Some thoughts on playing together

Sessions are strange animals. They're like a band without a set repertoire or rehearsal. So one of the places that they can unravel most easily is, by lack of agreed tempos or styles of expression, and by lack of a conductor, we stop playing together. There's a large Irish session in town, for example, where one half of the table is playing half a beat behind the other half!

We're pretty good in the Scottish sessions around here, but we hit a few rough spots this last session. So here are some suggestions on how to tighten things up, so when people hear our sessions, they sound like we're a well-rehearsed ensemble:

For the beginning/intermediate players: practice at home with a metronome. It takes a lot of practice to play steadily, surprisingly so, and a metronome is your best friend in the world in this area. Playing with other people is about playing together. It's especially important to have that steady tempo when starting a tune. This makes it much easier for other players to pick up which tune you're starting, and makes it a lot harder for stronger players to bully you into something faster than you're ready to play once they join in. Own that tempo! Then, everyone else will play along.

For the advanced players: We love our slow airs. But let's face it, these are solo pieces, or for tight ensembles. In those situations, our instinct is to close our eyes, lose ourselves in the tune, and play expressively, with lots of rubato. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for a session. We can still play expressively, but the melody players need to open their eyes and watch each other. We don't necessarily need to watch any one person, but to play together, we need to be taking cues from each other. And playing to metronome once in a while wouldn't kill us either.

With these simple tools and tactics, we can be playing together like a well oiled machine for many sessions to come!