How to play faster (Hollow Poplar)

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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 Hollow Poplar from a Square Dance at the Mobtown Ballroom in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about how to play fast, but before we get to my tips for playing fast, let me just address the question do you have to play fast? I don't think so. No, you don't have to play fast. Look, you don't have to play fast tunes. You can play all kinds of things on the fiddle and never play a real or fast jig. 

And you don't have to play reels that are meant to be played fast. You don't have to play them fast, you can just play them slow. The exception to that is for dancing. You have to play fast. So if you're just playing at home alone or with a friend or family member, there's no need to play fast. But if you're playing for dancing, stepping beat is between about 100 and 120, so you got to play fast for that. 

So, assuming you can play some reels but you play them slowly and you don't feel like you can play them fast, or they don't feel or sound settled at a fast tempo. How do you get there? How do you get from playing reels slowly to playing reels quickly? 

This is not a short project. In my experience it's about four years from starting from scratch to all the way up to tempo and be settled there For somebody who's playing a few hours a week and also in challenging environments. So by either taking lessons, playing in groups, going to camps, playing places where you'll be challenged to play faster, so you can just take your four years, see where you are. 

If it's been a lot longer than four years and you don't feel settled up to tempo, I've got some tips for you. Or if you're just in a big hurry Some of us are in a big hurry to get up to speed as fast as they can . 

When I say fast and settled, the settled is an important part of it, because people can be playing fast according to the metronome, but the music can sound how do I put this? Panicky or messy or both. And it's not really your fault. You just haven't gotten it up to speed and then you're not going to like this above the speed In order to play at 120 and sound settled and comfortable and not in a rush. You actually need to be able to play that tune at 130 or faster. 

In classical when we have these really fast runs, we bring them all the way up with the metronome to the tempo where we're going to perform it. But if you only ever practice it at that tempo and then you take your concerto in front of judges for competition or something, it's going to fall apart. You need to be able to play it even faster for it to run smooth every time.

This may have happened to you. If you play something fast at home and it sounds pretty good and you're like, oh, I've got this, it's fast, that's great. And then you go someplace, try to play with someone else or play for your teacher or perform, you get a little nervous and then it falls apart. That is because it's not settled. You haven't gotten it fast enough for it to be settled at a good fast playing speed. 

Beats per minute. Just in case we don't know beats per minute, that's a BPM beats per minute. The easiest one to know is just 60, because there are 60 seconds in a minute. So 60 beats per minute is an exact second and the classic dance tempo is 120, which is, of course, twice as fast as a second. That's used a lot because it's just a comfortable stepping tempo for square dancing, contra dancing, the way that I.

Right before I start a dance and I don't always play at 120, a lot of times it's more like 110, unless it's a community I know that likes to dance really fast. But somebody told me that 120 is like a Sousa March. So I'll think in my head dun dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun dun, and that gives me one, two, three, four. That gives me 120. And then I play it at that speed for the dance. So if you've been to a dance where I'm playing, I'm constantly hearing in my head Sousa Marches right before I start playing. 

Here let's get into some of the tips, okay. First tip for getting faster Use less bow. How much bow are you using? Is it six inches, four inches, three inches, three inches? It should be like one or one and a half inches Really really small bows for going fast. Practice that. 

If you're not slurring at all. That's gonna make it harder. Learn some slurring patterns, because when you slur, only one of your hands has to go fast and you don't have to coordinate them moving together. Your bow is just going a little slower and your left hand is moving fast. So once you have the trick of slurs, they will help you go fast. You can't just slur all your notes in a fiddle tune. That would make it much easier to go 120. You can only slur some of them. Look up my, I have a course for slurs and shuffle patterns, so learn some of those and they will help you go faster. 

Third tip simplify the tune. So you might not be used to simplifying tunes. Go through a couple and see where you can take notes out. You'll hear this a lot. When a professional fiddler plays a really fast tune, I mean maybe they just go for all the notes and it's like show off city. But a lot of times they'll take a lot of notes out and simplify it, especially if they're playing the tune really, really fast. So learn how to simplify tunes and take all those little passing notes out of there. 

I think scales, arpeggios, broken thirds, chromatic. Look, fiddlers don't like these. But I also play jazz occasionally and I know jazz players and they practice this stuff like crazy. Their scales their arpeggios broken thirds ba da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da da and chromatic scales, because it's the building blocks of what they're doing. And then when you hear like a really fast bebop solo and you're like how in the world are they playing that and making it up? And it's so fast, it was shedding those scales that did it. 

