Up and Down bows on the fiddle (The Coming of Spring)

Sheet music for The Coming of Spring by Paddy O'Brien. Hear the tune and discussion on the Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple Music or on Spotify!

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 The Coming of Spring by Paddy O'Brien from a session at the Arthouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about up and down bows. This is an insider topic if there ever was one, but I like to overthink things I like to get in the weeds. I'm that kind of fiddle teacher. So let's talk about up bows and down bows, it's going to be great. 

This is a discussion more for beginners, it's a very common beginner question. If you're not a beginner, well, there may be an opportunity for you to help explain this to beginners, at some point, I hope this can be helpful with that. 

What is an up bow and a down bow. Um, the E string. It's exactly what it sounds like. You're playing on the E string and you're playing an up bow, the bow is normally going up, the tip is getting closer to the ceiling or the sky. And if you're playing a down bow, the frog is getting closer to the floor, your bow is going down. 

If you're not on the E string, it's a little more of a side to side motion. So it's not super intuitive which way is up or down. But it's always the same. If you're going towards the tip that's a down bow. If you're going towards the frog, that's an up bow on any string, E string, A string, any of them towards the tip down towards the frog up. 

It is pretty widespread to play down on the downbeat. And it's not just because they have the same name down down. Start near the frog and the frog is a heavier part of the bow and makes basically the bow near the frog is heavier and will make of heavier sound down bows on the downbeat. Give the beat that heavy sound with the beginning of the note being louder, fuller.

The up bow has a lighter start to it because you're starting from just that part of the bow weighs less. And it's a little further away from your point of control. So it's going to be a little lighter. So I have a personal take on this, which is that down bows are a little more intuitive. If you think about the difference between hammering down on a nail or like trying to hammer up to hammer a nail into the ceiling. I just think we're more practiced with that downward motion. 

And so that might be another reason that downvotes tend to be a little stronger, a little more in control. And they're generally being played on the downbeat. Because a lot of music is organized that the downbeat is the important strong beat. So if you think about starting down on a downbeat, Old Joe Clark da da dum bum bum ba starts on the downbeat, you'd start on a down bow.

With a tune like the march Meeting of the Waters, it has a pickup note kind of a pre note before the downbeat dun da dum bump. So the pickup would be up bow so that you're playing down bow on the downbeat. 

Now, this all goes out the window when we start talking about shuffles and backbeat, emphasizing the two and the four. When I'm playing reels, and I'm hitting that two and four hard. I'm adding in slurs and it's just what you would expect. I'm using my down bow on those beats because I want to have those be heavier, louder, bring them out more. 

So slurring up, up bow, and the less important notes but on the two and the four the back beats and playing a down bow to kind of bring it out heavy, spit it out. Some people do it backwards from that there's not a wrong way to do your own personal bowing that you're comfortable with. Not in fiddling.

Now for classical music. The bowing is basically part of the composition so there's a right and wrong way to do it. And classical violin players do worry a lot of About if their bows are in sync, you know, like, the way dancers would try to make their legs or their arms and sink them in the orchestra, they want all your bows to be in sync.

With Fiddler's it's all can almost be a problem if it's too in sync because you lose some of the variety, the improvised feel. It can look good, but I don't know. Personal opinion. I don't think it's really fiddling if the bowing is exactly the same all the time, never changing. 

I improvise my bowings, there's a lot of bowings, I do the same or the same patterns. But if I'm playing a tune more than once, I don't want to use the same bowings because I want to bring out different rhythmic aspects of the tune, make it smoother, make it bouncier.

I mean the outcome of that is that I wouldn't worry too much about getting the bowing exactly right. Or if you're bowing tends to be a little different from other people's what you're comfortable with. Because for fiddling, there's not really a wrong way to do it. Don't worry about it too much. But you know, down on the downbeat.

Our tune today is another Paddy O'Brien tune. This is the jig Coming of Spring and appropriate tune to be playing in March. It is from a session at the Arthouse bar in Baltimore. This is a three part jig. I love these three part jigs actually, Paddy, I guess, played this tune with another jig called Black Lough. 

And Seana Davey and Stephen Doherty played it on the Esdee sessions. You can look that up and Liosa Murphy also plays it on her album Skylark. So pretty well known Patty O'Brien tune. There are so many great Paddy O'Brien tunes, you can you know, if you want a collection of them for yourself, you can look up Eileen O'Brien Paddy's daughter get a collection of tunes composed by Paddy O'Brien. 

So there was a player on the session writing about this tune and using it for a certain Irish ornament. They called it smearing. This is kind of sliding up into a note. You hear it a lot in Old Time. Certainly bluegrass is certainly here in klezmer, which is another style that I play. But it's not always as well known, especially in an Irish jig. 

It has a has kind of a lonesome sound. I think it has a lonesome sound in Old Time, or an Irish. So some of these high notes, all these quarter notes, the high G's in the in the third part, you can slide up into them. And if you want to experiment, you can try sliding and not quite getting to them. That's that Liz Carroll technique I've been experimenting with. 

But this is the Coming of Spring. And yeah, I'm learning all these and learning all these accordion tunes to get to know them all. You ready? Okay.