes that I knew already and I was like, all right, these are great, these are gonna work. So we both know these tunes and we can kind of come up with some sets from there.

And then she is like, well, let's just check that we have the same version for some of these tunes. And sure enough, a couple of her versions were totally different from the ones I knew. So I'm like, well, you know what? I've got a little bit of time. I've got a window where I can play and really work up these sets. So let's just go ahead and we'll do your version. I will match you. And that's just how I'm going to spend my time is, you know, putting together our set. Granted, it's like it's a 45 minute set. So we really didn't have like a whole lot of time to fill. So there wasn't going to naturally be a ton of new stuff that I had to learn.

But at the same time, it still ended up being, I think, about seven or eight tunes that I had either never played before or that I had played before, but I don't really play a whole lot often. Like, you know, if you're sitting in a session and maybe you recognize a tune and you can play along with it, but you wouldn't necessarily be the one to start it. That was me on a lot of those tunes. So I had to become someone who could start the tune and was well familiar with how it starts, where it's going, how it ends, all the works.

So I would say there was about seven or eight tunes overall that really fit that description. So I do want to talk a little bit about that process and just how I went about learning those tunes quickly, because I do actually think that in the end, you know, get into the end of the story and spoiling it a little bit in advance. But I do think that I got about 90 % of the notes, which given the amount of time that I allowed myself to prep for this and just the, yeah, just the amount of time that I gave myself really, I'm actually pretty happy with how that went.

I want to talk a bit about my strategy and my approach there. But of course this is like, I want to briefly go back to, you know, having multiple projects that are back to back. So you may find yourself when you are getting ready for a gig or a series of concerts or maybe you play multiple genres, so you could be a classical violinist and an Irish fiddler at the same time.

And I want to talk a little bit about that because really what I would tell my past self is that maybe there were some things that I could have done prior to the two weeks. So I had that one event that was two weeks before and I'm just like, I'm just going to focus on one event at a time. I'm not even going to think about the one that's coming up in a couple of weeks. And I do that a lot. So I play with a lot of different people. I play with a lot of different groups within Irish music.

And usually, you know, we're all kind of Irish traditional music. So it's not going to be a whole lot different as far as styles and really just what I'm doing on the fiddle. It's a lot of the same stuff, but I'm just kind of, you know, mixing and matching and blending with who it is that I happen to be playing with. there are definitely some things that I could have done.

Maybe, you know, we could have picked out the tunes a little bit earlier or we could have… I say we really, really this is all this is all me here. Could have picked out the tunes a little bit earlier or I could have gone in and listened to their recorded material a little bit earlier and just started to like do some listening practice just to get familiar with the band just a little bit earlier. Even though I have played with them before, I haven't done a whole lot of their gig stuff. So usually I'm playing with them in a session setting where we're playing stuff that pretty much everybody knows.

And so we're not doing a whole lot of like heavy arrangement or here's a song, we're going to stick this tune in the middle, and then we're going to go into a tune after that. Now, granted, at that particular session, sometimes that does happen, and we do do a song, and we do the specific arrangement, but it's something that's easy to, you know, just sit down and be like, okay, so we know, we all know Cliffs of Moher It's a great popular jig, we all know. We're going to launch into this at the end of this tune, and we're going to give you a big nod when it happens, so that's the kind of thing where you could get away with that in a session.

Whereas if you had some elaborate fiddle line that really didn't connect to any tune in particular that you wanted the fiddle player to learn, you wouldn't necessarily ask them to do that in a session. That would be more of a performance setting thing. So a little note on that. But yeah, there's just a couple of things I could have done maybe further in advance. So just thinking forward, I have a couple of gigs.

I've got one gig that's it's like a caroling gig. So I'm actually going to be singing more for that. And then I've got another couple of gigs coming up as well. So what can I do for each of those? Like maybe I can make a list and I can be like, OK, I'm going to know what sets of tunes are happening for each of these. And even though, yes, I will probably spend more time focusing on the gig that's coming up the soonest. I can also spend a little bit of time on these other gigs as well.

