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 Sadie at the Back Door by Jere Canote from a session at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today I'm going to be talking about how to improve your tone on the fiddle. Kind of, what affects tone? what doesn't affect your tone? Some thoughts around that.
The part of your body that controls your tone on the fiddle, is your right arm and hand. It's not in your fingers. I frequently will teach beginners who are having trouble with their tone. And they're trying to diagnose something that their left hand fingers are doing on the strings. Basically, it's not your left hand, as long as your fingers are pressing the strings down enough, they don't even have to be pressing them all the way down to the fingerboard. But they're pressing them enough to like stop the vibration, then it's not your left hand.
You know, you can have some funny effects from if your left hand fingers are not coordinated at the same time as your right hand. But I did do a podcast coordinating the left and right sides of the body. So look that up. If that's your trouble.
Let's get back to tone. So it's all in your right hand, your right arm, it's your bow. And basically the tone is the vibration that you're getting out of the string, you know, you pull the bow across the string, you can see the string vibrating back and forth. There's sort of the vibration coming out of the instrument into the air of the tone.
And then there's also the noise of the bow scraping on the string, whatever's happening with the actual physical horsehair and the steel string, that's going to add some noise to your tone. There is also relevant to tone, would be your bow speed, starting and stopping, rosin, to some degree rosin, and pressure on the string.
But when people talk about that point where your horsehair meets the string, in relation to the tone coming out of the instrument, that has a specific name, and it's the contact point. So if you haven't heard this phrase before, you can probably picture if you go to an orchestra concert, and you know, somebody is playing the Mendelssohn. And you watch their bow on the string, it's going to be doing a lot of back and forth. But it's going to be staying really stuck onto the string in one place, at least the violinist will have full control over it. If they want to play closer to the bridge closer to the fingerboard to get a different volume or a different color of their sound, they have full control over their contact point. But mostly the bows going to be just absolutely straight, usually about halfway between the bridge and the fingerboard or maybe slightly closer to the bridge. And there'll be staying right there, their contact point will not move, and they will not lose that point of contact.
On the other hand, I was at a jam the other night. And there were tons of fiddlers there, lots of people just starting out to you know, advanced musicians who are leading the jam. And so there was a beginner and I could see because of where I was sitting, I could kind of see his bow. And his bow as he was playing was just sliding everywhere. I mean, it was a big jam, so I couldn't hear him. But I know what that sounds like. If the bow's sliding around and there's no one point of contact, you hear the sliding and you're not getting the full vibration you would get if the bow was just straight and stuck on the string.
So the vibration, the sound of the note is quieter. And then the noise, the bow noise the scraping is louder. And that's, you know, that's what that tone sounds like. Not as great. You want to go towards getting a really strong contact point.
Just basics for contact point. A lot of it is about keeping your bow straight. And a lot of keeping your bow straight is about opening from your elbow, making sure that your, your angles are right. And with kids, this is so hard because they keep growing so all their angles keep changing. You know their instruments bigger and their arm shorter but then their arm gets longer and then, but then they get a bigger instrument. So they're always having to adjust their angles.
If you're an adult, you just need to find it once you need to find the path for your arm that keeps a really straight bow. And that's going to be a big part of your contact point. The other levers are kind of pressure, the amount of pressure you're putting into the string obviously affects the tone, and speed.
All of these are things that you should have a lot of control over the speed of your bow, you may move your bow unconsciously not really thinking about it. But you can work on playing with your bone moving at different speeds. With the pressure, there can be a lot of unconscious movement, sort of affecting the pressure of your bow on the string. People who may have a lot of tension in their bow arm, or in their arm or their shoulder.
Or maybe they're pressing down too hard. And it's really hard for them to relax enough to let off enough of that pressure to just have a good contact point, but not like a crushing contact point in the string. Or there's a lot of people who are kind of afraid of the string, you know, and I mean, the violin can make some weird noises. And so they're tense, but they're holding the bow back from the string and they're afraid to kind of relax and put their weight down into it, which would actually get more vibration, more sound from the instrument and the sound would fill out and cover up the bow noise and make their tone sound better.
I hope this is making sense the way I'm explaining it. It's really all about getting that good contact point and keeping it as you're playing. Now, starting and stopping the bow kind of messes with this. If you have your bow straight and in control, and you're using a good pressure, good speed, and you've got it sounded good while the bow's moving, you still may have tone issues when the bow starts or stops, or changes direction.
Classical players really work on this, they try to get all of those crunches out. Basically there's almost never a time in classical music you really want to crunch unless you're playing something very, very forceful or triple stops or something. They will work on kind of sometimes I call it smile bow, where you sink in, got your full contact point while you're both moving in the middle. But then when you're changing directions like a smile, you kind of let up the pressure.
For fiddling, I use, in my fiddling, it's a little crunchy. It's a little percussive, I love the fiddle as kind of a percussive instrument. Using my playing to also reinforce the rhythm of the dance tune. I leave a little bit of that grip, that kind of sound when I'm changing directions. But I do have control if I want to play a waltz and I don't want there to be any crunch. Now I'm playing in a different way where I'm keeping my contact point, but I do let up a little bit of pressure when I'm changing directions.
You want to kind of work on all those different levers different aspects so that you have control over what's happening with your tone.
Our tune today is Sadie at the Back Door. This is a tune by Jere Canote and I don't know if that's how you say his name, but that's how I'm gonna say it while I talk about this tune. Great tune, written on the banjo I believe. Apparently Sadie is a cat. And Sadie was a cat whose habit was to always go out by the front door but would only come in by the back door. And so she got a tune, written about her called Sadie at the Back Door.
Jere Canote plays fiddle and plays a lot with his twin brother Greg Canote, they are twins. They're based on the west coast in Seattle. They were for many years, the Canote brothers, the kind of sidekicks on Sandy Bradley's potluck, which was an NPR show.
Playing music, they play all kinds of tunes fiddle tunes also swing novelty songs, they sing, they play all their instruments, you know, all the stringed instruments fiddle guitar, banjo, ukulele, great duets, really nice harmony. I was checking them out a little bit.
Jere builds banjos and teaches banjos is kind of his specialty and so if you if you want to buy a banjo you could look him up. I think his studio is called Small Wonder Banjos. And I did as I was researching him find a banjo joke that he told in an interview. Here's the banjo joke before we play this tune Sadie at the back door. What do you never get the chance to say to a banjo player? Is that your Porsche out back?
Okay, Charlie is a banjo player. Here it is, Sadie at the Back Door.
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