Using Our Self-Repeating Phrase Audios

A Unique Feature

One unique feature of fiddle-online is the self-repeating audio for each phrase of a tune. I call it “interactive sheet music.” Fiddle-online went live in 2015, built on ideas such as this one, which I developed as early as 2007. Why is it unique on the internet? I’ve often wondered, but I suspect it’s simply because it takes too much work to provide this service for every tune. One character amiss in the code and it won’t work! In any case, I believe it’s super helpful for learning tunes, and I hope you make full use of it as you go.

Phrases vs Written Music

On fiddle-online, the written music is parsed by phrase, using colorful boxes, with the same color used every time the same phrase appears. This structure of phrases is how we hear and play music, but it’s not how we write it down. Music is written down so that we can easily see the beats and the divisions by measure and by part.

Phrases, however, are more organic. They include pickup notes, and represent the rhythms we feel as our tune goes through a call and response. Often phrase A1 and A2 are like question and answer, followed by another instance of phrase A1 plus the End phrase. It’s like asking the same question (A1) twice but having an initial answer (A2) and then a better, more settled answer (Ending, or A-end).

Using Phrases

Phrases are the building blocks of a tune. Sometimes you can even learn a tune up to tempo from day one, as long as you break it down into manageable pieces — phrases — instead of trying to play too much at a time. Phrases in music are like phrases in English, or more to the point, lyrics in a song. They are what the tune is trying to say. Learning them and putting them together is the language of music. Learning just the notes is like thinking of all the letters that spell the words you are saying. To clarify your understanding of phrases, take a look at the phrases of song lyrics. or write your own lyrics for a tune you are learning!

Using the Phrase Audios

The self-repeating audios are the orange buttons that say, for example, “Play A1” above the A1 phrase. You click there and it will play the A1 phrase slowly enough for you to learn it; it’s the first building block of the tune. Since the audio automatically repeats itself, you can even click on it and look away from the sheet music if you’d like to learn the phrase by ear. You can also trade of listening and playing, or learn the first few notes and pick up on the next few notes as you listen to the audio repeatedly. You may wish to match the audio with the sheet music of that phrase as you listen. There are no perfect methods — the more ways you play with it, the better you’ll learn it. Be wary of presuming that you are a “visual person” or that you can’t read very well. These self-limiting proclamations have been shown in cognitive studies to be inaccurate and usually hold you back from your potential.

Note that once you click the orange “Play” button, the audio will continue playing until you hit the red “Pause” button associated with it. At that point the audio will stop. When you click that same play button again, the audio will resume playing exactly where you stopped it. If you don’t click the “Pause” button, the audio will continue playing even if you click and start another phrase audio going.

These orange buttons can help you understand the tune, even visually. Each phrase has only one audio. If the phrase comes back later in the tune, there is no audio for it. This helps you scope out which phrases you need to learn, and what the structure of the tune is. Once again, this is how we hear and play the music — we bring back phrases we’ve already played, and answer them with new ideas. Sometimes we also bring back the 2d phrase and 4th (ending) phrases in multiple parts of the tune. In such tunes, only the A1 and B1 (in four-part tunes, also C1 and D1) are the only new ideas. You can see this easily by scanning the tune and noticing which phrases have the orange audio buttons, and which ones do not.

Next Steps after Phrases

Once you start gaining confidence in a phrase, move on (don’t wait till you decide you’ve “mastered” it) and try learning another phrase. Working phrase by phrase is a better plan than trying to string all the notes together from the beginning, because the phrases fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, often like a call and response. The first phrase may go into the second phrase the first time you play it, but the next time it comes back, it’s likely to go somewhere else, as in the typical structure A1, A2, A1, End. Know the phrases as discreet pieces of music in their own right, so you can plug them in as you need them.

After getting a feel for one or more phrases, you can begin mixing and matching them by playing with the “Playalong” track above the tune and under the “Listen” track. You don’t have to wait until you can play the whole tune before you try the “Playalong” track. It can help you learn the tune to play along with the phrases you know and listen to the ones you don’t yet have. This helps your ears keep in mind how all the phrases fit together.

Most of the “Playalong” tracks are also self-repeating, so you can play through a tune several times in a row. This feature was added by request, so you might run across some Playalong tracks that do not repeat themselves. If you find one like this, feel free to let me know and I’ll fix it!

I think you’ll find that by using the self-repeating phrase audios, you’ll end up learning the tunes faster, and retain them longer. Happy fiddling!

© 2021 Ed Pearlman

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