So it's not just like you if you have back to back to back gigs, sometimes it doesn't work to be like, I have one gig on Friday night and then Saturday night. I have a totally different thing, but I can't wait until Saturday morning to learn all the repertoire for Saturday night's gig. So that's always something that's good to keep in mind. I don't think I ever really get that bad, but sometimes I'm definitely guilty of being like, OK, I just had the bandwidth to focus on one project at a time.

And then I want to get in and do the second one once the first one's done. But really sometimes you actually have to do a little bit of project stacking and you can, you know, you can do multiple things there. You could like say today's a tune learning day. So I'm going to learn tunes that I have to play for multiple gigs coming up and just kind of look at it that way. You know, back in the day when I was in college I would spend probably two and a half, three hours in the practice room on any given day and I would have to be working on my classical repertoire.

So there's a lot of stuff that I would be doing for lessons, know, scales, etudes, my actual pieces that I was playing. I would be working on our orchestra stuff. So lots of different projects to be juggling all at once. And granted, the number of times that I have like a two and a half, three hour practice session these days is pretty scarce.

But also at that time, that was really when I was getting serious about Irish music. So I first went to the Swannanoa Gathering in 2014, and that was between the summers of my sophomore and junior year in college. So I think, yes, I have to have to do my math there. So, yeah, that was between sophomore and junior year. So, you know, junior, senior year, I was actually spending a lot of time. Even before that, I was spending a lot of time in the practice room where I also wanted to be working on my fiddle stuff.

I'd say at that point, maybe it was like half an hour would be devoted to going through all my different tune books and maybe trying some different techniques and trying to get the feel and the groove for the tunes. it was something that was very, definitely something I wanted to be spending more time on at that time. But of course I had all my other stuff as well for my degree that I had to be going through and working on and focusing on as well.

But I would do these in the same practice session. So I would start with my scales and my etudes and then I'd have my fiddle stuff. And then I would have my repertoire. And then, you by the time I get to my repertoire, I'm super warmed up, super energized from the fiddling. And I would really, I would take about five minutes in between. So it's a good idea to be taking breaks, of course. So I took a little break between my scales and my etudes. And then I would just go into my fiddle stuff and then I would take another five minute break, kind of reset and then I would do my repertoire.

So maybe move my bow hold back down from the choked bow hold to the classical bow hold and have to just remember to do that. So these days I don't have to worry about switching genres a whole lot, but I do think that maybe you could apply this strategy as well if you're a classical player or you play other genres as well and you just want to kind of reset yourself, it's like, you know, if you're at a wine tasting and you want to have a little sip of water in between each of the different types of wine just to reset the taste buds, reset your palate.

This is kind of like take your five-minute breather to reset your genre and how you're going to approach your tunes. So you could do this for whether you're genre switching or if you are switching what event you're prepping for. So maybe you have a gig that's more of like a pub band, God love you, if you have to do that. So you can do more of your song repertoire and then you could have another gig that is more traditional. So it could be either a session, it could be a trad concert, it could be a solo concert, a house concert, anything like that.

So if you have different gigs and performances coming up that are just kind of a different environment, a different feel, a different set of tunes, then maybe give yourself that time to practice a little bit more in advance. So again, here's the lesson here for past me. Practice a little bit more in advance and really, you know, just go with that approach and let yourself reset, let yourself think, okay, so this is for this gig.

I've had this time, now I'm going to take a few to rest my wrist, do a couple of wrist circles and relax and shake things out. And then now I'm going to dive into the next one. So without further ado, let me go ahead and talk about just the tunes that I learned and just how I approached this different tune learning. So it was really just jigs and reels that we were doing for the tunes for this set. So no polkas unfortunately, which I would have maybe not had to spend a whole lot of time learning if I had to learn any new polkas, but I learned a couple of new jigs and a couple of jigs that I already knew pretty well.

It's always that thing too. It's like you see so many tune names. If you have enough tune collections in your household and you've gone through those music collections, you have seen these names before. So you're like, I know I've seen that. I recognize it. Do I know how the tune goes? No, but I have seen the name, so I recognize it ish.

