Playing by ear (Heater Don't Stop)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller. Today I'll be bringing you a setting of Heater Don't Stop from my album Broke the Floor by Meg Wobus and Charlie Beller. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about playing by ear on the fiddle or this might pertain to other instruments as well. 

Playing by ear is funny. Some folks take to it right away. I always wonder, especially if they haven't played other instruments. Did they experiment a lot with instruments when they were a kid? Did they spend a lot of time whistling? Yeah, I wonder how they got basically the part of their brain that thinks about melodies and music wired to their fingers where they could just easily figure out, pick out a tune or find the notes to play along. 

For some people it's a struggle, and I don't think it's their fault. I just think our brains are wired differently and sometimes you have to work to connect those two things Physical motion of your hands, if we're talking about fiddling with what you're hearing and what you're thinking about trying to play. 

You can't really play by ear if you're not listening to what you're doing. So people playing music without listening to what they're doing. Sometimes they call it typing. I think that comes from piano Pianists kind of an insult to say, oh, he's just typing. The way you might practice typing you're just reading a document and then making your fingers type it out on the piano. 

Just reading music and then just making your fingers type it out on the piano. So with a violin I think you're kind of forced a little bit more to listen to what you're doing. But people still tuck their instrument under their chins and I do this sometimes and I'm just off in a different world and I'm not really listening to what's happening. Sometimes I'll go back and hear myself and say is that what I sounded? Like I wasn't paying any attention. 

If you're trying to Listen in focus on what's coming out of your instrument, it really helps not to have something that you're reading. You're not reading music, you're not trying to read something else, you're not looking at anything in particular. Maybe your eyes are closed or you're just soft gaze and you're listening to the notes coming out. 

You may, if you have trouble distinguishing between notes, just like some people have trouble distinguishing between colors, it's just a difference that comes up. You may want to do ear training test or software online to try to develop that skill of just being able to hear the difference between the different notes. 

One way I like to play around with ear training for people who are just starting off with fiddling or just dipping their toe into playing by ear is in a curious kind of improvisational way. Start on one string, take your A string or your D string and try to make up some little four note tunes on a string. Just to hear what the notes are doing, play around with your fingers, listen to what's coming out. You only need four notes to make a tune if you play, play some little patterns, put them together. Pretty soon you'll have a little four note, three or four note song. 

You can go from there to picking out simple children's songs. You know really well. If you know Row River, your boat or Three Blind Mice or any other song that you grew up with, that you can hear it in your head. And then pick out a note and try to make that sound on the fiddle. Yeah, also works with simple fiddle tunes, but of course if you're not using the music, you want to know it in your head, the sound of it. You want to basically know it is so well you can hum it. So if you can hum old Joe Clark then you can try picking it out. But if you can't hum it yet you can't remember how it goes. You're not really playing by ear trying to figure it out. 

You do have to think a little bit about keys. So it helps, when you're first starting to play around with learning by ear, playing by ear, to have just one or maybe two keys, that you're working in the key of G. And you're working in the key of G basically means that any songs you're trying to figure out, or even little songs that you're writing, would end on a G. Because if something's in G it means it's all centered around that resting tone of G and it may not necessarily start on a G, although a lot of songs do start on their home base note. 

But it would normally end on a G. And then you'd want to know the seven notes that make up that scale. Seven's, not that many, you can learn it. The one octave G scale is just on the D string 3A, 1, 2, 3e, 1, 2 and your twos are low. So you know that. Or you can use A if you like your high twos but work in that one key. 

Try making up your songs, working out some children's songs, maybe working out an easy tune or two, and just do them in that key until you get comfortable with those seven notes Going back and forth, skipping, hopping, leaping, different patterns that basically make up music in that key. Then you can branch out to some other keys. You've got D, a, e, minor, a minor. I mean that might hold you for a while. 

I love to take a really easy tune and try starting it on different notes, so playing it in different keys. This is a classic way to practice. You can do it with a scale. I had my interview with VanNorstrand  and he said he'd never played scales. But I think playing scales is really useful. You can just make up your own music, like Noah did, or you can play some scales and move that around to different keys and then try it with some easy tunes. 

You know if you're playing the piano or right now I'm playing the English concertina. I know where all of the natural notes like on the piano it's the white notes and then all the black notes on the piano are sharps or flats and on the concertina it's the same where you kind of know where all the white notes are and then on the edges are all the sharps and flats. It makes it easier to know what key you're playing in because you know in G you've just got that one black note on the piano, the F-sharp, and the rest are the white notes. But on the fiddle you need to know your finger pattern, loathe, high, twos, what's going on, what the notes are, but there's only seven, you know. 

I guess the last thing I'll say is the next step, after listening in to what you're doing and learning to pick things out and just let the wrong notes slide by and keep figuring out until your hand is able to into it its way through a tune is that you want to actually push it into your subconscious. This is where I'll actually I'm trying to do this with the concertina now. I want it to be subconscious so that if I'm hearing a tune in my head, my fingers will just do it and there's no thinking about it. I can think it where are the buttons and it'll go slow. 

But in order to get it fast it needs to be happening basically subconsciously. Unless I've like practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced, I'll have that one tune fast. But I want all my tunes fast. So I've actually been propping open a book or even, you know, reading an article on the internet and playing tunes while I'm trying to do something else trying to read or have a conversation with somebody and making the tune as easy as it needs to be for me to do it while I'm not focused on it. As you push the skills into your subconscious, you're creating that faster link between the melody remembering part of your brain and the finger muscle movement part of your brain. I want those to be super well linked so that it just happens before you can even stop to think is that a two? Your two is already playing it. It takes a little while. 

Our tune for today is called Heater Don't Stop. This is a tune I wrote kind of a crazy tune, to be honest, but I like it. I think I was trying to write an old time tune, but it's not really old time. It's in D minor. It's got some unusual notes in it. I wrote this up in a cabin in Pennsylvania. It was by a stream and I was playing around a lot with tunes that I know that have hits in them and writing tunes with hits. 

I really love it when the fast notes stop and then there's these kind of bum, bum, bum bum. I call them hits. They're just longer notes that really emphasize that part of the tune. In Contra Dancing they're used for balancing, doing the balance movement. Yeah, I somehow ended up writing this tune that has five hits in a row, which is five is not a great number for dance. Everything is four or eight. It's actually very hard to use this tune for Contra Dancing. It's hard to dance to, but it's fun to play. Yeah, I'll share this tune with you. This is Heater Don't Stop. From my album Broke the Floor. 

Sitting or Standing (On the Loose)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of On the Loose from my album Broke the Floor by Meg Wobus and Charley Beller. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about sitting vs standing for playing the fiddle what? But first a quick word about reviews. The place where you can leave a review of a podcast is on Apple Podcasts that site and thank you to two lovely reviews I got recently from New Fiddler with Big Ears and Drew Reynolds. Thank you so much for those reviews. 

If you listen on a different platform, you can often leave a rating, or if you want to recommend the podcast, you can always just post about it. Wherever you run into other fiddlers online, whether somewhere on Facebook or Fiddle Hangout or some other place, the reason that I'm asking for reviews and recommendations is that this podcast is an investment for me in time and it also costs money for the mixing and the hosting. 

I don't know if you noticed, but I don't do any commercials or sponsored products. So basically it helps to sell some of my fiddle studio books and my online courses, and it's how it kind of works commercially. So connecting to beginning fiddlers or fiddlers who might be interested in this content is a way to just help the podcast get out there and make it kind of viable for me to continue spending kind of a week out of every month working on it. 

