Rachel Eddy (Rose in the Mountain)

This is my second conversation with Rachel Eddy, since I forgot to record the first one! We talk about finding flow in fiddling, learning tunes off recordings (or not), remembering tunes, singing, some great stories about Rachel's dad and his fiddle journey, and some ideas for fiddle students to help relax and get balanced while playing. 

Rachel Eddy (they/them) hails from West Virginia, where they grew up steeped in Appalachian music and dance. Rachel’s multi-instrumental talents and soulful singing bring a powerful energy to the stage. In addition to being a performer, Rachel is passionate about teaching. They have taught fiddle, banjo and guitar at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins WV, at Sore Fingers Summer school in the UK, and different various weekend workshops from the hills of West Virginia to Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, London and Wales.

Contact Rachel at reddytojam@gmail.com

Rachel's website is https://www.racheleddymusic.com/

The tune this week is Rose in the Mountain, played live by Rachel on the podcast!

Tapes on the Fiddle (Broken Down Gambler)

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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 the tune Broken Down Gambler from a jam in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. I'm excited to talk about tapes on the fingerboard. This is a very Suzuki teacher topic. If you're listening to this and you're a fiddler and you don't know, I'm a fiddler too, but I also was a Suzuki teacher, so I think a lot about things like tapes on the fingerboard. I wanted to let you all know that next week we're going to have an interview with Rachel Eddy, a fiddler from West Virginia, who has lots of cool stuff to say about fiddle and music in West Virginia, so I'm excited to share that with you. That'll be next week in May. 

So let's talk about tapes. Tapes are like your training wheels when you're playing the fiddle. You want to have them on A lot of. Of course, these kids learn on those other kinds of bikes that don't have training wheels, but I learned to ride a bike with training wheels, had them on for a while, then I had to take them off. There's three things you're using to know where to put your finger on the fiddle. If you're using tapes, you can use your eyes fiddle. If you're using tapes, you can use your eyes. If you don't have tapes, you're using the feel of what you can feel in your hand kinesthetically and of course you're using your ears to tell you whether it sounds right or not, whether the note is in tune. 

Yeah, it's annoying that we don't have frets, but a lot of other instruments need to learn eventually to make micro adjustments. If you're a wind player, you might learn that you press these buttons down to get a C, but eventually you're going to have to have some training in. Is that C in tune? Does it match the piano? Does it match the tuner? Does it match the other people I'm playing with? And how do I adjust my embouchure, the way I hold my mouth on my mouthpiece, to bring the note sharp or flat, to make it be in tune? I mean, the nice thing for them is that you can play for years. 

You can just get your instrument generally in tune and play the notes and you don't have to make those very small adjustments until you get to the high level and then you do. You absolutely do For the fiddle. Look, there's just a lot of notes all in one place on those strings. It's a small space and you have to be very exact about where you put your finger to make that string the exact length it needs to be to play that note in tune. You could put your finger anywhere you know, so you've got to learn where it goes and you've got to train it to go there. 

When we put tapes on the fiddle for beginners, for kids who are learning, even for adults who are just starting out, we're bringing the eyes into it. Not because I want someone to have the habit of watching their fingers. I I don't think that's good at all. Try to do it, keep an eye on it, especially if you have tapes, but don't get in the habit of watching your fingers all the time. You want those puppies to run on autopilot, watch your bow or, you know, watch the world around you, but you put the tapes on and then you have a visual reference. You put the tapes on and then you have a visual reference to where that note is where to put your finger. 

If you do have tapes on, it's very important to have your fiddle be in tune every time you play so that you're still hearing the notes in tune, but eventually everyone is going to take them off. If you have issues with your hearing, you're going, or with identifying the differences between notes. If you're tone deaf to some degree, you could just leave your tapes on forever why not? I don't care, I give you permission. If you can't play and enjoy it without your tapes, you can leave them on. But for most folks we're going to take them off and it could be after a month or two. You could use them for a whole year. 

Depends on how long it takes you to get some autopilot going in your hand, because you want your fingers to know what they're doing to some extent so that you can work on those little bitty fixing your tuning motions and not like, oh my gosh, I have to go from a C to a D or from one note to the next higher note. Which finger do I use? You want some of that stuff to be happening on autopilot so you can zoom in on the tuning when you take your tapes off. Yeah, it wouldn't wait too long if you can help it. Once you've got them off, think a little bit about unlocking your hand. I think I have. 