What I had to do is I popped on thesession.org, which is just a great resource for giving yourself a little mental memory jog of like, how does this tune go? So I went on the session and I found the two tunes for this one set of jigs where I'm like, OK, I feel really comfortable with the first jig. I know I know it super well. It's one that I've been playing for ages. It's East at Glendart, by the way. And then there are two other jigs, Brian O'Lynn's and Pay the Reckoning. And I was like, I know I play these.

I am sure that in my session back home, we have played through these tunes and I've been able to play along just fine and I know the notes. So that's always a good thing. So I did look those up and I'm like, yeah, these look familiar. And then we get to rehearsal and my friend who's on flute, she was saying, you just want to double check that we have the same versions of these. So we went through Brian O'Lynn and she had a totally different A part.

This is kind of the point where it's like, okay, we're two days before the gig, because I drove into town just a couple of days before the festival. So I didn't have a whole lot of practice time, but I was like, you know what? A couple of days before the gig, I feel confident that I can retrain my brain quickly enough that I'm not going to go through the version that I think I know. And I'm actually just going to learn your A part, your version here.

And the really handy thing about that is that didn't have to relearn the entire tune. So this is something that I teach when I'm teaching learning by ear and tune memorization. So with my students I am working on making it not as hard and helping you find patterns and find places where you can give yourself a leg up so you're not starting from scratch every single time.

So lots of common phrases in Irish music, lots of different phrases that will come across different tunes and if you can recognize those from another tune that you learn you're like, wait, I already know how that phrase goes. So your brain isn't consciously having to master these new notes and figure out this new pattern because you automatically know it. So you're really just giving yourself a leg up by keeping as much of the tune in your subconscious as possible so you only have to think about where the tunes are different.

This is actually why I like to encourage students to play tunes that are very similar to one another that are actually very tricky to keep apart because it forces you to really hone in on that one note, that one phrase of where does this go in a different direction? So, you know, we're all driving down a highway at the same time. Who is branching off on this exit and who is waiting to branch off on another exit? Like, it's really, really helpful to just go in and be like, OK, this is the exact note where I have to go differently.

And this note is associated with the Providence reel and this note is associated with Fergal O'Geadhra's which are two reels that have very, very similar B parts. I can hardly ever play them in the same session, but I'm trying to force myself to actually go in and do that because that will help me keep them straight in my head. So actually forcing myself to go in and think, okay, where in the B part does Fergal O'Geadhra's go off in another direction?

And where does the Providence Reel go? And just kind of keeping track that way.

So was really the same thing with these tunes that I was learning. So this was for Brian O'Lynn's, that there was a different A part. So I'm thinking, OK, well, I know the B part. We have the same B part. So I don't have to go in and relearn that. But I do have to relearn where A is going. A starts on the same note. It's a C natural and has a very similar phrase to start with. But then instead of doing what I was doing, and I don't even remember what my version is now because I've learned Anya's version.

So instead of going in this direction, I need to remember to go in this direction. Now, I did get the sheet music for her version, so I was able to see it really quickly and I could easily identify where the tune was going. This is something that you could do either with sheet music or by ear. In the sake of time, for the sake of, you know, having a lot of different tunes that I was trying to memorize, I just use the sheet music in this case, and I played it enough that I got it in my head and eventually didn't have to look at the sheet music.

So I did not use any sheet music for this gig — just for the prep for it. And I was very happy that I was able to get myself to a place where I, again, could play 85 to 90 % of the notes and not need to reference the music to remember where things were going. So I'll talk a little bit more about that as well. But with this tune, with relearning the A part, really it was going in a slightly different direction.

It was one of those situations where you know, when you're playing with other melody players, sometimes you have slightly different versions. Maybe you put an ornament in a different place or maybe you put a note in a slightly different place and sometimes it works. It creates a nice harmony. This was a version where it was just going to clash. It was just going to sound like a jumble of notes crashing across one another. And, you know, if that floats your boat of stuff to listen to, great.

