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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 New Mown Meadows from a session at Fergie's Pub in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about the pinky on the left hand, highly specific. But if you play fiddle you, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
But first, I want to say a quick thank you to somebody who has been helping me with editing and post production on this podcast, you may have noticed the sound quality increased in the last couple months. So thank you, Miguel. Miguel has been helping out. And I really appreciate it.
Let's just check in briefly with the Kickstarter. So the Kickstarter is going Why do musicians do these kick starters? If you don't know, but a Kickstarter is it's crowdfunding, it's somebody posts about their project to try to raise money. So rather than sort of putting all the money up beforehand, and then creating something and then selling it, to pay back your investment, you try to raise the investment first. And this is the whole reason we're doing Kickstarters.
Because we used to make albums and musicians would do this, they'd put up the money, make the album, sell the CDs, and then that would pay back your investment. But now most people listen to music on streaming. I mean, what can I say? I listened to most of my music on streaming, except for CDs in the car.
Where does that leave a musician if an album costs 1000s of dollars, and it's not actually going to make you money, because nobody makes money on streaming from fiddle music. I don't know. Maybe Mark O'Connor. Nobody like me, makes money from streaming. So we use the Kickstarter. Anyway, I'm not going to talk about it too much more. But go check out the Kickstarter, see if you want to contribute. And even if you don't have any money for the project, if you can share the link or the information on your socials, your network. That's really useful too.
Okay, enough of that. Let's talk about the left hand pinky, a whole podcast for one finger, no matter what the style is, whether we're talking classical or fiddle. The pinky is a problem. It short, and it's weak. Feel like I should apologize to my pinky right now. We'll talk about beginning sort of beginner problems first, and at the end, I'll talk to you about how people who are more advanced, also work on their pinky.
I usually teach six months with no pinky, I don't even put the pinky tape or sticker on the fingerboard kids or adults, we learn with the three fingers. Then after like six months, we do the pinky. The reason for this is to let students have a chance to get comfortable holding and playing the violin before they're trying to control the pinkie and use it in that way. But it does mean that the rest of fingering on the violin has become a little less challenging.
And then when you add the pinky in there, people can find it. Frustrating, I get it. It's frustrating. I'll write the 4. If we're reading music, I write the 4 and encourage them to do it. Sometimes they do it. Sometimes they don't, you know, we'll do little exercises like adding the pinky after the other fingers playing like a 1234. So adding the pinkie and then practicing lifting the pinkie. So 4, back to 3 or 4 back to 2. We have to lift two fingers or four back to one where you have to lift three fingers. So it's it's both putting it on there and then controlling when you take it off.
All kinds of things to think about. in Suzuki it's perpetual motion for song with the pinky. Yeah, it's about six months, maybe a year for younger students. What is the problem with the pinky? Well, it's hard to press the string down. It's also hard to reach that E natural. And there's another issue for some people that their bow will do weird things when they're trying to play their pinky. What is this about?
The heard to press, you just do little exercises to try to strengthen it, play it a lot, have the other fingers down to give the pinky some support and engage like the whole hand, the muscles for all the fingers together, that will help so little pinky doesn't have to do it all by themselves.
In terms of being harder to reach, while you can try a straighter pinky, that's my go to. Your other fingers, of course, should be pretty curved pretty boxy, as I say to the kids, but the pinky can be flatter, it can be a pinky pancake. If that doesn't work, you can even bring your wrist kind of a hair closer to the neck.
My college professor of violin, her name was Lynn Blakeslee, and she would show me this and she was she was such a good violinist. And her pinky was so short. And it was kind of the worst, because I have these kind of long fingers. I'm lucky my dad is tall, I'm tall, have long fingers, and I'd be struggling to reach something and sometimes even my wrist would go back, and I wouldn't be able to get there.
And then she just show me that she could reach it easily, you know, using this technique, bringing her her wrist kind of a hair closer to the neck, and then the long extension flat pinky. Then she would show me her hand or even make me come over and show how much shorter her pinky was. Megan if I can do it, you can do it, she would say to me.
The bow reacting thing. I just saw this the other day, I had a student. And when he put his pinky down it, it was having trouble reaching and it was having trouble pressing down the string because it's new. But at the same time that his brain was trying to make the pinky cooperate in this way, it was kind of sending up static and so his bow which was usually a nice clean tone was like crunching into the string just involuntarily.
Because he's he's trying really hard to make something happen with one hand and the other hand is reacting. And when you react involuntarily on the violin, it sometimes crunches, so be careful of that too.
Advanced pinky lore. So when I was 12, I did this summer camp for advanced violinists. I've been working pretty hard. I was on Preludium and Allegro, that kind of thing, is past Vivaldi, past the Bach concertos. We worked with a soloist who came so wasn't a famous teacher was like a famous violin player can't remember his name. I wish I could, but I was 12. That was a while ago.
That was the first time I heard anyone say, well, if you really want to make it, you have to practice for hours. Four hours a day, one for scales, one for etudes one for your new music and one for your other music. I was like, what? I was not practicing for hours at that time.
He ended up just having us work on our pinky a lot. He kind of said it's a very advanced group of preteens and teenagers. He said y'all have three fingers that are advanced and one bit still a beginner. So what do you had us do for our pinkies if you're a little more advanced, you can look into this.
First two pages of Schradieck, Schradieck? I would always call it Schradieck. It's a volume of etudes. And the first two pages are the classic. You can memorize them and you can play them till the cows come home. And some of them use the pinky a lot. So you learn them and you play them. And when your pinky starts to get tired, you stop for that day. Let it recover. Do it again. It's like doing your reps for weightlifting.
He also had us do left hand pizz, or left hand pizzicato. The pinky is the finger that does the most work because it's the farthest away from the other fingers. So it's going to be the most likely finger to do pizzicato. I mean, we're talking about you've got your 1 or your 2 down, and then your pinky on the same hand is reaching down to pluck that string.
It is an advanced technique, but it'll make your pinky a lot stronger. So he gave us just some simple etudes left hand pizzicato etudes, same thing, play them. When you feel your pinky getting real tired, stop, don't push through, let it recover. Do it again. Pinkies. Let me know if you're having trouble with your pinky. I might be able to think of some other ideas.
Our tune for today is called New Mown Meadows. So you have your meadows, and they are newly mown. Like m o w n somebody Mowed them. I was trying to figure out what this name meant. It's a fun tune. It's played on a lot of instruments, apparently in a lot of different keys and in a lot of different places because I kept finding it everywhere.
There were long explanations about why it's so popular with melodeon players. Who knew? The B part'ss a little similar to Silver Spear. And it's not a super old tune, apparently collected in the mid 1800s, both by PW Joyce collecting in Munster, and also by Cleric James Goodman of Cork. So it's already in a couple different places had different names but pretty quickly became New Mown Meadows.
I think there's an Irish language named to that. I did not collect. Yeah, so here it is. This is a nice one. Ready?
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