Review Set 2.2

Renew with review

Before moving on to Module 2.2, take a practice session to review the core tunes you learned in this module: Find them listed below for your convenience.

Core Tunes

*Suggestion: Film another video capsule of this tune (if you haven’t already done so). Share your progress with the FiddleHed community by posting to the Student Video Exchange.

Essential techniques

You may also want to review these technique exercises:

Challenge 🧠

Try to see how much you remember of these tunes without using tabs, sheet music, audio or video. After testing yourself in this way, go to the lesson page to jog your memory and fine-tune the melody.

Tips For Reviewing Tunes

Fingerprinting

How to use Fingerprinting to remember tunes:

Play an entire tune.
Say the name of the tune.
Play the first few notes of each part of the tune.
At the end of a practice session, play fingerprints for all tunes you did that day.

An easy way to remember how to practice fingerprinting: Say it, Play it.

Example: Kerry Polia

Play the whole tune.
Then say out loud, “Kerry Polka, Irish jig in G Major”
Play the first few notes of the A Part (A1-D0-1-0) then the first few notes of the B Part (D3-A0-1-0)

Use a practice journal

If during your practice sessions you only play whatever you feel like playing, you’ll just be treading water. It will be difficult to improve as a musician. If you know what you did yesterday you can pick up where you left off today. In this way you waste less time.

As you continue your fiddle journey, you’ll learn lots of tunes and techniques. Take note of what you practice on a daily basis. Use a notebook or journal app (Apple notes, Roam, Evernote, Notion). In the “Practice Toolkit” below you’ll find a simple online practice journal you can use to keep track of what you’re learning.

Later on, the journal will help you to review things you’ve learned and forgotten.

Review Sets

If you build up a long list of tunes (over twenty) it can be a daunting task to review them all at once.

A good practice strategy is to create small review sets with 3-4 songs you’ve learned and want to remember. My student Fiona uses her review set as a warm-up. She says it “makes her feel like a fiddler”.

For FiddleHed subscribers, a simple review set could simply be all tunes in a module (3-4 tunes). If these are solid, then you can build eventually bigger “Birds-eye” review sets of 2-3 modules.

Why review tunes?

You won’t forget the tunes you learn if you review them. 📈
You earn compound interest on the time spent learning them. When you review these tunes, you’ll gain new insight into things that were difficult 👁
You’ll gain the satisfaction of being able to pick up the fiddle, remember and play the tunes you’ve learned. This helps you to overcome the Emotional Challenge Of Fiddling ♥️