Anyway, let's talk about this topic. Gosh, I haven't been playing a lot of fiddle. I've just been playing the concertina lately and having a lot of fun with that and our guitar, my father's Martin guitar, has been in the shop for six or seven weeks and it's coming back next week. So in my house there'll be a little bit of fighting over who gets to play the guitar between me and my husband when it comes back. 

Should you sit or stand to play the fiddle? This is a silly topic. I like the silly topics the best. You can do anything. You can sit, you can stand, you can lie on the floor. Have you tried lying on the floor? It's kind of crazy. All the angles are different. The gravity works very differently when you're trying to play and you're lying on the floor. But I thought I'd tell you some of my thoughts about it. 

People stand a lot for classical music. In fact it's kind of an issue with kids when I'm trying to teach kids because you're trying to get them to stand a lot, and then they see the cellists and there's always some kids who want to switch to cello just because they can sit. In fact, I have an interview in November coming out with Casey Murray who said that they switched when they were a kid from fiddle to cello partly because of the sitting. 

But the reason that classical players stand so much and this is not an orchestra, but they usually stand to practice and to perform, you know, as a solo is because when you stand up, your body is very aligned. Your back is just naturally straight. You're using your lower body to hold your weight up, your shoulders and your head are more upright and loose and your arms are longer and straight. So you have already set yourself up to be playing the fiddle in a more relaxed and aligned way and you've got your angles a certain way. 

When you're standing up, because your back is straight, it's pretty different from sitting. Even when classical players sit, they try to sit with their back really straight. I will often sit with my back, not touching the back of my chair, if I'm, if I'm sitting to perform in a string quartet or in an orchestra, trying to mimic standing as much as possible, have my feet on the floor and all my weight in my feet the way that I would if I was standing. 

If you're sitting on a couch it's a completely different story. Or kind of slumped in a chair, you've got that curve in your back. Things are collapsing and basically when you're sitting and you're playing the fiddle, you're using your arms, neck, shoulders, head just that very top part of your body to do the work. So you're not standing in a way that your whole body is supported and that maybe your head is just holding the fiddle up and your shoulder and your arm are relaxed and not working so hard to hold. 

I hope I'm explaining this well. Of course I'm not. I'm not a medical professional and I don't know that much about bodies, but I have played standing and sitting up and when you're standing it's easier on your arms and your shoulders and your neck and when you're sitting it's going to put a lot more strain on those. They're going to be working harder. 

You can be more likely to have some pain, some tension, to kind of wear yourself out sitting. Of course, if you're standing, your feet are going to, you know, get tired, you're going to wear yourself out in a different way. So if we just think about sitting and fiddlers sit a lot more than they stand. Okay, so those, those classical players practicing you know, when I was in conservatory practicing two, three hours a day, I was standing that whole time. 

But when I fiddle I usually sit down and partly that's because I don't need perfect alignment and to be completely holding with my head. When I'm playing the fiddle I'm usually playing in first position. I can hold the fiddle with my hand. More it doesn't really matter and I'm not playing things that are so difficult that I'm going to have trouble getting around. Like, if you're trying to shift and you're slumped in a chair, you're going to elbow yourself right in the ribs. 

If you're standing, you're going to have a lot more space and openness to shift around, get around the fiddle. But I don't need to get around the fiddle if I'm playing traditional music, just in first position. If I'm trying to play Tchaikovsky Concerto, I need to get around the violin. So if I'm just playing at home, I sit down and when I teach kids and adults and we're playing fiddle tunes, we usually sit down and then if we're going to play something hard, then I'll have them stand up. 

Or if they're having trouble with your angles, if you've only really played sitting down but you're not happy about your tone, hey, why not try standing up? You may have a change in the angles of your bow and your highway and also a change in the way you put your weight into the string. Gravity is kind of working with you or against you in terms of playing the violin and you might have more success standing up. And also, if you're just one of these people that gets kind of antsy sitting down or your back starts to hurt, try standing up. It's great. 

When I perform for like a full dance, I try to stand up because if I sit, everything just gets too heavy and starts to hurt. I'm actually more likely to kind of have cramping in my left hand playing a full dance. If I'm sitting, for that same reason, like I'm hunching a little, everything's getting heavy, my fingers are getting heavy on the string and my hands clenching too much and I'm gonna start to cramp, whereas if I stand up, I tend to use that drilled into me so many years that lighter, more floating posture and way of playing, and it's more sustainable for a three-hour dance, oh my gosh, anyway. So if you only do one, try branching out, and if you really wanna be crazy, lie down on the floor, try playing that way. 

Our tune for today is called On the Loose. This is a tune that I composed. I haven't shared one of my tunes yet. It's in kind of an old-time style. It's in G major. I wrote it so many years ago. I don't actually remember composing it so I can't tell you what was going through my head, but I do know that I wrote a lot of unusual and experimental tunes and then this was part of an effort of mine to write tunes in a more accessible style that sounded more like traditional tunes. 

I shared this tune online I don't know, maybe it was last year and I remember somebody who watched the Real on Instagram wrote, because I said you know, this is a tune that I wrote. And they said I don't really believe that it's possible you could write this tune because it's just really complicated and I don't think you composed it. I was like, huh, well, I did and it's true, this tune sounds more complicated than it is. 

I love to just take advantage of the little tricks on fiddle with. You know the way double stops work and everything and drones, where you can make it sound a little fancier than it. And it's not that hard to play. It's not as hard as it sounds. I knew you'd write it. The B part for this tune is one of those four bars that repeats, you know, and then the whole B part repeats. You end up playing these big four bar chunks four times. And in the contradance world we use those kinds of tunes for a dance that ends in Petronella, turns, contra corners, even like a tight series of four bar moves, like circles and stars or the balance and the wavy line. So I don't know If you know about contra dancing. That's what I use those repetitive B parts for. 

We are sharing tunes from our album this month, so this tune is off my new album which is called Broke the Floor. It's me playing fiddle, my husband Charley is playing guitar and we will be back next month with some old time tunes for you. I think I have an old time jam to pull tunes from, but we wanted to give you I don't know a little taste of the album. You can find it online. 

Broke the Floor should be out pretty soon and also available on my bandcamp paying for the digital or the CD. My bandcamp page is actually megwobus.bandcamp.com. Wobus is spelled W-O-B-U-S as in bus. Anyway, I won't pretend we're gonna play it now. I'm gonna put in a clip from the finally finished and mastered version of our album here for the tune On the Loose by Meg Wobus Beller. 

Joanna Clare (Amédée)

Listen to the Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple or on Spotify!

Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Amédée from Joanna Clare. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking to Irish Fiddler Joanna Clare, but before we start, just two quick things I wanted to tell you. 

One is that I'm finally feeling much better. I appreciated people who got in touch. I did have long COVID for about the last six weeks and I'm pretty much back to normal and hopefully my voice is too. That is good news. The other good news is that I will be at Fiddle Hell the first weekend in November. It's a convention up in Massachusetts and if you're interested, I think they still have tickets. I would check it out. If you want to hear more about Fiddle Hell, I did post about it last year after I went. That is episode 14. I think it's called going to Fiddle Hell. 

Joanna Clare is an Irish Fiddler and a professional musician and teacher in Baltimore. She performs and she competes on the fiddle. She plays in sessions and for dances. She composes fiddle tunes and also teaches fiddle and violin. Joanna, welcome, I'm so glad you could make it. (Thanks so much for having me, Meg). It's funny, Joanna and I both live in Baltimore now and we used to both live in Rochester, new York. I know, Joanna, that you started learning the violin with the Suzuki method when you were pretty young. I did too. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about starting the violin in Rochester and, I guess, how you got from there into fiddling? 

