There's a man I've written about before, Mick Hennessy, who used to play fiddle in the sessions at Cruise's back when I was a young lad with more hair and less sense. I've been thinking about him a lot lately. So let me tell you about Mick and the tuner.
First you have to understand how Mick tunes a fiddle.
He doesn't.
That's not fair. He DOES tune it. But not the way a normal person tunes it, with a wee box that blinks green when you've got it right. Mick tunes by ear. He puts the fiddle up under his chin, he closes his eyes, he saws across the A string, and he listens to something the rest of us can't hear. Then he tightens. Then he saws again. Then he goes "mmm" — not happy, never happy, just less unhappy — and he does the next string. The whole thing takes him about forty seconds and at the end of it the fiddle is, I swear to you, perfectly in tune. Every time.
I asked him once how he did it. He was about sixty then, leaning back against the wall with a pint going warm beside him, and he looked at me like I'd asked him how he breathed.
"The string tells you," he said. "You just have to shut up long enough to hear it."
That's Mick. The string tells you. Shut up long enough.
Now. I am a man of the modern age. I have a website. I know what a clip-on tuner is. They're brilliant — you clip it on the scroll of the fiddle, it picks up the vibration, it lights up green when you're spot on. Eight euro in the music shop in Limerick. Takes the guesswork clean out of it. And one Christmas — this would've been years back now — I bought Mick one. Wrapped it and everything. I was so pleased with myself I could hardly sit still.
He opened it. He turned it over in his big knuckly hands. He read the box. And then he said the thing I will remember until the day I die.
"What's this for?"
I explained. Clip it on, it tells you when you're in tune, no more guessing. And Mick — God love him — looked at me with genuine pity. Not anger. PITY. Like I'd handed a fish a bicycle.
"Seamus," he said, "if I needed a machine to tell me my own fiddle was out, I'd give the fiddle away."
And that was that. He thanked me, mind. Mick has manners. But I found out months later, from a fella who saw it, that Mick had been using the wee tuner as a bookmark. In a Western paperback. Louis L'Amour, I think. Clipped to page two hundred and something, blinking away to itself in the dark of his coat pocket, marking the place where some cowboy was about to do something dramatic. Eight euro of precision electronics. A bookmark.
I was raging at the time. I'm laughing now. That's how Mick gets you.
Here's the thing though, and this is the part that's been turning over in my head. For YEARS I thought it was stubbornness. Old man set in his ways, won't move with the times, all that. I used to roll my eyes about it (sorry, Mick). I'd be there at the session, plugging my own bodhrán-less self into the modern world, smug as you like.
And then one night the tuner gospel got tested.
We were in a back room somewhere — I won't say where — and there was a young one, fierce talented, brand new fiddle, top of the range, electronic tuner clipped on and glowing green. Green green green. In tune by the machine. And she played, and it sounded — fine. Correct. Cold. Like a phone reading you a poem. And then Mick lifted his old yoke, did his forty seconds of "mmm," and played the same air, and the whole room went quiet in that way a room only goes quiet maybe twice in your life. The notes weren't different. I checked. I have ears. The notes were the same notes.
But his were ALIVE.
I think — and I've only worked this out recently, so bear with me — I think the tuner gets you to "correct." And correct is a fine place to visit. But Mick was never trying to get to correct. He was listening for the note the room wanted, the note the song wanted, the wee bend in it that no machine has a setting for. The string tells you. He wasn't being a contrary old goat. He was just operating on a frequency the eight-euro box doesn't pick up.
It's the same reason The Rattlin' Bog works in a pub when half the room is two pints past tuneful. It was never about correct. It was about alive. The whole song is a roomful of people listening to each other hard enough to land the flea verse together at speed — which, by the way, no tuner on earth will ever help you with.
So I've stopped arguing with Mick about the tuner. Officially. He won the argument by a margin of one entire lifetime to my eight euro, and I've conceded.
Was he right all along? Yeah. He was. Don't tell him I said it.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — I tried clipping the tuner to Rattlin's collar as a joke. He sat very still, the green light blinking under his chin, and gave me a look of such ancient disappointment that I took it off again and apologised to him out loud. The cat tunes by ear too, apparently.