Coordinating the left and right hands (Reel de mon Gibard)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller, and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Reel de mon Gibard from a workshop with Eric Favreau and Fiddle Hell.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about coordinating between the left and right sides of your body when you're playing the fiddle. The reason this is hard to do, in my opinion, is that your right arm, your bow arm is doing a gross motor motion, it's moving your whole arm back and forth, your left hand is doing a fine motor motion. 

And if you're right handed, more commonly, it's already your weaker hand. So you've got your weak hand, doing fine motor, and trying to coordinate exact timing. With the other side of your body doing gross motor, it's a little tricky. 

You can tell if it's not lining up, you'll be getting blips and things will not be happening at the same time, you'll get a lot of sort of special effects in here playing that you don't want to be there. So if this is what you think is going on, here are some things to try. 

To start with, I would think about leaving your fingers down. Now are you leaving your fingers down when you're not using them, or always using your fingers one by one. A lot of beginners learn walking fingers, which is what I call it with kids, when they're learning to use just one finger. I tell them it's like walking where you use just one foot at a time. A lot of people use walking fingers, they use just one finger at a time. 

But blocking your fingers leaving them down when you're not using them can help with coordination because you're not trying to get one finger to go down while another goes up. While your bow you know, it's fewer things to coordinate. If you're not used to that, try it with some scales or easy tunes just trying to always leave the fingers down kind of behind the note you're playing. If you're playing a to have your one down, if you're playing a three, have your one and your two down. And just leave them there until you need to move them,

You can practice that. You can do I had a teacher once have me practice tricky part. So you can take a tricky tune or tune with a lot of string crossings or accidentals, and practice it very slow. And stop your bow between each note, get your finger setup that takes some patience. But I did find it helpful when I worked on that. 

A lot of people will say use the metronome, that's pretty straightforward, just start very slow, basically slow the metronome down until they are coordinated practice that get used to that and then you know, start to inch it up. See if you can get up from there. 

I actually will often suggest rhythms before I suggest metronome. So this is for like a nobody real getting your reals fast. It's an age old problem. You take the real you make it sound like a horn pipe. So you turn all the running eighth notes into long, short, long, short, long, short, long. Then flip it and so it sounds like short, long, short, short, long. So you practice both of those. 

And as you get better at it, you actually make the long notes a little longer and then short notes little shorter. It becomes more like a very exaggerated strathspey or something. What this does is allows you to practice very quick changes in your fingers and your bow, but only every other note. Sometimes our bodies like this. 

I have seen these rhythms really improve reels for my students both in playing a reel that you're finding is a little too hard for you and getting your reel faster but keeping it cohesive. Let's move on to our tune. Our tune today is Reel de mon Gibard. This is a crooked Quebec tune in a major that I learned from Eric Favreau at Fiddle Hell. Eric was a great fiddler and teacher. I loved his workshop. He also did foot percussion. He had his board and his shoes. And he did the foot percussion while he played. 

I can kind of do that. It's not, it's not super rhythmic. The rhythm it's a little worse in my fiddle and in my feet when I'm when I'm doing both at the same time, but if it's in a group, I can look like I know what I'm doing. Calling a tune crooked, means that the form is not 32 bars that divide evenly by four. Instead, it's some other number of bars and beats. So this was a crooked tune. 

It's from the playing of Louis Boudreau, who was a fiddler born in Quebec1905. He played the fiddle when he was very young, he had a very musical family and father was a fiddler. And when he got a little older, I guess he was invited to come to a classical school. But he, his teacher, wow. Times never change. His classical teacher was very hostile to the idea of traditional music. And he ended up quitting because he could not deal with that. Yeah, the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

In his adult life. He was a carpenter. But he still played the fiddle, mostly for like family events and community events. He didn't record really a lot or travel, but then when he was in his 60s and 70s, so in the 1970s, he attended a fiddle competition like with friends, just to go and hear them. His friends were like you should, you should get up there and compete. 

So he's in his late 60s. So he got up and he played and he won. And what that led to was during the 1970s, you know, he had this later life career competing and performing at festivals around Canada was the folk revival of the 1970s. It was just the perfect time. Everyone wanted to hear these traditional tunes played really traditionally. So he had a wonderful and very rich later life fiddling career. 

I do not remember what Eric said to us about the name. I think she's a bard has something to do with a whale. And he talked about fjords. So he talked about fjords and whales, and I could not quite understand what he was saying. But when you're playing this reel think about Wales, and fjords, this was a tricky tune. 

Lucky Charlie was in the workshop. He learned it on flute Yeah, afterwards Eric was like whoa, the flute was really nice. That made it a little easier for us to work it out. It's still a still a handful but really fun tune was in my my head all day after I learned it. Hope you enjoy.

Thanks for listening, you can head over to fiddlestudio.com to find sheet music for this tune and more information about becoming a member of Fiddle Studio. I'll be back next time with another tune for you have a wonderful day.