Joanna Clare

Yeah. So I went to a concert of child violinists when I was about two. My mom took me to an Ithaca Talent Education concert. I ended up being so infatuated with the little music students who are just a bit older than me that I got out of my chair and jumped up and ran up to the stage and would have gotten on if my mom hadn't caught me soon enough. So that was the beginning force that propelled me to learn the violin. I then started playing when I was three at the Hochstein School and I had a really good time with it. 

I grew up listening to all these different Irish albums because my mom was influenced by the late Mick Maloney when she was at University of Pennsylvania and he was at University of Pennsylvania. I grew up listening to albums like Three Way Street. There were a few Cherish the Ladies albums, a few Chieftain's albums, Eileen Ivers, Seamus Connolly , Liz Carroll. I kind of listened to a bunch of the greats from a young age and took a liking to it and started learning tunes from albums when I was about seven. I actually my first fiddle teacher was Dick Bolt when I was about five. I don't know if he knew of Dick in Rochester. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, I did know Dick, when I lived there and I taught fiddle. Yeah, he was a character? 

Joanna Clare

Yeah for sure. And his wife. I remember that she was big into knitting, doing some sort of fabric thing, and I loved her wool. I was just so obsessed with it Like I was almost more interested in that than fiddle at that age. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Five is pretty young, yeah, so I understand that we almost crossed paths, because I started working just out of college at a different Suzuki School in Rochester the Kanack School and teaching fiddle there and started a fiddle camp and then, I think after I moved down to Baltimore you went to that school right and the camp and learned some fiddling there. 

Joanna Clare

Yeah, the Kanack School. I took group fiddling lessons with Liz Hirshhorn, and then I also took improv lessons with Alice, so that was really great. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Oh my gosh, Alice is the best. And how about after that? 

Joanna Clare

I started taking lessons with Brian Conway when I was 11. So by that point I had moved to Syracuse. It's kind of funny how I started with him. I was also an Irish dancer growing up and I guess I still dance because I performed at the Maryland Folk Fest in dance as well as fiddle last weekend. But as a 10 year old I was going to feises, Feshanna and competing in Irish dance and they would also have music competitions there sometime. 

So at Rockland County Feish, when I was 10, I met Maeve Flanagan, who said to my mother she said you know, you should really go to my uncle, Brian Conway, and I think at the time her mom, Rose Flanagan, wasn't teaching online and I lived in Syracuse and Brian lived in White Plains and so it was prudent to take lessons online as opposed to go in person. But about three quarters of a year after that my mom finally reached out to Brian and I started lessons with him and I actually took lessons with him for about nine years, so into college. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, Brian Conway is just a lion in the Irish fiddle scene. For people who aren't familiar with him, he's been one of the top Irish fiddlers for many, many years. When I was Joanna's age, I was able to work with him in workshops and he completely opened my eyes to understand a lot more about how I was playing jigs and how I wanted to play jigs, so I'm forever grateful to him for that. What was it like working with him for so many years? 

Joanna Clare

Brian is a real stickler and you play a role that's a little sloppy and he'll stop you and say, hey, do that again and make it cleaner. And why don't we change this bowing so that it sounds better and that you're following a few standard rules, which are you slur into the downbeat and you slur from lower string to higher string. Those are like two, like pretty major rules or guidelines that he has with slurring. So a lot of it was being really intentional about slurring and then being really intentional about ornamentation, borrowing ornamentation from the greats like Michael Coleman and Andy McGann that came before us, but also coming up with our own ornamentation variation. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, so kind of developing your own style, and you also write tunes yourself. You write tunes in the Irish style. When did you start doing that? 

Joanna Clare

I started writing tunes when I was 14 and actually my first tune, which is called the Mouse Catcher, named after my mom, my dad and my cat, who all, in various ways, caught mice in a week apart from each other. Yeah, so the Mouse Catcher was the first reel that I wrote 2014 and I competed with it and actually went over to Ireland and played it there in the newly composed tune competition. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Can I ask you about competing? My understanding, the dance competitions are Feis, called a Feis, and then the music competitions are called a Fleadh . Yes, it's a completely different world from the New England contra dance world that I grew up with, because competing is a big thing in Irish music and they have flaws in the US and they have them in Ireland. How does it work when you go and compete with the categories and everything? 

Joanna Clare

So there's age groups, so under 12, 12 to 15, 15 to 18 and over 18. And then there's different instruments like fiddle flute, and then there are like fun ones, like the newly composed tune competition, which is open to all ages and there's not different age groups. So you go to Parsippany, the Hilton in Parsippany. If you get in the top two in your competition, then you qualify to go over to the All Ireland Fla Keele, which this past year was in Mullingar and I was fortunate enough to attend that. But it moves around from city to city and so different parts of Ireland get the economic benefit of having the Fleadh there. 

Meg Wobus Beller

So when you see in someone's bio like All Ireland, this or All Ireland, that's because they were competing in that national Fleadh (usually 

Joanna Clare

Yeah, and it's a pretty big honor to get a All Ireland championship to win the Fleadh.  All right. This person is like really great. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, how do you? What's it? Kind of like the mindset, Because you also have performed for dances and for live dances and you play in sessions and stuff. So how is it different the competition scene? 

Joanna Clare

I much prefer sessions and performances and dances to competitions. I think that it's a setting where the music is greater than the person and competitions are very eco-centric. And then Irish music is the music of a people and it's not really. It wasn't really made to be competed with. The competitions only started because Comholtas wanted to preserve Irish music and get people excited about it, which that does happen and I was really motivated to do the Fleadh Cheoil competitions because of Eileen Ivers having won All Ireland Fleadh , I was like, oh, I want to be just like her and so, um, yeah, so I started competing. I think it's also much more important for kids to compete than adults. Like I don't know if I'm going to compete for very long. I'm more internally motivated than I was when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I was very externally motivated, and so competitions were really good for getting me to practice. But now I care a lot more about practicing and playing music with people and less about whether I get external validation for that. 

Meg Wobus Beller

That's so interesting, thank you. Speaking of playing music with other people, I know you moved down to Baltimore for college and you play with a lot of great musicians down here. What was? It like, how did you kind of connect with them moving to a new city and getting into the new scene? 

Joanna Clare

Well, Brian Conway, my teacher, and Billy McComisky, who's the biggest of the biggest down here and the best of the best, are in a band together named Pride of New York, and so they know each other quite well. And when I moved down, I think what happened was Brian kind of said to Billy hey, Joanna's coming down, take care of her. And so I get the special treatment from Billy. He's kind of like a dad to me and he really helped me grow as a musician in many ways. I think that one of the big things was sending tunes back and forth that I had written to him during the pandemic. 

We really kept in touch and I was up in Syracuse and he was obviously down here in Baltimore but we would call all once in a while and it made me feel still connected to the music scene in Baltimore. But yeah, I mean knowing Billy and then just going out to Cafe Hon when that was the thing when there were sessions there, and going to the Trad Fest and being available for performances and stuff like that. 

Meg Wobus Beller

And those tunes that you were writing and a lot of the players that you connected with are on your album. Joanna has an album called Keep the Candle Burning, is that right? 

Joanna Clare

Yeah, To Keep the Candle Burning. Yeah. So I included a bunch of musicians, a few of which are from the Baltimore area. So we have Billy McComisky, Sean McComisky, Myron Bretholz, Matt Mulqueen, Josh Dukes, Brian Conway, Catherine O'Kelly, and Liam Presser on the album. Yeah, it was really fun to collaborate with all those musicians.