But, you know, we're kind of looking a little bit more for harmony and togetherness and that's just kind of what my ear likes to hear. like to hear a really tight set. So it's especially nice to play with people where you've been playing with them for a while, so you know their variations and you know how to match them exactly. That's definitely something that I look for when I am playing with with other melody players and with with Harmony as well. If you if you know the melody well enough and you can follow it and it's just very, very tight and together, that's just like Chef's Kiss best ideal sound out there.

So that was one tune. That was one tune where I knew it fairly well, but again, had to relearn an A part. And it was funny too, because the last phrase of that particular version of Brian O'Lynn's has a very similar phrase to another few tunes that I know. So it's like, da da da da, dee da da da. And that comes up so many times in jigs. I'm sure it comes up in reels as well, but this was a jig.

So I could just think of several different jigs that I knew and I'm like, okay, well, I know that phrase already. I don't have to think about relearning a pattern of notes. So I just have to remember that that comes at the end of A. So as long as I land there, then I'm good. And then I can go right into the B part that I know. So it was just really nice to be like, okay, I'm not learning an entire new tune. I'm not learning 16 bars or 32 bars of notes and trying to keep them all straight. I'm actually just learning probably six bars total.

So like the first measure was about the same, the last one was familiar, and then the ones in the middle were just like, okay, just got to get this pattern right. And if you know the direction, the general direction, if it's going up, down, staying the same, you know the intervals, the thirds, the fourths, the fifths, the sixths, all the different ones, then it is actually really nice to just be able to quickly reconfigure those patterns and think, okay, so I'm used to going here, but instead of going here, now I have to go there. So that's something that helps me.

It's something that I'm really looking at doing more teaching, focusing for in the new year. So I'm recording this at the end of 2024 and in 2025 I would really, really like to double down on helping you with learning intervals and really being able to recognize tunes by ear quickly. So if that's something you're interested in, definitely be on my email list so that you can get all the news on that.

I'll have link for that in the show notes, of course, as always. So definitely be on those weekly Sunday newsletters if you want to have more information around interval training And I actually do have a freebie right now that kind of gets you started on that. So that is called getting off the page, which this is a lot of talking about getting off the page as well in a real life context that I had to apply recently. So these are skills that I'm using quite a lot.

So what happened with the other tunes now, so we had the jigs and again, was mostly familiar with them, but still had to go in and do a little bit of tweaking on some of the notes and the direction just to make sure I was matching my flute player and making sure that she and I were in sync there. So we had that and then we had a couple of reels as well. So there was one reel, Paddy Killoran's that I had not come across. So she actually brought a lot of flute tunes to the table, which was really a lot of fun. Another thing that I want to mention as well, but I'm going to start with Paddy Killoran's here.

So she didn't have the sheet music for it. She just had the ABC notation. So if you're not familiar with ABC, it's literally writing out the note names, A, D, E, F, G, and you are, there's different patterns and different, you know, little dashes and marks that you can make to kind of delineate what note is what. So this is a notation that I first saw Kevin Crawford and Colin Farrell use. I know that it's widely used. It's not just them who use it, but they were the first ones to bring it into my world.

So this was, ironically enough, Anya is one of Kevin's students. So of course she has a lot of the ABC notation and Anya was who I was playing with for the gig. And so she had some of Kevin's ABC notation for the Paddy Killoran reel there. And it was fun to go through and relearn a tune that way. have learned tunes off of the ABCs before and it is valuable because you're not seeing the shape of the notes written out on the page, but you're getting the note name.

So you have that at least like, you know, the bare bones of the tune is just written out of, hey, this is going to be this note, this note and this note. And you know that it's an A part and a B part. So it's like it's almost halfway between learning by ear and learning off of the sheet music, because again, you're not seeing the shape written out for you. So you don't see the up and down notes on the staff.

You do see the note name, so you at least have a little bit of a reference in front of you on the page. And I do find it difficult to learn tunes quickly from ABC because you have to really be paying attention to, you know, how long are the notes and where are the dashes located. So personally for me, when I write ABC notation, I actually like to write them in phrases.

The way that think Kevin wrote it was maybe like a long line, like a long couple of lines for the A part. So it might have actually been like a four bar phrase written across, or maybe it was like two and a half or something, but there wasn't like a rhyme or reason to the phrasing as far as how it was written out on the page. was just like, how many notes are we going to fit on one line and the next line and then the next line. So for my brain personally, when I write an ABC and I like to do this sometimes when I'm listening to music.

