Shifting and Positions Part 2 (Money Musk)

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Welcome to the fiddle studio podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller. And today I'll be bringing you a setting of Money Musk, from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today we are going to talk about shifting. This is the second part of a two part series on shifting and positions. But I did positions first. So if you go back last week, we talked about positions and what positions are on the violin or fiddle. And now we're going to talk about shifting, which is how to get into positions.

First position, most people play in it several years before they start to learn about shifting, and it definitely becomes a comfort zone. Besides the fact that you have the open strings there to kind of ground you, there isn't specifically a reason that first position would be wildly easier than the other positions. Because most of the mechanics are the same, you're pressing a finger down on the strings, and you know, there's a certain amount of space and then you've got your next finger and you're going up in a scale or you're going down or you're skipping or you're stepping a lot of it is the same. 

And I'm working with people who are trying to improve their shifting, I feel a little bit like a motivational speaker a little bit. Because I try to help them reframe in their mind, people will feel like the higher they get on the violin that the scarier and the more difficult it is, and they'll get very tense. And they'll have a very hard time. And it's almost like they're, they're straining to get up to those really high notes. You know, these are for advanced classical players. 

In fact, the higher you play on the violin, the closer your hand is coming to your wall to your face, really to the front of the violin where your head is, and having your arm closer into your body, it gives you if anything more control than trying to control something when your arm is way stretched out away from your body, I'll often take the violin out of the hands of students and say, Okay, now do your your shift. And they just, they just see that it's not, they don't have to think of it as way, way, way high up there, they can just think about it as I'm just bringing my hand closer to my nose. Easy peasy. 

So that's just a way to think about shifting and leaving your comfort zone. But many things are gonna stay the same. And you're just coming home, you know, you're just coming up to your nose there.

The mechanics of shifting, here's a rule for you. There's always a finger down when you shift. If you're I'm sitting in front of a desk right now. And if I have two spots on my desk, and I know where one spot is, and I want to touch the other spot. And it has to be exact, I can learn to get to that other spot by dragging my finger across the desk. And I can sort of teach my finger how far it is in what direction and practice getting to that spot. 

But if I'm just randomly touching my finger down in random spots on the desk, it's going to be very hard to measure and get to a specific place. I hope that made sense. I'll show a student I could play in first position. Now let go of the violin, nothing's touching it. Now try to find third position or try to find fifth position. Even a pretty advanced player will have a lot of trouble with that just finding fifth from nothing from note from not touching the violin at all. You want to have your finger on the string because feeling this string under your finger. You will learn how far and how long it takes to get to the position.

So which finger is it, it can be the finger that you start with from the note before the shift, or it can be the finger that you're going to finish with for the note. After the shift. A shift goes between two notes.

Most of the time, it's the finger that you start with. Okay, shifting up on the finger that you're going to finish with is a little bit of a special effect. I use it a lot in klezmer or playing something very romantic or schmaltzy. But normally we're going to shift on the finger that we're kind of leaving from if you're just going from like a one to a one, if it's the same finger, that's great. In fact, that's where most people start, is they start learning shifts that are just one in first position, up to one and third position.

And then back down to one, and then you try your to two to two, three to three. How do you know where you're going? Well, you know, check with your three, you don't just slide and pray that you're going to get there, you go very slow. So you can hear when you get to the note and stop at the right time. If you're going super fast, you're going to overshoot. And basically you'll just be practicing overshooting, which isn't a good way to get better at shifting. 

So you go, you go very slow, and you stop when you get there. And at first, you're just really kind of dragging your finger. So it sounds like this very thick glissando. Then when you get better at that, you'll practice in order to get some speed into your shifting, you need to release the pressure on your finger. So you're kind of pressing down on the string playing your note. And then you'll release the pressure, but not release the string, fingers still touching the string, very lightly, do the shift with a very light pressure on the string and then come back down into the string.

A classical player, when they're learning to shift will plan, every shift, I write into my students music, all the information, what position they're in, where the shift is, what finger it's using. And they'll practice that shift. Once you get really comfortable, for instance, shifting to third position, I don't necessarily write in every shift, just a third position in my music. But really any other position, I'll put a little fingering in there that will in my brain translate to, oh, that's a shift to fourth position. 

But for a student Oh, you know, I might literally write the words shift to fourth position for someone who's just starting out. So they don't, you know, practice and and just make something up. If you're constantly just moving your hand around wherever trying to, you know what it's supposed to sound like trying to find the notes way up there. I mean, I'm not saying you can't do that. But for someone who is trying to learn to be really precise with their shifts, you want to plan it, write it down, and practice that. 

There's books full of like, every conceivable combination of finger positions string. Hence, as I said, last week, you'll walk through the practice halls of Eastman or Juilliard and you you hear these D. D, people practicing their their shifts on string instruments. Oh, my, that was a lot about shifting. I will be at some point, working on a shifting course. That's gonna be fun. It'll be good for me actually. 

Our tune today is Money Musk. Money Musk is a really old and well known tune, you might say 'How appropriate then Megan's doing Money Musk'. As a New England Fiddler who grew up playing New England music. This is actually pulled from an old time jam. They were playing an old time version of Money Musk, fiddler's who are friends of mine actually right on my street named Brenna and Shane, and they have this great version of Money Musk. I love it. 

The song was played in Scotland originally, but definitely spread to Ireland and then different parts of North America. So I think it was a Scottish pipes tune. There was a country dance that went with it. So came to America. And I think the old time version we're playing was kind of in the mountains. But it went other places went to New England and together with the Money Musk dance was a very popular for hundreds of years dance and tune. And now people don't play it as much. Apparently it was a dance that people would do right after the break. It's considered like an old chestnut now. I grew up hearing it.

Also played out west. I heard it was used in Texas and Missouri for like fiddle competitions. It's a real kind of show off tune if you want to hear people show off with it. I mean, check out Rodney Miller's version that would be the New England or if you look up Jean Carignon. He was playing this on YouTube. There's a video of him playing it. Astonishing is sort of the word I always think of when I see his playing. It was awesome. I saw him playing it in G and in A.

There is a story that Paul Gifford when he was in Montreal, asked Jean to play Money Musk and Carignon said, Do you want the French, the Scottish or the Irish version and he could apparently play all three. Oh my gosh. So the version that we play is from what I can tell and Brad Kolodner who helps run the jam also helped me with this. It's from the Highwoods String Band. They have a version of Money Musk that you can find on Slippery Hill look up Money Musk. There'll be a bunch of different recordings there. 

And this was from the Brandywine friends of old time music festival. 1974 the Highwoods String Band was a revival String Band in the 1970s alongside bands like New Lost City Ramblers. I mean, I have these records from my dad's collection on Cranberry Lake, Delaware Water Gap. 

Do you want to read more specifically about the Highwoods String Band? There's a an excellent documentary by Larry Adelman called Dance All Night, the Highwoods String Band story you can dive into that folk revival mid 70s era. Great music coming out of there. And this is a great tune here. Money Musk.