hey! i have been following for a while and been loving listening to all the tunes you play, and i was wondering if you had any advice for someone who wants to get into playing folk music, preferably with other people? i have been playing guitar for 10 years but learning by ear and improvising (like a lot of folk tunes/instrumentalists seem to do) is not my strong suit...
Ah this is a great question! Iâm honored I was the person you went to for it :) There are of course multiple aspects to this question so Iâll try to address them all as best I can.
I can vouch for the fact that the best way to learn folk music is definitely to play it with other people. This is the nature of folk music after allâitâs passed around, adopted, adapted, traditionally in very communal settings. I canât tell you how many tunes in my repertoire have come from other people.
Of course, this begs the question of how to find these other people, which I admit can be a tricky one depending on your situation. I was lucky in that I initially fell in with my group at college, where we had a club specifically devoted to folk and traditional music. From there Iâve made multiple friends who sort of operate in different worlds of folk musicâIâve accompanied some of them to traditional Irish pub sessions, where theyâve learned and brought back a ton of new tunes for us to play independently, or been invited to contradances at local arts centers. Meanwhile, my preferred place is in the living history scene, where doing folk music at reenactments and at my current museum has introduced me to new friends as well as led to a number of gigs, but the music I play there is more restricted than stuff you would play at the average session. I can really only speak to these two facets of the folk music community (which is to say, the broadly âIrishâ folk music world as well as British and early American 18th century music) so if youâre looking to do other sorts of music Iâm not sure what advice I could give, but if youâre looking for a âsessionâ sort of community I would first try and look into local pubs and bars and see if they might host regular sessions? Obviously itâs super location dependent, but a lot of Irish pubs will host regular (weekly or maybe bimonthly, for example) sessions open to the public. If youâre scared to jump in directly you could just show up to one, sans instrument, just to hang out and scope out the vibe and the people there. Other places that might have similar things going could be community centers or local arts centers like I mentioned, or perhaps if you have a local college (or are in school yourself) they might have public music events or organizations to look into. Finding and building a community is difficult, so I very much sympathize with that, and consider myself lucky that I basically happened to stumble into a good situationâI hope any of that might give you a place to start.
As for actually learning music, I think my first piece of advice would be to just listen to the sorts of music that you want to be playingâcast a wide net, listen to lots of things, build up sort of a mental ârepertoireâ even if you canât necessarily play these tunes yourselfâchances are, if you decide to show up to a session one day, they will eventually play a tune you recognize, which will help you be able to jump in!
Learning how to play and adapt to this music on the fly, as well as make creative decisions with it, is obviously a skill. Itâs hard for tons of people and I would never call myself an expert either, so being intimidated or otherwise lost or frustrated is frankly a very reasonable response. And it will take time no matter what. As a fellow rhythm player, I think a good place to start is just by applying chords you know to tunes you know. I assume, having played guitar for so long, you definitely know your way around the instrument pretty well, so youâre probably already familiar with the concept! There are tons of tabs and chord sheets you can start with, which Iâm sure youâre familiar with, but as for learning by ear, Iâll be the first to tell you that folk music is quite repetitive. If you look at enough tunes youâll be able to start identifying chord patterns and applying them to tons and tons of individual melodies, and as time goes on, develop and embellish your own progressions as well. Learning these patterns in common keys is super helpful in being able to recognize them in tunes you hear. Again, itâs a skill that takes time, so the more you do it, the more youâll start to feel comfortable with it.
If youâre venturing into improv, having a strong sense of chord structure will definitely help. If youâre interested in doing melodic stuff as well, I would work on slowly building your those skills by practicing individual melodies. There are tons of libraries of notated folk tunesâstart with ones you know and look for written music or tabs. Thesession.com and Traditional Tune Archive are my favorite places for this!
I technically canât speak exactly to your experience as I primarily do mandolin stuff and my guitar skills are quite rudimentary, but building up the separate skills of chord/rhythm work and melody will allow you to begin to combine them. After several years of becoming comfortable in my instrument I now think as myself as sort of âfluentâ in it, in the sense that I donât have to think about the chords Iâm playingâI just sort of automatically know where they fit in the progression as well as in my fingersâso adding some simple melodic stuff on top of those chordal shapes is quite easy. But as I said, this came with years of practice, and I certainly wouldnât even consider myself a âgoodâ mandolinist (Iâm totally self taught and pretty sure any professional would take one look at me and ask wtf I was doing), but it has allowed me to hold down the rhythm section for my non-rhythm friends, or jump in on a session in either rhythmic or melodic capacity, so Iâd argue thatâs the most important part! Iâm a strong believer that you donât have to do music the âcorrectâ way as long as itâs right for you.
Hope this helped, and that it wasnât too overwhelming LOL. Again, Iâm no expert but Iâm always happy to talk folk music!
(I also have generally switched to posting my musicking endeavors on my main @iamthemaestro if thatâs something that interests you :) )