I did this for Donal Murphy's CD. I wrote down the note names based on, I was just listening to his recording and I wrote down the note names from that. I was also trying to transpose it from a E flat accordion to just a regular fiddle friendly key, which not that E flat isn't fiddle friendly, but you know, for more instruments as well. So I was transposing and transcribing at the same time. So writing it down while also switching the key in my head.

But when you can hear the intervals, it helps to be able to do that a lot. But I definitely had my fiddle on hand to check on those. But what I will do for the ABC notation is that I really do like to write them in phrases so that I know where I want to pause naturally, because it's hard to see that if it's just all in a line. And then you have little dashes next to the note that kind of let you know what octave it's in.

So it's below the note, you know it's the lower octave, if it's above on the right side then you know it's going up to the higher octave.

So I had been working on Paddy Killoran's for a little bit before we had our rehearsal, which again was just a couple days before the festival. And I had gotten most of the feel for the tune, but it really, really helped me to actually just sit down with Anya and Anya played through the tune. And I'm like, okay, this is somewhere where I just totally breeze through. I thought that there was a dash on this note, but actually it's an octave below. So I don't have to do a high B, I need to do a middle B instead of the high one that I've been trying to play, so it was just really helpful to have that as like a check. I think that if you already use ABC notation, it is always a very, very good idea to listen, which of course any trad fiddle teacher who knows what they're doing will tell you to listen before you really try to hash the notes, but it is just very helpful to have the actual tune in your ear and then the ABCs just kind of help you see it written out on the page note-wise.

And yeah, I haven't found out the best combination for that for learning ABC notation quickly, but it took me, I don't know, probably five, six, seven years to finally learn all four of the main. Well, there's a fifth Martin Wynne's. There might be a six as well, but it took me a long time, suffice to say, to learn Martin Wynne's three and four because I learned two and one pretty quickly because I would hear them a lot in sessions, but three and four you don't hear a whole lot. And I had the ABCs from Colin Farrell for that. And finally, I was like, you know what?

I want to learn, like actually what it was is that I want to learn Martin Wynne's number five, but I feel like in order to learn number five, which is a great tune, it's actually going to be on my second album. So that's coming out soonish. that was like, if I'm to learn number five, then I need to go back and actually properly learn three and four so that I can play all five in a set sometime if I really want to, which is always fun when there's other people in the session that know all five of them as well. So I always like doing those.

Shout out to my Southeastern friends because we do a lot of that in the American Southeast at some of these sessions.

So the last set that I'll talk about as far as learning and prepping these tunes for this festival gig is a set that I literally knew none of the tunes. It was a set of three reels that are again, very kind of more flute friendly. They're great flute reels, definitely sit very well on the instrument and they actually sit pretty well on the fiddle too, but I just, I had never come across them before. So this was the Milky Way, the Trip to Birmingham and the Baltimore Salute.

So I'm totally stealing this set and bringing it back to my session at home. I'm sure the guys there know it already, but I'm very excited to keep playing these tunes. But the fun part about learning this set was that Anya sent me the sheet music for it. you know, just your regular sheet music, but it was sheet music that was written by a flute player to be teaching where the breaths are for the flute.

Instead of having a series of just straight eighth notes for a reel, which usually you have eight eighth notes in one measure, there would be a pause. There would be an eighth note rest where the breath was for the flute. So it was really fun to learn it off of this transcription because I could automatically just, if I just wanted to read it like what was on the page for sheet music, I could see, okay, there's gonna be a little rest here. And so I can use that to copy the flute's breathing. So I can like actually pause here. And I know that that's where Anya is gonna pause as well. So that was really fun to do. And of course, you know, I'm doing it a little bit in rehearsal and she's like, you know, I'd rather you fill in that space. You know, it's good to be able to like, you're the fiddle player.