Meg Wobus Beller

Where can people go online to hear you? 

Joanna Clare

JoannaClaire.com. That's the only place where my album is currently available. It's for sale as a CD and for sale as an MP3. And it might be on digital platforms soon. But CD Baby is taking forever to send out the album, so it's been actually multiple months of me trying to get my album out on platforms. 

Meg Wobus Beller

It's so annoying and you get nothing for it. I mean, people get to hear you. We have Joanna's album. It's really good. It's one of our rotations in the car. It's one of those five desks that stays in there. I know you're doing some teaching in Baltimore and you also have a workshop you're doing. Do you want to talk about how people can learn from you, learn with you? 

Joanna Clare

So I teach at my home in Baltimore and I also teach for the Baltimore Music Company and the Baltimore Irish Music School. I teach privately. People of all ages come to me. I start kids as young as three, but kids that are three have to take in person. Older students can take online and I teach Suzuki violin as well as Irish fiddle. And then I'm also this weekend, October 1st 2023, I'm starting to teach a tune, teach workshop and low session. That should be really fun and that's at Racer's Cafe in Parkville from five to six. Anybody's welcome there. Bring any instrument, any level, although it's geared towards beginners and lower level intermediate students. 

Meg Wobus Beller

So people can go to your website, Joanna Clare, and hear your music and also maybe find you on Facebook or Instagram to get updates about your teaching. Yes, well, our tune for today is one of Joanna's tunes. Can you say the name? I know it's a hornpipe, Amédée Amédée, and this is a hornpipe in G Minor that you wrote. Can you tell us about? 

Joanna Clare

it, so I wrote this tune when I was 17. I was a senior in high school and my violin was getting seams opened all the time, and so it was one of these times where I had a loaner violin from Sullivan Violins. Were you aware of Sullivan Violins in? 

Meg Wobus Beller

Rochester. When you lived there, I got my violins from Tom Hosmer in Syracuse. I grew up in Syracuse. 

Joanna Clare

Oh yeah, I know, Tom, pretty well what a small world this is. So I had a loaner violin from Ken Sullivan and it left a like a rash on my neck. Oh no, something about the varnish I was allergic to, or something like that. I figured I would write a tune, after this silly violin that, you know, left a itchy rash on my neck. The maker of the violin was Amédée. I used that to name the tune. 

Meg Wobus Beller

A sinister story for this tune, yeah. 

Joanna Clare

Okay, and this tune actually won the newly composed tune competition in Parsippany. I was actually at my high school graduation and I had sent it over to Andrew Caden, who's from Bethesda, to learn and play at the competition. And all of a sudden I had just graduated and I get this picture of a medal on Facebook Messenger and the tune had won. So even though I wasn't at the qualifying competition, I still went over to Ireland and played in the Island. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Awesome. Joanna Clare, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We're going to share this tune and be sure to everyone. Look her up on Facebook and on Instagram and check out our website, joannaclaire.com. 

Thank you so much, Meg.

Flexible Right Wrist (Tighe's Rare)

 Listen to the Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple or on Spotify!
 

Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Tighe's Rare from a session at the ArtHouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about the flexible right wrist. 

I don't know if I sound funny. I have unfortunately been sick for several weeks. I am getting better. I kept putting off recording until my voice was back to its usual, but it's been slow going. So we're moving ahead with the voice we have and the horn practicing next door and the drilling outside. I just need to record. Here we go. Does your wrist need to be flexible and why? And we're going to talk about how to work on getting a looser wrist or a looser bow grip. 

First, let's just establish having a loose right wrist for your bow arm is about getting your bow straight, assuming we all agree that it's useful to have a straight bow. I did talk a lot about the straight bow and how that affects your tone in episode 31, the podcast called how to Improve your Tone. 

But when a beginner starts playing violin or fiddle, their elbow is bent and they're often swinging their entire right arm back and forth and their violin is holding steady in one place but their whole bow arm is swinging, so the bow is not staying straight and you get all the problems that come along with that. So first we get them to open up from their elbow. So now their forearm is coming back and forth, they're opening from their elbow, but if their wrist is still very straight and locked, they're still going to be some swinging back and forth, some change in the angle of the bow that will affect your tone, because the bow won't be staying very straight and stuck onto the string. 

Now if you're just playing in the middle of the bow, it might not make much of a difference, because you see the effects a lot more at the tip or the frog. Eventually you're going to want to play something that uses long bows and you're going to need some flexibility in your wrist and your hand to accommodate those long bows. And I would say that a lot of speed and dexterity in your bowing on the fiddle does come from being loose. So if you can feel that your wrist is tense, if you watch a video, this happens to a lot of people and you say, oh wow, my right arm looks really tense. Then we'll talk about some ways to address some of that. 

The classical approach and I had some teachers when I was younger who worked on my wrist this way with me. They would say to lead with your wrist. So if you think about doing an up bow, you know you're down there at the tip, you're going to do an up bow and then you think about your wrist kind of coming before everything else and they would have me play scales and play like a long down bow and then a couple little notes back and forth, just using my wrist at the tip, and then a long up bow and a couple more little notes just using my wrist at the frog, back and forth. Like that it can be a little too much wrist flopping around. 

My college professor, who was a very talented violinist and teacher, Lynn Blakeslee she hated this. You could get roasted in studio class for getting up and playing with here leaning with your wrist. She had some very stern words for us if we were playing like this. She felt like your power comes from a unified arm and that you should focus on unlocking your fingers in your right hand, your bow grip and letting your wrist respond. Always You're leading, but always having the wrist just respond to the movement in your bow grip, in your bow hold. So basically the movement in your hand instead of your wrist. So if we're thinking about that and thinking about ways to unlock your fingers in your right hand and then try to use that to loosen up your wrist, you can do finger taps. 

I did a little video about finger taps but it's basically putting your bow in your right hand and getting a little stack of books or something. You immobilize your arm and then you use your fingers to just grunge your bow up and then push it down taps on the table. So you're going tap, tap, tap and your fingers are going in and out, and in and out and in and out in your bow grip. If you can't picture it, just look up the video. It's on YouTube. I think it's just called finger taps. 

I've had other teachers talk about the same motion. It's kind of your fingers going from straight to scrunched up to straight and the way that it works in your bowing that when you're doing an up bow your fingers are straighter and your knuckles are kind of sticking out and they would call that mountain. You make the mountain with your knuckles. And now you're doing your down bow and your fingers have scrunched up and your knuckles have flattened out and you're doing the planes with your knuckles. 

So you're doing your up bow, you're making mountains, fingers straight, and you're doing your down bow, making the planes with your knuckles, fingers scrunched, and it's this kind of people will call it the octopus, because the motion looks a little bit like the octopus. There's a long discussion about it in my Fiddle Studio, Book 3. 

And I can, even I'll try to make a video with just an explanation of this motion. But this is the motion that I would recommend working on, in addition to trying to loosen up your wrist. But I think that unlocking your hand is going to go pretty far towards loosening up your wrist and making your bow arm look more like you wanted to look less stiff. I wouldn't go with leading with your wrist, not, I mean. You know there are people who do that and they sound great, but that's not what I was taught. So a little bit about the right wrist. 

Our tune for today is Tighe's Reel. This is a single reel. I call these 16 bar reels, half length reels, but the Irish players call them a single reel. Kind of an uncertain key. It's got two sharps but the tonality is kind of up for grabs. I got this tune from the playing of a banjo player who lives around here named Brendan Coyne. Brendan's from the DC Baltimore area. 

