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 Tighe's Rare from a session at the ArtHouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about the flexible right wrist.
I don't know if I sound funny. I have unfortunately been sick for several weeks. I am getting better. I kept putting off recording until my voice was back to its usual, but it's been slow going. So we're moving ahead with the voice we have and the horn practicing next door and the drilling outside. I just need to record. Here we go. Does your wrist need to be flexible and why? And we're going to talk about how to work on getting a looser wrist or a looser bow grip.
First, let's just establish having a loose right wrist for your bow arm is about getting your bow straight, assuming we all agree that it's useful to have a straight bow. I did talk a lot about the straight bow and how that affects your tone in episode 31, the podcast called how to Improve your Tone.
But when a beginner starts playing violin or fiddle, their elbow is bent and they're often swinging their entire right arm back and forth and their violin is holding steady in one place but their whole bow arm is swinging, so the bow is not staying straight and you get all the problems that come along with that. So first we get them to open up from their elbow. So now their forearm is coming back and forth, they're opening from their elbow, but if their wrist is still very straight and locked, they're still going to be some swinging back and forth, some change in the angle of the bow that will affect your tone, because the bow won't be staying very straight and stuck onto the string.
Now if you're just playing in the middle of the bow, it might not make much of a difference, because you see the effects a lot more at the tip or the frog. Eventually you're going to want to play something that uses long bows and you're going to need some flexibility in your wrist and your hand to accommodate those long bows. And I would say that a lot of speed and dexterity in your bowing on the fiddle does come from being loose. So if you can feel that your wrist is tense, if you watch a video, this happens to a lot of people and you say, oh wow, my right arm looks really tense. Then we'll talk about some ways to address some of that.
The classical approach and I had some teachers when I was younger who worked on my wrist this way with me. They would say to lead with your wrist. So if you think about doing an up bow, you know you're down there at the tip, you're going to do an up bow and then you think about your wrist kind of coming before everything else and they would have me play scales and play like a long down bow and then a couple little notes back and forth, just using my wrist at the tip, and then a long up bow and a couple more little notes just using my wrist at the frog, back and forth. Like that it can be a little too much wrist flopping around.
My college professor, who was a very talented violinist and teacher, Lynn Blakeslee she hated this. You could get roasted in studio class for getting up and playing with here leaning with your wrist. She had some very stern words for us if we were playing like this. She felt like your power comes from a unified arm and that you should focus on unlocking your fingers in your right hand, your bow grip and letting your wrist respond. Always You're leading, but always having the wrist just respond to the movement in your bow grip, in your bow hold. So basically the movement in your hand instead of your wrist. So if we're thinking about that and thinking about ways to unlock your fingers in your right hand and then try to use that to loosen up your wrist, you can do finger taps.
I did a little video about finger taps but it's basically putting your bow in your right hand and getting a little stack of books or something. You immobilize your arm and then you use your fingers to just grunge your bow up and then push it down taps on the table. So you're going tap, tap, tap and your fingers are going in and out, and in and out and in and out in your bow grip. If you can't picture it, just look up the video. It's on YouTube. I think it's just called finger taps.
I've had other teachers talk about the same motion. It's kind of your fingers going from straight to scrunched up to straight and the way that it works in your bowing that when you're doing an up bow your fingers are straighter and your knuckles are kind of sticking out and they would call that mountain. You make the mountain with your knuckles. And now you're doing your down bow and your fingers have scrunched up and your knuckles have flattened out and you're doing the planes with your knuckles.
So you're doing your up bow, you're making mountains, fingers straight, and you're doing your down bow, making the planes with your knuckles, fingers scrunched, and it's this kind of people will call it the octopus, because the motion looks a little bit like the octopus. There's a long discussion about it in my Fiddle Studio, Book 3.
And I can, even I'll try to make a video with just an explanation of this motion. But this is the motion that I would recommend working on, in addition to trying to loosen up your wrist. But I think that unlocking your hand is going to go pretty far towards loosening up your wrist and making your bow arm look more like you wanted to look less stiff. I wouldn't go with leading with your wrist, not, I mean. You know there are people who do that and they sound great, but that's not what I was taught. So a little bit about the right wrist.
Our tune for today is Tighe's Reel. This is a single reel. I call these 16 bar reels, half length reels, but the Irish players call them a single reel. Kind of an uncertain key. It's got two sharps but the tonality is kind of up for grabs. I got this tune from the playing of a banjo player who lives around here named Brendan Coyne. Brendan's from the DC Baltimore area.
He's a great fiddler. I haven't actually heard him play fiddle in person. I talked to him a little bit about this once and he told me that there were a lot of really good fiddlers in DC and at some point he decided he would switch to the tenor banjo so that he could be one of one instead of one of many.
Apparently it's fingered the same way the tenor banjo, as the fingering is further apart and there are frets, but the basic fingering is the same. That made me want to try it. Just what we need is another instrument around here On the session. The source for the tune is named as Alan MorrisRowe, who is a Melodion player in New Jersey who grew up in a musical household in County Mayo and collected tunes and songs from family and community there.
If you're wondering what a Melodion is, I was wondering that. I guess it's just a smaller accordion with just one or two rows of treble buttons. So a tune coming to us from a Melodion player and played for me on the tenor banjo, but we're going to play it on fiddle.
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.
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