Yeah, shedding. You guys know what shedding is? Practicing. So at music school the classical players called it practicing but the jazz players called it shedding. Because you're like out in the woodshed I mean, yeah, that's my understanding. Anyway, I wasn't really either. Right, I'm a fiddler. 

I do have some tricks I run my students through to get them up to speed. One is rhythms. I might have gone over this in another podcast, but you take a reel where you've got groups of four notes, something like Fisher's hornpipe Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun Lots of, lots and lots of running notes. Hard to play that up to speed. It's got string crossings and everything, and you first you can play it slow fast. So bum ba dum ba dum, ba dum ba dum. It sounds like slow, fast, slow, fast, slow, fast, slow. Then you can flop it and do it fast, slow, fast, slow, fast, slow, ba dum ba dum, ba dum ba dum, ba dum, ba, dum, ba dum. Like that. 

Classical players will even take this to kind of the next step. Instead of just doing slow, fast and fast, slow, they'll take a group of four notes and make just one of them slow. So how would we do this? Fisher's Hornpipe you can take the first note and make that long. So I'm saying slow, but maybe I mean long, I don't know. They kind of come out to the same thing when you're using this practice technique. So it would be like bum ba dum, ba dum, ba, dum, ba dum, ba, dum ba dum. Then you can take the next note and make that the long note, this one's harder Ba dum ba, dum, ba dum, ba dum, ba, dum, ba, dum ba dum. 

Okay, I lost you all, but these are practicing in rhythms and they are like magic for making things faster. It's very hard to practice tunes that way, and that is part of the whole. Trick is not only are you practicing some of the notes fast, but you're also just learning the tune really really well because you're having to kind of translate it into these different rhythms. 

So part of playing fast is just learning really really well. If you wanna use a metronome, that's a classic way to get faster. You can start at 60, play your tune super slow at 60, one note per second, that's really slow. Then crank it up. You can go up in tens, try it at 70, try it at 80, try it at 90, go up in 20s. You can do 60 for two notes. Yeah, find a tempo that's really slow, where you feel really really comfortable, and then work up from there, playing fast. Yeah, it's not necessary, but it is fun. I think it's fun. 

Our tune today is Hollow Poplar. Oh, this is another tune from the square dance. So square dances you have to play fast. It's a little different from a contradance. In a contradance the dance fits the music exactly and it doesn't change. So the caller will teach the dancers what to do and kind of call the dance moves out while you're playing the tune. But then after a few times through, the dancers kind of know what to do and the caller will stop calling the moves out if the dancers seem like they have it and at that point a lot of times will change into a different tune. Sometimes we've changed tunes twice in a contradance because as long as the tune is 32 bars it's still gonna fit that dance and there's more variety that way, since they're just doing the same exact dance over and over again. 

Square dance is a little bit different because the moves some of them, are set and some of them the caller's just coming up with it on the spot. Well, they have some tricks in their bag, but the beginning and the end, and sometimes in the middle, they're deciding what they want the dancers to do and trying to fit it in with the music. And it doesn't always fit the music exactly, so they'll let the swing go on a little longer to get them back to where they need to be for the next set of moves to start in the square. 

So it's usually just one tune in a square dance and it goes very fast. So don't pick your complicated notey tunes for a square dance. Use your simple tunes for that, or simplify the tunes like we talked about, and be prepared to play them for a very long time. Yeah, it's nice if you have some rhythm players who can switch it up under the tune. 

Hollow Poplar is also called Hollow Poplar Log or Old Hollow Poplar. Yeah, this was a breakdown from Missouri, although I guess it was played first in Tennessee by Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, famous Tennessee fiddler, and his grandson, Ernest Smith, said that this tune, Hollow Poplar, was his dad's favorite. Hmm, does that mean Ernest's dad or not sure whose favorite it was? It was somebody's favorite and played on the radio at the Grand Old Opry and Smith played this tune. 

It was also played in the Midwest by Missouri fiddlers there, so maybe they got it from the radio, from Smith playing it, or they just picked it up and it came over with dance fiddlers or regional kind of traveling musicians. Definitely played in Missouri and also in Tennessee. Hollow Poplar, here we go. 

Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudio.com, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.