He's a great fiddler. I haven't actually heard him play fiddle in person. I talked to him a little bit about this once and he told me that there were a lot of really good fiddlers in DC and at some point he decided he would switch to the tenor banjo so that he could be one of one instead of one of many. 

Apparently it's fingered the same way the tenor banjo, as the fingering is further apart and there are frets, but the basic fingering is the same. That made me want to try it. Just what we need is another instrument around here On the session. The source for the tune is named as Alan MorrisRowe, who is a Melodion player in New Jersey who grew up in a musical household in County Mayo and collected tunes and songs from family and community there. 

If you're wondering what a Melodion is, I was wondering that. I guess it's just a smaller accordion with just one or two rows of treble buttons. So a tune coming to us from a Melodion player and played for me on the tenor banjo, but we're going to play it on fiddle. 

Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudio.com, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day. 

Noah VanNorstrand (Sure Does!)

 Listen to the Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple or on Spotify!

Meg Wobus Beller

Welcome to the Fiddle Studio podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus-Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Sure Does! by Noah VanNorstrand from his debut solo album, Share the Moon. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're talking to Noah VanNorstrand. Noah is a fiddler, primarily also sings and plays mandolin and other instruments. He's a percussionist. We'll talk more about that. He composes music. Noah performs with his brother, Andrew, and other bands the Great Bear Trio, Buddy System, Wake Up Robin and the Faux Paws. Noah welcome, it's really great to have you here. 

Noah VanNorstrand

Thanks for having me Good morning. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Good morning. Noah and I grew up in the same area in central New York. I've talked on the podcast that I started playing for dances when I was really young. Noah, you did too. I think you started when you were younger than I was. Can you talk about what that was like when you were a kid and you were getting into traditional music? 

Noah VanNorstrand

Yeah, well, I started playing fiddle when I was about eight-ish I think that's what we say. Most of my story is very connected to my brother, andrew. I have a younger sibling, I guess, where I just copy the older sibling in many things in life. Music is one of them. He learned fiddle when he was eight. We say that about two years later I started playing fiddle. He got into playing for country dances. I was like, okay, I'll get into playing for country. My brother Andrew and I did this very much together, especially from my perspective. Yeah, we started playing for dances when I was eight, 10, somewhere in there with our mother Kim. 

Meg Wobus Beller

I played with my dad, who played piano. You were playing with your mom, who also played piano, and touring around playing for dances. You all were homeschooled, right? How did that play into your music? You had a little bit of an unusual I guess older childhood in that you were so immersed in music with your brother and family. At some point that took over your lives as a teenager, right? 

Noah VanNorstrand

Yeah, that's true. We were homeschooled. My mom says that the plan was always homeschool us through elementary age, then in junior high or high school we would go to public school. That was the plan. Then, when we started diving into music a lot, right Right at the end of that elementary age, it just kind of didn't happen. We just kept on homeschooling and kept on doing more and more. I don't want to throw anyone on the bus, but we definitely did more music than other subjects at school. It worked out well for us. It's definitely had. You know, realizing now as an adult like, oh well, maybe school would have also been good. 

Meg Wobus Beller

I feel like at some point, you know how you know a little kid and they get to be a bigger kid, all of a sudden you turn around and they're like a grown up and you're like what happened? That happened to me a little bit with your fiddling, where I was like, oh yeah, no place to fiddle, no place to fiddle. You know, we brought you to fiddle camp to teach. Then maybe you came back the next summer and I heard you and I was like what happened? Oh my god, I mean this is just my own personal curiosity, but you got really good really fast. 

Noah VanNorstrand

I think what happened is to put an over easy answer is that Andrew. Andrew started playing guitar, so he was no longer playing double fiddle for the most part. Andrew learned guitar and then I was the only fiddler. There was just a lot more. I was just fiddling a lot more Because the first when I run Great Bear, that was the band with my brother and my, our mom. When that band first started I was like exclusively percussion, hand percussion, children, remote drums, and then I would play like fiddle on one or two things that I could play that fast when I was like 10. And so slowly Andrew learned guitar, I learned mandolin. I played a whole lot more fiddle when Andrew was playing guitar and I that's. That's the only answer I can think of. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Okay, but I'm going to follow up because, because we were, we were at camp one year and the kids asked and they always ask this how much do you practice? And your brother gave this sort of, he gave an explanation of his own practicing. That went on for a little while I love your brother and then he was like no one never practices. 

Noah VanNorstrand

It depends on what we're, what we're defining the word to mean I would play constantly. I would be playing my instrument constantly, pract. I wasn't like, okay, I'm going to. I'm going to do this one thing repeatedly until I can play it better. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Did you ever play scales? 

Noah VanNorstrand

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no scales. 

Meg Wobus Beller

And you didn't. You didn't repeat something slow it down. 

Noah VanNorstrand

No, to the extent of the reason I especially like as a growing up learning. As a kid I wouldn't have the patience to like I don't want to learn a tune, I'll learn a tune. That takes so much time. I'm just going to write a tune I was writing my own and then, and then I don't have to learn a tune. It's like this easy little scapegoat I know a new tune now and I didn't have to learn it. So again like it wasn't like even learning repertoire, it was just writing tunes. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Well, thank you. Let's talk about writing tunes a little bit. Did you just write tunes from the start? When did you start writing tunes? 

Noah VanNorstrand

It was pretty much from the start. It was like right along with learning the first ten full tunes, I think the order things went in Andrew would go to a little lesson with this older lady, also in central New York. Her name was Granny Sweet. She was like right out of a comic book. She was amazing. She had like wore bonnet all the time the anime dresses. When I think back I was like, oh, it's just Granny Sweet and I think that's like what was that? Who was she? 

Anyway, Andrew would have like weekly lessons with her and he would learn these little upstate New York tunes, central New York tunes, western New York tunes, and then I was too young to have the focus for like a lesson and he would come back and then I would learn it off of Andrew. He wouldn't really teach me, I would just like Andrew would be practicing and then I would soak it in, sponge it off of them. So right along with learning tunes like that, I would get frustrated and like, oh, I'll just write my own tune. So there was really both happening at the very same time of learning the instrument. There's tunes were not well, they were. They were what they were. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Well, the year that you brought your tune Griffin Road to camp, you told me, megan, my retirement plan is I'm going to teach all these kids to play my tunes. They're going to grow up and record them and pay me royalties and I have to tell you. Did you know that Cecilia Vacanti, one of the little campers, she has an album with KingFisher and she recorded Griffin Road? 

Noah VanNorstrand

My plans coming full circle. It's only took 15 years or whatever 10 years, so you have you're still writing tunes and you have an album coming out. 

Meg Wobus Beller

That is is everything on the album your compositions. 

Noah VanNorstrand

It sure is, yeah, a little more involved than that it's as a. It has a pandemic story, like many albums do nowadays. When the pandemic happened and hit and all the gigs all poofed away in that very surreal spring, you know, at that point I hadn't spent more than two or three weeks at a time at home, uninterrupted time at home, for more than two weeks in I don't know two decades, a very long time, and it was a very weird feeling and there weren't any gigs and so, kind of as a excuse to keep my instrument out of its case, I decided that I'm just going to write a tune every day, I'm going to wake up and I'm going to go on this porch. I had a gorgeous porch I could hang out on and I write a tune and post it, no matter how bad it was. Like that wasn't the point. The point was just to play my instrument and the way that I most easily can play my instrument is to write a tune. 

