How to get really good at the fiddle (Hob Dye)

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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 Hob Dye from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.

But before I start, if you are enjoying the podcast, can I just ask that you go ahead and leave a rating or review? That would be great. While I'm recording this, this is actually the second time I've recorded this podcast because the first time I forgot to turn my mic on, I'm recording this in January and have a few ratings on Apple podcasts. 

But I don't have any reviews. So maybe you could be the first one. That would be amazing. I like this topic, how do you get really good at something because of course, I'm a teacher. And I think about this all the time. 

There is like a beginner vibe or energy, where people are really in a hurry to get very, very good at something, I'll often sit a really excited beginner down. And I will make an analogy about chess. 

So here's my chess analogy. How can you get really good at chess, like get a really high rating. And the scenario I like to spin is that a person makes a plan that every day, they're going to have coffee with their friends in the morning, and play chess, or play a couple games of chess, then go to work or whatever. 

So that's kind of the lifestyle part is designing your lifestyle, so that there's something that cues you to do it every day, and you kind of stack those minutes, stack those hours. But the other part of getting your chest rating really high is an evaluative part, like get that word right away to evaluate your playing, and figure out how to make it better. 

If that same person who was playing chess every morning over coffee, also would every night before bed, look back through the game and kind of see what Stockfish had to say about it. And maybe once a week, play through an old game of theirs and think about what they might have done differently. 

Well, that's going to make a big difference, too. And I think you get there, you get I don't know if you win a tournament, you get pretty good at chess, for fiddling, if you've got that desire to get really good. 

You want to think about your lifestyle, and how to plan to play fiddle every day, stack those minutes, stack those hours. And you want to plan for a way to evaluate what you're doing, whether it's getting feedback from someone else, being able to take that feedback. 

I mean, be careful that you aren't thinking so hard about evaluating what you're doing that you can get lost in the weeds with the thinking and the overanalyzing and I've had students really worried about all the different kinds of rosin they could be using. And they're like, what about this kind of what about that kind? 

And I might say something to them, like, instead of worrying about the rosin, what if you try to sink into the string and really get a good connection between your horsehair and your string? Try to get a sound that way not try to find the rosin that's going to, you know, get you your perfect sound. Someone could take that advice, or more often, they're just like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what about the rosin? 

You don't want to be the Yeah, yeah, yeah, person. If you get feedback from a professional from a teacher, want to write that down, make a note and have a way to go back and look at it and think about it. 

I have a weightlifting coach right now. And everything she says, I write down, basically she comes over and says you needed to

push your knees out. She says that a lot about my squat. I write it down. Even if though I've written down, push your knees out six times, I'm still doing it well enough. And then I always look it over before my next set. 

This is really how you're going to make progress. Being able to take that feedback and apply it. My husband is kind of an expert at this. He's only been playing Irish flute a couple of years, but he's very good. But he played a reel for me, and he had this concern that it wasn't super rhythmic, very solid all the way through. 

And he was telling me what he thought could make it more rhythmic. And I gave him some other advice. I said, Well, actually, you know, I'm looking at him with my teacher eyes and my teacher ears. 

And I said, Well, I you know, I think you should prioritize playing with other people at least four hours a week and you know, metronome rhythms and I kind of went through the advice I would have given him if he were a fiddler coming to me saying, you know, my reel is kind of uneven. 

How do I, how do I make it really rhythmically solid. He started doing the stuff that I said, and then a couple of weeks later, it's like, his reel sounded better. It doesn't sound like a hard thing. But I think it can be I think, I think it can be, you want to get really good. 

Think about that chess player they meet they play games every morning, every night before they go to bed. They look over the game. You got to find a way to make that happen for you're fiddling. 

Our tune today is a it's a rag. I haven't done a rag yet. This is a rag called Hob Dye. It's in G major that we play at the old time jam here in Baltimore. And it was one of many tunes collected by the blind Fiddler Kenny Hall. It was in his, he has a book, Kenny Hall's music book from Mel Bay. 

And you can hear Kenny Hall play this on slippery Hill website, I think a recording back from 1974 with Jim Ringer on the guitar. And he said he learned it from Clara Desmond, and she said it was named after a Texas bootlegger who composed it. That's not clear at all. Most people just think it's referring to hob, hobbing, which is a machine term. 

To find out more about that I went to the Wikipedia article about hobs. It's funny, the article came with a warning label basically saying the words in this article are too technical to understand. Could somebody please simplify it for the Layperson. 

What I could get as a person who is not involved in machine learning machining, the machine trade was that hobbing is a process of cutting into a material to create gears. And just to finish up here, I'm going to read you a common list of hobs. So here's some hobs for you: 

• The roller chain sprocket hob
• The worm wheel hob
• The spline hob
• The chamfer hob
• The spur and helical gear hob
• The straight side spline hob
• The involute spline hob 
• The servation hob 
• And the semi topping gear hob.

So those are a bunch of hobs. This tune is called Hob Dye. I don't know why it's an A major chord in the B part but that's how we play it in Baltimore. So that's how Charley and I are gonna play for you now. Enjoy. Go.

Thanks for listening, you can find the sheet music for this tune at fiddle studio.com You can also find my books and courses for learning the fiddle and get more information about becoming a member of Fiddle Studio. I'll be back next Tuesday with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.