One of my recent episodes was on gripping the fiddle. I've also got other left hand oriented episodes you can check out. You want to do things to relax your grip on the fiddle a little bit. That's going to make it easier to fix your tuning, because, of course, if you're going to make it easier to fix your tuning, because of course if you're gripping the neck as hard as you can and you suddenly have to move your finger into position, it's going to be hard to move it if it's pressing really hard into the string. Yeah, definitely just be using one finger at a time. If you've been blocking your fingers, using them all, you know you're playing a three and you've got all three fingers down. You want to transition to just using one at a time. That makes it much easier to fix your tuning. 

Play in tune without your tapes the kind of work you need to do to get used to playing without tapes and to get better at playing in tune. It's a lot like working on your tone. I wouldn't do both at the same time, but it's playing slow, very slow, so slow that you feel like you can catch it if things are going wrong. So you're listening to catch it and then you try to figure out how to fix it. And it might be that you slide your finger a little bit up and it was the wrong way. Go back and slide your finger the other way. 

But that process of hearing that it's wrong and moving your finger until it sounds right, that's the only way to do it. It's going to be a little bit of time of doing that. You don't have to do it the whole time. You practice, but I would devote a few minutes of practice to it every day until it's happening automatically, make a recording of yourself and you listen to it and you're like that's pretty in tune. Okay, then you're. I wouldn't necessarily work on tuning, unless you're having issues after that. So yeah, putting tapes on and taking them off. 

Our tune for today is the Broken Down Gambler. This is the last tune I'm sharing from the jam that I did with my friends back in I think February it was and this was a Skillet Lickers tune from the Milliner-Koken collection. Aha, the blue book. I don't have that book but I look at it when I go to my friend's house and it's got a source recording. Broken Down Gambler. It's from Missouri, one of these Missouri or North Georgia tunes. There's a 1930 recording Gid Tanner. Oh, the members of the Skillet Lickers were Gid Tanner, Riley Puckett and Lowe Stokes, and they recorded it in 1930. 

Some people compare it to Waynesboro or Scott no 2. I've heard of Waynesboro. I don't know what Scott no 2 is. Other people think it's similar to Katie Hill. Why, you know? To be honest, I don't really care what it's similar to. It's a cute tune and I was happy to get it at the jam and I'm gonna play it here for you. Thanks everyone, you, you, 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. 

Articulation on the Fiddle (Dusty Miller)

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Find me on YouTube and Bandcamp.

Here are my Fiddle Studio books and my website Fiddle Studio where you can find my courses and mailing list and sign up for my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!

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 Dusty Miller from a jam in Baltimore, Maryland. You a setting of Dusty Miller from a jam in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. I'm excited to talk to you today about articulation. Now articulation is in music. 

So I looked up the musical definition on Wikipedia and it wasn't that helpful. They said articulation is a musical parameter that determines how a single note or other discrete event is sounded, determining the length of its sound and the shape of its attack and decay. It's attack and decay, hmm, okay. So on the violin, articulation is, I guess they said in a not very clear way in that definition it's about the beginning of the note and the length of the note. I'm trying to think of how articulation would affect more than that, but it's pretty much the beginning and the length. 

The way we teach it to kids, the way I teach it to kids as a Suzuki teacher at first, I just teach them to move their bow back and forth. You know they're playing whatever they're playing. Boil them, cabbage down, twinkle, twinkle, little star their bow's on the string, get them to leave it there on the string, not be pulling it up and off the string and moving it back and forth. Just move it for each note, change directions. 

Then I teach them staccato. So that's the first articulation In the classical world. They often use the Italian to refer to the types of articulation In the classical world. They often use the Italian to refer to the types of articulation. So staccato is making a note short, and so I teach the kids to stop their bow. So they're playing and they stop. It's not really that much about the beginning of the note, it's more teaching them to stop staying on the string in between their notes. Then we teach them legato. So legato is a lot like how they were sort of playing to begin with, but legato, making the notes long and smooth and connected. 