So, especially in the beginning, especially in the first two years of the pandemic, there were these big chunks of time where, like I don't know, like a month and a half worth of every single day except weekends, I would write a tune and out of that about 19 were worth recording. I'll accept. I think two of the tunes on the CD are from that process, from that project where you want to whatever you want to call it tune a day, and it was really fun, and now that I'm busy again I miss it. 

Meg Wobus Beller

So yeah, so you've got these tunes on the album. Who are you playing with them with? You're playing them on fiddle. Did you also do the percussion Noah plays? When he performs, he's often sitting on a box with shoes on that tap on the floor and then he's also fiddling. So he's yeah, I can't describe this. So can you talk about that and then maybe just tell us who you're playing with? 

Noah VanNorstrand

Yes, I could do that. The percussion thing I'm doing when I fiddle it's from a French-Canadian tradition Playing at festivals and stuff where they aren't very familiar with French-Canadian music and they're always like do you invent this thing? No, definitely not. This is not my thing. This is something when I was like 10 or something, a French-Canadian fiddler, I think Richard Forest, I think was showing me it. So it's a French-Canadian tradition and, yeah, it's a simple little footstep you can do while you're sitting. 

And I have this like contraption box that I built so that I'm always at the right height. I was at the right height chair, but it's just a piece of plywood and leather bottom shoes. That's all that. That is my fiddling. Well, the other thing I would say is that I feel like, as I analyze my own fiddling more that hearing myself play fiddle when I'm not doing feet, it sounds really different, like my fiddling has evolved with my feet playing and when their shoe happened together it does sound. It sounds like me, it sounds, I think, better, but it sounds noticeably different, and so the two my feet and the fiddle are very interlocked. I feel like that's really interesting. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, and your actual, your fiddle style. When I hear you, I mean we grew up in the same area, even though New York is not technically part of New England, the New England and like the French Canadian influence there was so strong, I bet we were learning the same kind of New England and easy French tunes. And you, you play, the way you play sounds to me like new way. They know that. They got to get that. 

Noah VanNorstrand

Up bow stuff yeah. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Is it. Is that how you would describe your basic? 

Noah VanNorstrand

Yeah, yes, yes, okay, how would I do you believe me? So my fiddling, my fiddling, definitely is for contra dancing. I did, that is what I lived and breathed for 20 years. This is all I, all I ever did. Now I did, but when I did do other things, I was just still playing for a contra dance. Just no one was dancing. 

So my fiddling is like a lot of music and contra dancing there isn't. I'm not playing. I'm not really playing Celtic music Like I wouldn't. I wouldn't sound Celtic next to like Liz Carroll or Martin Hayes or someone. It's Celtic it. And then I'm not really playing old time music. I wouldn't sound like a Appalachian old time fiddler next to Bruce Molsky. Same thing with French Canadian, the same thing with New England, like it's. I'm playing all of these different things and they're borrowing little bits of all of the traditions but it's really like mashed together to hopefully make a good contra dance experience. Like that's what I did for so long was just like what are the bits of all these traditions that make the best, make the best contra dance? 

I'm doing less contra dances nowadays and trying to find what that means for my fiddling. How do I market myself? Like there's, like a bluegrass festival doesn't know what a contra dance even is. 

Meg Wobus Beller

So what do you? What are you doing instead of dances? 

Noah VanNorstrand

Our main project that I'm part of right now is a band called the Faux Paws. You mentioned Faux Paws. Paws like little puppy Paws, it's a pun. It's with my brother and then our friend basically other brother at this point Chris Miller, who plays saxophone and banjo. That band is very much trying to we're trying to not like we don't want to like disrespect or shake or shake off the contra dance community at all, but it is so easy to get pigeonholed into one thing and we're trying to like we can do concerts too. So we're trying you have to be very on purpose, basically. So we're trying to really focus. We're playing concerts, we're trying to get festivals and and that's where our energy is all going into is to convince the organ, because our festival organizers will be like oh, you guys, you guys were a great pair of trade, you want to play a little contra dance at our festival. We're like no, actually, maybe not Give us a different kind of chance, please. So anyway, that's where we are right now. 

Meg Wobus Beller

I heard you guys. That was such a fun house concert. 

Noah VanNorstrand

Yeah, both of them were. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, and even though your basic style, I would agree, is Contradance, you learn some tricks somewhere, noah. When you take a solo, you do not sound like a Contradance. 

Noah VanNorstrand

Maybe it's from playing solos next to a saxophone for the past 10 years. The weird things happen. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Y'all need to hear some of these weird things. Are you soloing on the album? 

Noah VanNorstrand

Yeah, a little bit. The album is my solo album. I guess by the time this comes out it'll be out. It's kind of going a little bit back towards what Andrew and I were doing in high school. It is more tune-based. You had mentioned to ask who else is on the CD, and so it's part of how it sounds. 

The original plan for my CD was like you know what, I'm going to play all the instruments myself and then it'll be like my solo CD where I play all the instruments, and that would have been fine and fun in its own way, I guess. But then I was like my brother is one of the best guitar players in the country. Why would I play guitar? I can fake it, I can get by, but my brother is Andrew. So that idea chained into actually getting musicians that were good at the instruments that they play. So Andrew plays guitar and our friend Rachel Bell plays accordion and Dana Billings was the engineer for the CD and he also played the drums in percussion. Well, he played the drums, I played the percussion, but he played the drums for the couple tracks that have drums. And then we had a bass player. A friend, Jordan Morton, was their bass player and those people just hold up in an electric Wilberland in Ithaca and made it, and a couple years ago now it feels like. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Where can folks go to check out that CD and also the faux pas? I know you guys have a great EP, a couple of them. 

Noah VanNorstrand

Yeah, yeah. And greatbearmusic.com is a place you can go and that has all of the things that Andrew and I are involved in together. So it has all the great beer albums from the past and then faux pas albums, and then this, my new solo album, is also there, along with buddy system albums. Make a problem thing. Anything that Andrew and I do together goes there. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Okay, and people can. Can they order CDs? They could get the digital downloads. 

Noah VanNorstrand

You do both those things. Yep, they can order. Order the physical CD through, I think, at the greatbearmusic takes you to our bandcamp page. So it's all the things that bandcamp offers. 

Meg Wobus Beller

And musicians sell through bandcamp, because we we don't actually get income from streaming. So, or I don't know, three cents, I wouldn't count it as income. We're not paying taxes on that Three cents. 

Noah VanNorstrand

We have to put a good stream for three cents. 

Meg Wobus Beller

So pay your. If you want to pay a fair price for music, check out yeah, check out bandcamp. Our tune for today is off of Noah's new CD, and this tune is called Sure Does. 

Noah VanNorstrand

With an exclamation point. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Sure Does ! Noah, can you tell us about this tune a little? 

Noah VanNorstrand

Again, it's a cute little kind of New England-y, french-canadian type again, not really but type tune, and it's named after I got. I got a great friend group, great friend group, a bunch of contra dancers that all went to the same Great Bear weekends for three years and so they really became like little contra family and there's a. There's a really dumb joke. That punchline is Sure Does, and I figured those friends needed a tune on the CD. So this tune is called Sure Does. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Hey, Noah. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It's been a real treat. We're very excited. Make sure to check out Noah's album and go to GreatbearMusic. 

Noah VanNorstrand

Yes, greatbearmusic.com. Yeah, okay. Thanks for having me!

Instrument Horror Stories (Jaybird)

Listen to the Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple or on Spotify!

Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Jaybird from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. We have a fun topic. Today. We're going to be talking about instrument horror stories. A lot of these are from the Facebook Fiddlers Association. Oh my gosh. I posted and they delivered. 