You don't have to breathe in order to make a note. I mean, obviously, yes, you do have to breathe, but you don't have to, you know, breathe and break the line. You can keep playing while you're breathing at the same time. So that's the handy thing about us fiddlers is we can keep it going. We can sustain the notes pretty well. So it was kind of fun because I got to choose what was going into those little athras. So I kind of tell, you know, and maybe if I looked up another version of the tune, I would see what the notes written in were.

But you can fill it in pretty easily and keep it in the key, not do something totally wild, like throw in a random note that just doesn't make any sense at all. And so it was a lot of fun to be able to do that and just fill in that space sometimes. But then other times I could match her phrasing and that would really make that eighth rest just like pop for one second. And then you hop back in and then you sustain it for another one and then you do a breath at the same time. And it really was just lot of fun.

Like again, like I said before, I really, really love a good tight set where people are just, you know what the other person is going to do. You know they're going to breathe there. And so you tailor your playing to match that sound. So instead of actually taking a breath necessarily, you're letting the fiddle kind of take a breath by just having a little bit of a pause and then you're sinking right back into the note. So just a lot of fun to do.

I was recently in a master class that Liz Knowles was leading. And Liz talks about, you know, approaching the tune in a bunch of different ways, like really exploring it and getting to know what is happening in that particular version of that tune and mimicking that. So that really drew me in. It's like, you know, you can play a tune very choppy. You can play it with a lot of breath and a lot of space between the notes.

Or you can play one that's maybe little bit more lopey and it flows along and it's just, you know, there's not a whole lot of stuff happening that really breaks up the, it's just more fluid. So there's multiple ways that you could approach the tune and it's just really fun to be able to play it with multiple people and kind of see how they interpret it. And it just breathes new life into the tune personally, in my opinion.

So those were several different methods that I used for prepping for this gig. So I had the sheet music, had tunes that I knew fairly well, but I knew that I needed to go back and kind of adjust a little bit. And then I had some that were the ABC notation. And then there was a couple where I just listened to the song. So I had the Border Collies CD. Well, yeah, had their album playing online. And so I was going in there and listening to their arrangements for the songs and the tunes that they were playing afterwards. And that just helped me to kind of map out what was happening in the arrangement. And I didn't need sheet music for the songs necessarily. I just kind of was listening to what their fiddle player had recorded. So are they matching the rhythm of the guitar? Are they doing these long, flowy notes? Are they playing a little counter melody to go along with what's happening?

So just able to get kind of the bare bones structure. then with songs, I usually do try and hang back as a fiddle player. So it is more about the singer and trying to just add a little bit of color to what they're doing as opposed to, you know, just being the star of the show and breaking out all these, what do call it, flourishing lines and trying to draw the attention to the fiddle, which, you know, we like doing, but not always the time and place for it. So that is basically how I approached this gig.

So that's really how I approached this gig. I had a mix of listening and using the sheet music as, really in this case, it was a tool to speed up the process. when you sit down and you learn a tune by ear, it takes longer in the moment to learn it by ear, but once you have it in your system, it's there. And so it was very helpful for me to have the rehearsals with the musicians since that way I could be listening to the tune and we could play it through, seven, eight, nine times and just to really hear each of those phrases each time and get it further into my head. So I was listening very, very hard. My brain was working hard for this one of what direction we're going in. And so do we start low? Do we start high? And then what happens right after that?

And then if I could get that start a bit like if, you know, you're singing a song and you know the basic direction of where the story is going, but you just have those little starting phrases to help your brain be like, okay, I know what's coming next. I know the two phrase line in my head. I just need it to start and then I can fill in the rest from there. Then that's really how I like to approach these tunes. And it's definitely again, a method that I'm going to be focusing on teaching a lot more in the future. Stuff I do fairly much, fairly much. I do that already to some extent, but just really wanting to put more attention and more focus into that learning approach.

If that is something that interests you, again, I am happy to work with you on it. So the best place to be in the know of all those things is on my weekly newsletter that sends out every Sunday. And of course, there's these episodes that come out on Thursdays. So I'll definitely be chatting more about that with myself and also with guests in the future. So I hope you enjoyed this little totally off the cuff solo cast. I think I kept myself fairly well in check, all things considered. I will see you in the next episode!