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 Candy Girl 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 shoulder rests, different kinds of shoulder rests, not using a shoulder rest. I guess I won't talk about chin rests. Save that for another podcast, you need a lot of topics when you do it every single week.
There's two big schools of thought about shoulder rests and then everybody has their own take their our shoulder rest enthusiasts who go for the Kun with padding, they'll even go for the Bon Musica which is bigger and kind of aims basically to sort of immobilize the violin on your shoulder. So that it's doing all of the work.
So ideally, the way that these really big rigid shoulder rests work is that they build up all the structure underneath your violin so that your violin is held right under your jawbone there, and your shoulder isn't shrugging up and your neck is not tensing and you're not having to press down with your chin. It's sort of locking under your jawbone, and the shoulder rest is doing all of the work. So you don't have to do the work.
There are a lot of teachers who work on this, I've gone to music shops with students who were looking for a lot more support, tried out different kinds of shoulder rests and found versions of this that worked for them.
There is another group of classical violin pedagogues and I live near the Peabody School of Music, and the teachers there, I have some interaction with them. And they do not like this kind of Great Wall of shoulder rest. And what they have their students do is use a sponge like a small foam sponge that allows you to shift and move the violin around while you're playing or between, you know, when you're not playing different angles, you're going to hold it in different ways. And they like that because they feel like it helps their students relax more the goal either way is to relax.
If it helps you relax to have the violin glued up there on an enormous Bon Musica situation or to be with a like a little sponge. And that's more relaxing for you. Basically use what keeps your tension to a minimum. Some people use these straps so that it's on a strap that kind of comes around your to the other shoulder. And it it holds it there.
One of the issues that you can get with a shoulder rest, I use a KUN shoulder rest, I'm basically in the middle, my KUN doesn't take up all of the space between my jawbone and my shoulder, but I don't really like it too, because I will hold my violin in different places. So for classical, I hold it classically. For Irish, I might actually hold it on my shoulder in a very traditional way. But I might lift my head right off the chin rest.
So in there, I'm, I'm using my left hand to hold up the fiddle more, taking more weight into my left hand. You know, you maybe have a little bit of drawback with that, but it doesn't really bother my left hand or I haven't had a problem with it. And it allows me to have absolutely no tension in my neck.
So sometimes I even go back and forth and I'll, I'll hold it with my head for a little while so I can really relax my left hand, then I'll hold it with my left hand for a while so I can move my head around, lift my head, just totally off the chin rest and relax it but it's still got the shoulder rest sort of holding it there partway.
When I play old time, I will even move the fiddle down kind of rested against my collarbone or my chest. And I like enjoy playing in those lower fiddle positions. Especially if I'm playing for a long time. I mean, if I don't have another instrument to switch to, I really need to move the fiddle around on my body to to cut down on the repetitive motion, the stress from it.
So some people don't like to use a shoulder rest because they find it gets in the way of that. Oh my KUN doesn't really bother me. I guess if I had a if I had a bigger situation, maybe it would. The strap if you're interested in trying the strap out look it up. It's sometimes called the Vio strap a violin strap. I saw people using them at Fiddle Hell. It looked pretty comfortable, basically did all of the work of holding up. So, you know, I just described transferring the weight between my head and my left hand.
It looked like the strap actually did all of the holding so that your head and your left hand could both be relaxed. Something honestly I should probably try. But it's hard to try something different with the way that your with your technique and your instrument when you're I'm used to the way I do things. And if I changed, it would be annoying. So I haven't changed it.
Sometimes people will get into the weeds a little bit about how heavy and tight their shoulder rest is. People feel like if it's really big and tight and cuts down on the vibration of their fiddle, that their fiddle doesn't sound as good.
So someone might not use a shoulder rest for that reason, or they might use sort of a very fancy I think Piestro has a super high end hundreds of dollars shoulder rest that's supposed to vibrate along with the violin. I've not tried this, but it's interesting. If you've tried that one, let me know how did it work?
I mean, if you're just starting out, I would get a KUN, K U N, shoulder rest and try that. And then after you feel comfortable playing the instrument, go to a string shop, try some different things. Maybe bring along a teacher or a friend who already plays to help help you figure it out. But a KUN is enough to get started unless your neck is really short. In which case just maybe just a little sponge or a pad so it doesn't slip as much.
Our tune for today is Candy Girl. Oh my gosh, great tune from the playing of John Stephens. This is tuned from the Cumberland Plateau, Kentucky Tennessee border area. It's often played on standard tuning or a cross tune. So John Stephens was also known as Uncle Bunt Stephens. I love these uncle, fiddle players. He played for the radio. He recorded some tunes for Columbia Records in 1926. This was one of them so you can look up Candy Girl, Uncle Bunt and find his recording of this sounded great.
Apparently in 1926, he defeated a different Uncle, Jimmy Thompson, who I covered in a different podcast right? Could fiddle the bugs off a tater vine. So he defeated Jimmy Thompson in a big regional fiddle contest, and was crowned by by Henry Ford, who was apparently very into fiddling, crowned him national fiddle champion.
Although it sounds like this guy was kind of creative with his life story. So the articles I read said he had this whole list of fiddle contests that he had won from Henry Ford and the maybe some of them either didn't exist or only had one contestant.
According to legend, he said Ford presented him with a new car, a big pile of money, a new suit, and also paid to have Uncle Bunt's teeth fixed. We're not sure that that was a fact or just John's exaggerating. Look at the dental records or something.
He was a fiddler out of Tennessee. Started on the harmonica I guess as a boy he claimed that he bought his his fiddle from off of like a bum. Well, I guess a lot of fiddlers were, were given the name Uncle. We're not really sure where where he picked that up. Or how the where the Bunt came from. There's no evidence he played baseball.
Passed away in 1951 at the age of 72. And recorded this tune I believe in 1926. You can also look up recordings of this. Britney has recorded it Mike Seeger. Lots of people love this tune Candy Girl. Really interesting tune. we're going to do the Baltimore take on this tune for you. Okay, here we go.