Reading through the comments, my children came in to see what my husband and I were yelling about, because there were so many comments that made us just shout oh no. So this episode might need a little trigger warning. If the ideas of fiddles and bows, crunching and cracking is going to send you into a tailspin, maybe skip to the next episode. 

Anyway, I think there's some pretty funny stories. I'll tell you mine first. When I was little, my dad and I would argue and this never happened but if I fell down the stairs, should I protect myself or should I protect the instrument? You know, fall on me or fall on the violin. 

And we would joke about it. And I would say well, I should fall on the violin because I can always get a new violin. And he said no, protect the violin because you'll heal and the violin won't. Luckily, my fiddlers were all safe up until I was an adult. 

But as a teenager I did run down the stairs in our house and there was a doorway there and my bow just stuck between the door and the door jam and tips snapped right off. And that was a nice bow I was. I was already playing professionally at that point. Oh my, my parents were not impressed by this. They said I had to buy my own bow. 

So we went down to Tom Hosmer. Tom Hosmer, great fiddler and has a violin shop in the Syracuse area, has for many years, because he sold me all my fiddles from when I was three and he's still there. He was so nice. I looked at bows and I picked out the one that I wanted. I didn't have enough money to buy it, but I had a summer job at that point. 

So I said can you give me a loaner bow and then I'll save my money for my summer job and I'll come back and buy this bow? And he said oh, meg, just take the bow and bring the money back when you have it. That was great. So I did get to practice that summer with a decent bow and worked all summer and then gave all the money to Tom for the bow. 

But I was more careful with my instruments. After that lesson learned, I did have my instruments stolen out of my car. That was very sad when that happened. Hopefully that violin and bow ended up with someone who could use them because they were nice. That was my college violin. 

My violin now the Rimmer Owen violin had a tiny crack for a long time. That was not causing any harm at all. I was just nursing it along, keeping it humid in the winter, and I bumped my violin at a gig I was sitting. It just slipped through my fingers and kind of crashed against the stage and the crack spread all the way up the front of the violin. It was horrifying. 

Still had to play the rest of the gig and then I took it to Michael Weller in Alexandria. He fixed it up. But oh my goodness. So let's talk about some of these stories from Facebook. There were a lot of car stories. I was surprised at the number of car stories. 

So I knew, when I was a teenager, a bass player who had a van and they had, like, not shut the door all the way the bass had fallen out of the back of their van into the road and gotten hit by a car. There were at least two guys on Facebook who had run over guitars with their cars. How does this happen? 

Someone else described getting a headache. They had their fiddle in their car without a case. They put it on the seat behind them and then later they had this headache and they just leaned their seat back to take a nap and crushed the fiddle. Wow, that must have been a moment and already had a headache. Wow. 

A couple of people talked about fiddles in hot cars, so the glue melting or the especially the neck falling off. So maybe that's the glue that goes first, because there were a lot of different humidity neck falling off stories. You always think about keeping your fiddle humid enough during like dry winter months, but apparently if it gets too humid the neck can fall off. 

So somebody talked about it happening at a hurricane or in a hot car or an outdoor like summer jam session. Yeah, this girl lost her fiddle at the airport. That's kind of everyone's nightmare. I've left my fiddle at restaurants and bars. Always got it back, you know. I mean they say Yo-yo Ma left St rad in a cab, got it back. Most people are pretty good natured trying to help you get your instrument back. 

I did love the stories from mishaps from the middle of gigs. I felt a little bad for the girls that she almost threw up all over her fiddle, but a lot of bow flying incidents. So someone described that they had some weakness in their hand and that their bow would fly out. But a lot of other people said that they had just, you know, accidentally thrown their bow. You know playing vigorously. I guess it happens. I've never thrown my bow while playing. 

There's other things that can go wrong. Yeah, I saw about a bridge breaking in half and the whole string quartet kind of erupted and the people jerked because it made a really loud sound and then there was like stands falling over and music flying. That sounds like quite an experience. I'll give you my two favorite stories here. 

This guy said that he had his fiddle on stage along with his guitar, his Martin D 28. I don't know what that means, but I assume that it means something if you put that in there. He says a girl who had been drinking. She fell onto the stage hitting the fiddle stand, sending it over into the dance floor. So the fiddle went flying. It landed upside down, cracked open the top and while the fiddle was in the air, the stand fell down onto the guitar and punched a hole in the upper. Bout in the rosewood. Yeah, a moment of silence for this guy. What a terrible gig. 

Oh yeah yeah. There were several sitting and stepping on fiddle stories. You gotta keep the case closed, folks. These were all open case stories. Okay, here's my last one. I'm just going to read it to you. "My newly restored vintage fiddle was resting loosely in a soft case when a gust of wind swept the case and fiddle overboard. This was on a sunset cruise on a wind-powered sailing ship with a historic band entertaining the passengers. After 20 minutes and running over the fiddle several times, we picked it up. The glue had dissolved, leaving it in pieces."

Mmm, yeah, this was inspiring me never to take my fiddle on a boat for any reason. Oh, no gig is worth that much. Ah well, take a deep breath. After those, I think we're all resolved to take good care of our instruments. 

Now Our tune for today is Jaybird. This is a tune from the Baltimore Old Time Jam. Hey, I am a sponsor of the Baltimore Old Time Jam. You can go online and find out more about it. It's at baltimoreoldtimefest.com. The old time scene around here is supported by Ken Kolodner and his son, Brad Kolodner, and they do a lot of events and they're all great. 

There's a square dance, a jam, there's a festival in April and I wanted to get the word out for my business Fiddle Studio, where I have my courses and my books and I interact with students through that site. I was looking for local places to advertise that weren't just giving more money to Google, because who needs to do that? 

Yeah, so I'm sponsoring the Old Time Jam and if you're coming through Baltimore you should definitely check it out. A big thank you to Brad and Ken for doing that jam, because I get so many tunes for the pod from them, including this one, Jaybird, also called March to the Fife or kind of Pennsylvania Fifers. Yeah, there's a few different fifing names for it, considered kind of a revival tune. 

Also has been played a lot since the 1960s, early 70s by some of the fiddlers and banjo players in that time frame. So, like Art Rosenbaum, John Burke, Joel Schimberg, it was collected from Southwestern Pennsylvania. Yeah, we're looking, mountain country played on the fiddle and the fife, and that would have been same time, mid-20th century. 

It was played both as a march and as a reel. We kind of do it as a march at the jam. Some of it sounds like Skip to my Lou. We play the high part first and then we play the low part second. If you want to hear it that way, there is a recording on Slippery Hill of John Summers playing it in 1970, basically the same way. We do it at the Baltimore Old Time Jam. 

The Fiddle tune archive had the high part second, so somebody must play it that way. This is Jaybird. Yeah, nice D tune. Here we go you. 

Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudio.com, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.

All about the bow (New Five Cent Piece)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of New Five Cent piece from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about the bow. I've done all these podcasts for Fiddle Studio. I think this is the 50th podcast. If I release them in the right order, this will be number 50. That's a lot of podcast episodes, but I've never done an episode solely on the bow. For this one episode it will be Bow Studio podcast. The bow is very important for fiddling. It's half the battle there really. 

When you start fiddling you really want to make sure your bow can hold rosin and I'll explain what I mean by that and loosen and tighten. This is pretty important to even just the fundamentals of getting a sound when I say you need a bow that can hold rosin. Sometimes bows are made. If the horsehair is a weird synthetic material or if there's a lot of oil on it, you can take the rosin and rub it up and down the hair and it just doesn't seem to be coming off. Use the scrape, your finger down the horsehair and there's none of that white dust on your finger. That's a problem. You want the hair to be picking up the rosin dust. I've come across a few bows like that in my day. 

