When do you stop "learning' and start "playing"

[Long Haired David]

As I only started seriously at Christmas, I say that "I am learning" the concertina.

I know how far I have to go to 'play'rather than struggle..

 

Just a thought, though - when do you say "I PLAY the concertina"

 

What is the tipping point?

 

David

[Tootler]

As I only started seriously at Christmas, I say that "I am learning" the concertina.

I know how far I have to go to 'play'rather than struggle..

 

You never stop learning.

 

Just a thought, though - when do you say "I PLAY the concertina"

 

What is the tipping point?

 

 

When you feel comfortable about saying it.

 

I first tried the Anglo about four years ago, reached something of a plateau, put it down and played very little for a year or so. I have recently picked it up again and feel I am making more progress, but I am still learning even if I can play a few things and accompany myself (in a simple sort of way) on the odd song or two. I feel I have a long way to go though and I still struggle.

 

I have been playing other instruments for many more years. I first picked up a recorder more than 50 years ago but I still struggle. Admittedly there are things I don't struggle with, but there are many occasions where I do. It's all part of stretching yourself and if you stop struggling with something, you stop improving.

 

That's not to deny that the early stages of learning an instrument are mostly struggle, but stick with it and you'll get there. Most of all though, along the way, Have Fun.

[Woody]

I think for me the stage when I thought of myself as playing the concertina rather than "just" learning it was the first time I played for other people without feeling the need to prefix it with words something like "Please bear in mind that I've only been playing for X months / years"

 

Really you never stop learning. I did a course years ago with John Kirkpatrick and he was telling us about the types of music he was experimenting with and what he was learning from it. I suspect that if you stop learning you've either given up or you're dead

 

What I do find useful however is to set myself a goal to work towards - e.g. playing a certain tune through smoothly 3 times in a row - and then making sure that you take the time to register when you achieve it. Some days my overall goal of being "a decent player" seems just as far away as it did when I started 6 years ago, so having a way to mark my progress has really helped.

[Long Haired David]

I think for me the stage when I thought of myself as playing the concertina rather than "just" learning it was the first time I played for other people without feeling the need to prefix it with words something like "Please bear in mind that I've only been playing for X months / years"

 

Really you never stop learning. I did a course years ago with John Kirkpatrick and he was telling us about the types of music he was experimenting with and what he was learning from it. I suspect that if you stop learning you've either given up or you're dead

 

What I do find useful however is to set myself a goal to work towards - e.g. playing a certain tune through smoothly 3 times in a row - and then making sure that you take the time to register when you achieve it. Some days my overall goal of being "a decent player" seems just as far away as it did when I started 6 years ago, so having a way to mark my progress has really helped.

 

Thanks for that. It is very encouraging. Playing through three times is a goal I have set myself and almost always fail. Mind you, I have only been playing 'seriously' since Christmas. I do find that playing a tune through 2 or 3 times on a tin whistle (only playing 4 weeks but used to play a flue and recorder years ago) is much easier than on the concertina. Maybe that is just more built in memory of the fingerings.

 

BTW, my wife comes from Chippenham and her grandparents lived on the Malmsbury Road at Hardenhuish!

 

David

Edited March 12, 2011 by Long Haired David

[Woody]

BTW, my wife comes from Chippenham and her grandparents lived on the Malmsbury Road at Hardenhuish!

My wife's grandmother's maiden name was Tuddenham! Funny old world!

[Gary Chapin]

What I do find useful however is to set myself a goal to work towards.

I couldn't agree more. I've been playing melodeon for twelve years, and do gigs, etc etc ... I'm very comfortable saying, "I play ..." But when I don't have a goal of improvement, I do not play as well. I find I just play a bit aimlessly. My practices are really just dabblings. So my goals might be new tunes, or techniques from tutorial books, or chords for accompaniment, etc. But if I don't have such a goal, my practice is not at all as valuable.

[Anglo-Irishman]

David,

A lot of good answers up to now!

 

I think the most important one was that you never stop learning, so there's not a clean cut-over between learning and playing. At some point in your learning process, you realise that, although you can't yet make the concertina do everything that it's capable of in the hands of a vitrtuoso, you can play a few pieces competently enough to play Happy Birthday for members of the family, or make a change from the inevitable guitar at campfire evenings, or the like. From then on, you can say that you PLAY the concertina. Your learning then becomes the process of becoming a BETTER PLAYER. The next milestone is when you can contribute your concertina playing to a group of some sort, and a further milestone is when you feel you can play solo, even if it's only for friends and family. And so on, until you reach the Albert Hall. Most of us do not get that far - each has his or her "level of incompetence", and when we reach that, we take a step back to the level immediately below, and live the rest of our lives as satisfied PLAYERS at a certain level, learning to do what we do just that little bit better all the time.

 

That's the functional definition of a "player". More abstractly, I'd say that you can PLAY an instrument when you can get a new tune worked out on it fairly quickly. This shows that you're familiar with the instrument. It doesn't matter whether you do this by notation or by ear - both are valid ways of approaching new music, but both demand a certain familiartiy with the instrument, and it's this familiarity that makes you a PLAYER. There are of course different levels, and even the different concertina systems are different.

I'd call you an Anglo player if you can pick up a tune and harmonise it reasonably well on the fly in C or G.

I would expect a duet player to be able to do the same, but in a lot more keys, or to be able to play harmonised pieces from sheet music.

I'm not familiar with the English, but I would expect a player of it to read pretty fluently, or to confidently play any known melody in a variety of keys.

 

Perhaps the acid test is what you do when someone asks you how a particular tune goes: do you hum or whistle it, or do you take your concertina and play it to him?

 

Puts me in mind of a story:

A man went into a pub for a pint. Hardly had the barman put the glass on the bar, when along came a little ape and urinated in it. The guest was furious, and demanded to see the landlord. "That's him at the piano," said the barman. The guest went over to the piano, where the landlord was thumping out "Nellie Dean" or some such ditty, and said, "Do you know a monkey peed in my beer!"

"I don't think so," said the landlord, "But just hum a few bars, and I might recognise it."

 

That landlord was a piano PLAYER!

 

Cheers,

John