We get them to slow their bow down to connect the notes even more and try to make it real smooth between the notes so that there aren't any spaces. So now they have, hopefully kind of a regular autopilot way of playing and then they can play staccato, stop their bow, they can play legato, slow their bow down, connect the notes really well. Then we teach them the accent. So that's digging in at the beginning of the note for a very kind of explosive ka, getting an explosive sound. 

And in classical technique there are more kinds of articulations. You can get into spiccato and bouncing your bow and all kinds of things, what it means to have a line and a dot. So you've got the marking for legato and for sticcato a dot. So you've got the marking for legato and for staccato. There's sort of a long note with a little space in between. For fiddle we don't use most of that. Yeah, you're not stopping your bow and you're mostly not making it legato either. 

There are some fiddlers who play without articulation. I was talking last week about studying up on fiddle contest winners and some of them play real smooth kind of Texas style without a lot of articulation. Bluegrass some bluegrass fiddlers I hear articulation in most fiddlers playing. Nobody actually taught me this about fiddling. My dad, who had gone to Pinewoods and to old songs, learned from some of the old timers there and he taught me to do an accent on two and four. You know (speaking), make those notes louder, make that explosive accent, grabbing the string there, using more (speaking) from some fiddlers. 

I did workshops with Brian Conway and Becky Tracy who taught me about ghosting notes. So that was when you barely play a note, sort of the opposite of an accent, where you play a note much less, and so that's a way to bring attention to the other notes. Basically, in a jig you might play dot and (speaking) and those n in the middle, (speaking). But when I started teaching fiddle, especially to classical players, I felt like something was missing from their playing and I would call it being scrubby. So I would teach them to be scrubby. Then if they were playing fiddle and it was really smooth and it didn't sound very rhythmic, I'd say, oh, you need to make it more scrubby. Remember to be scrubby. Use your k-k-k-k-k-k. 

What I mean by this is it's a grabbing of the string at the beginning of the note. So a little bit like an accent, but smaller, because it's kind of every note I'm using like a d-d da for a lot of the notes, and those are all instances where I'm grabbing the string with my bow. So I'm not just la, la, la, la, la, moving my bow back and forth, but I'm digging into the string to make almost a little plosive like explosive sound, a buh or duh or cuh at the beginning of the note and doing that over and over again, up bows and down bows. 

I'm not using a lot of bow for this and it makes it sound for lack of a better word scrubby. If you're trying this at home, different strings take a different amount of force to get a little consonant on the beginning of your note. So if you're talking about the lowest string, the G string, you're going to have to grab it harder Then for the E string. You don't want to be putting tons and tons of weight over and over again into the E string. It's not going to sound as good. 

You use it rhythmically. You use it to keep the beat. You're playing for dancing and you're playing them a tune and you're also keeping the beat for them. That's the whole reason I'm doing it. So you got to use it really rhythmically. It's common to slur some of the notes and it's common to slur some of the notes. So now you've got a few notes that are slurred or ghosted so they're not showing up in your rhythmic pattern.

 And then you've got your other notes that are scrubby, or you're grabbing them, getting that little attack at the beginning of the note, and those are keeping the beat for you. Yeah, experiment with that scrubby sound. I don't know, you can. Once you learn it you can use a lot of it or you can just use a little bit of it, but it's a nice thing to have in your toolbox. 

This tune that we're going to play today is Dusty Miller. I guess it has a lot in common with Miller's Reel. I play a New England version of Miller's Reel and they have some things in common. I's Reel. I play a New England version of Miller's Reel and they have some things in common. I don't know. The A part's pretty different. So I grew up playing Miller's Reel. 

I guess this is you know. I learned this tune from my friends and they got it from the old-time fiddlers' repertory, from a book by RP Christensen Repertory from a book by RP Christensen. He got it. I guess he transcribed it from the playing of Bob Walters. It's a tune in A but I guess Bob played it in standard tuning and there are a lot of versions of Dusty Miller. 

Holy cow, if you look up this tune you will find a lot of different versions, but this one is it's close to Dusty Miller. That was recorded for Victor Records on the Texas Fiddler Captain MJ Bonner and Eck Robertson's version, which is maybe the parts are switched, but more similar to Bob Walter's. The one that we're doing switched, but more similar to Bob Walters, the one that we're doing , is from he's from Nebraska, so it's a Midwest tune. 

I guess we were playing Midwest tunes that night, so we're going to go ahead and play Dusty Miller .  Here we go 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.