In terms of turning, check that the bow tightens and loosens and there's not something wrong with the end screw. It can get gunky in there and get hard to turn or it can just break and not work right. Why do we tighten and loosen the bow? Here's how I explain it to my students who ask me about this. The bow is carved from wood. That's how they were made traditionally and it's carved on a curve. If you take all the pressure off, it looks like a big smile. 

Then if you turn the screw on the end to the right, so righty-tidy, it's going to pull the hair. It shortens up the bow hair and that pulls the curve up. The bow gets straighter. You straighten it to not quite exactly straight, but to I call it a Mona Lisa smile just a very slight curve. Use it like that to play the fiddle. But we don't leave it tightened like that. The reason we don't leave it tight is because you've put a lot of this pressure on the bow. 

The bow is carved on a curve. But then you've pulled it to pull the wood straight and it makes it nice and bouncy and great for playing. But if you just left it, put it back in your case and didn't take the pressure off and let it loosen back to its original shape, it would start to warp so it would pull to one side or the other to relieve the pressure. Once it starts to warp it's either an expensive repair job or it could just be beyond repair. So we relieve the pressure by turning that end, screw back to the left lefty-loosey and it lets out a little hair which lets the bow bend back down and takes the pressure off. It goes back to its natural curve.

 The rosin, the other important thing, helps the hair stick to the strings. I mean hair doesn't naturally stick to steel strings, it's got oil in it. If you think about human hair, it's got oil in it. I tell the kids, you know, with their fiddles, don't touch this horse hair with your hands, because your hands have naturally have oil on them and you'll just be putting more oil on the hair and the oil is not good. You want it to be sticky so it can grab the string and make it vibrate. 

So you want to put the rosin on there and that will make it sticky, of course. I'm sure you can imagine if you make it too sticky it's also not going to work well. So if you accidentally put too much rosin on, just get a clean handkerchief and rub some of that off. If it's coming off in a cloud making you sneeze, that was too much. 

Bows do need to be re-haired, maybe every couple years. If you're playing a lot, you might need to do it every year. I play a lot and then I forget, so it's probably every other year. They can do something to fix a little bit of warping. So if you left it tight and it's sort of bending out to the side and it doesn't look right, you can ask them. I think they like soak it and set it again. Sometimes you'll also need to get part of the winding or the pad done. That happens to me because I play a lot and I actually sort of wear the pad away. It's like the part right above the frog from my finger pressure. Maybe I'm pressing too hard on the pad there. I need to get that replaced every couple of years because I wear right through it from playing so much. 

The materials they use to make bows. They have the horse hair and I guess I just read when I was researching this that they like horses from colder climates because they have thicker hair. So that's what they use for that. No horses were hurt in the making of your bow, yeah, it's just from their tail they get a haircut. I have to tell the kids that sometimes, because they're worried. 

They use this kind of wood Pernambuco wood that has been used for bows for many years but unfortunately the tree that grows mostly in Brazil it's also, I think, the national tree of Brazil is endangered so it got all used up and they were using it for bows and they're trying to replant them now and kind of get the species back up and healthy. But there are not a lot of new bows being made from Pernambuco. So more often you'll see a bow made from sandalwood or Brazilwood. 

Now Brazilwood kind of just meet. It's not an actual kind of wood. They're sort of, because Pernambuco is from Brazil, they're trying to say, oh, this is like that, and sometimes it's from like the outer areas of the same tree but it's not as good quality wood, or just from trees that are like that tree and grow in Brazil. So it can mean a lot of different things. It can be hard to know a little bit what you're getting with a wooden bow. 

If you're looking at bows, you probably also want to look at carbon fiber bows. You know they make these bows out of carbon fiber now and they do a great job. They're very resilient. You know they hold up in humid and dry temperatures. They're not going to be affected as much by the pressure and the warping and everything. I mean you still want to tighten them and loosen them, but they're just not as finicky as wooden bows. 

I still use a wooden bow. They average about 60 grams. So bows come in different weights and I use a heavy weight bow. So my bow is maybe like 63 grams, but people will use them 57, 58. It's not a huge range. If I was playing a lot of Mozart, I might have a lighter bow, but I play just a lot of really heavy styles dance, fiddle, Klezmer and I love having a heavy bow. I feel like I don't have to put as much muscle down into the string to get a really big sound, and my sound is big. I mean it might not sound that big on this podcast. If you're in the same room the kids like they cover their ears. My violin is pretty loud. 

It's hard to predict what kind of bow is going to sound best with your violin and for the way that you play your violin. So you really want to take your instrument to a shop and try a lot of different bows and if you have a couple favorites especially if they're different weights or different styles see if you can bring them home and try them for a week and then go back and try some bows again, see what feels good and what sounds good, and if you can bring a friend, listen to them play with the different bows. But really it will be up to the way that you play on your instrument. 

There's a bow out there that'll probably sound a little better than the others Bows I did do. If you're looking for bow grip information, there's an episode on bow grip. I think it's episode 35. You can go check that out. 

Our tune for today is the New Five Cent piece, also called New Five Cents or just Five Cents. This is the tune about five cents. It's a Cumberland tune, sort of the border region of Kentucky, Tennessee, so that was in the mountains and then also found in Missouri. I'll talk about that a little. In Kentucky it was played by the fiddler Isham Monday, born in 1879. And I guess, played this tune. He tuned his fiddle so low that even though it was a D major tune it sounded like it was in C. I don't know why that would be. Maybe it was really humid. 

That's a story I heard about Cajun fiddling was that it was humid and that the fiddle wouldn't stay up, so they ended up just tuning them down. That's why they'll do that. It's like a G flat, d flat, a flat and E flat, slightly torturous for someone with perfect pitch. 

Mark Wilson said this tune is called Buffalo Nickel in the Ozarks and dated it back to about 1913, although it could be older. There's also an early recording of the tune by Paul Wormack and that was 1928, recorded it as five cents. There's a lot of fiddling in Missouri. 

You know I live in Maryland and I know a lot about the old time fiddling. That was kind of done in the mountains, western Maryland and Western Southern Pennsylvania and it kind of goes all the way down through Western Virginia and down into Kentucky, Tennessee, and there's a whole genre of fiddling and different regional fiddlers there, North Carolina, but there is also a lot of fiddling out west in Missouri. They have all their own regional styles. 

I have some family that's from Missouri and also a lot of family from kind of north of there. In farm country in Iowa, all along the river there was a really big hotbed of different cultures. So they had a lot of French and German immigrants, a lot of Irish workers for the railroad, also African Americans, Indigenous Americans. There were a lot of different kinds of people and the fiddling tradition kind of reflects that. 

They had a healthy culture of dances, competitions and local radio and then they would also pick up tunes that were coming from the radio in the mountains. I talked in another podcast about Arthur Smith playing it on the radio in North Carolina and then the tune may be getting picked up in Missouri from that. 

If you're interested in learning more, I would check out Howard Marshall's books. Howard Marshall, great Missouri Fiddler, and Family live there for a long time and then later became basically like a scholar of the history of fiddling in Missouri. So I'm not sure I'm saying it right and you know, because I have family there I remember that they would say it kind of Missoura, but because I'm a Yankee girl, I can't quite say it right. I'm still working on Baltimore. Anyway, we are going to play this tune, Five Cent Piece, and this is going to be the Baltimore version. Okay. 

Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudio.com, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.