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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 Kitty's Wedding 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 starting up after a break, and I don't mean a break like a solo. Sometimes a solo is called a break, but after you take a break from playing the fiddle, some things to think about in coming back to it, returning to it. There's the mental part of this and there's the physical part. So I don't know why another person may have taken a break.
We all take breaks for different reasons. I certainly took a long break the very first time I could, which was actually after my senior recital in college, my senior year, so I must have been 20 or 21. And that was sort of the first time in my life when my teacher didn't care if I practiced. I was already had fulfilled the requirements for graduating and I didn't have any parents telling me to practice and I took a long break. I did come back to it.
I took breaks after I had my children having a new baby and there were a few times when I took breaks, I guess you would say due to depression or grief getting a little personal there, I guess. But often when I've had sort of sharper emotions of anger, I will play more music because it can help me process. But when I have been more in states of numbness or just vaguely sad, sometimes I will just avoid playing or almost just forget about playing music, forget that it's there.
I had students who have taken breaks because playing the fiddle can be frustrating and challenging or because they move or their life changes. They go to college, they start another instrument or have another interest. I've even had colleagues, very accomplished players, who just went on to other things in life and stopped playing music altogether, or mostly If you are coming back to the instrument, and it's been a while. There's a few things that I have done with students who have been in this position.
Some people like to play very familiar music. So whether it's really old if you grew up playing Suzuki, getting out the old Suzuki books and playing really simple tunes that you remember really well from there. Some people like to play out of the hymnal play hymns that they grew up hearing in church, or even just very easy fiddle tunes that they knew and they played when they first started out. It could be that you do something different that you've never explored, whether it's something you're drawn to musically, or new music that's related to something that's going on with you right now.
You live in a new place, exploring the music from that region or, if you're falling in love or falling out of love, looking for music related to that, you could try writing your own music always an option, and some people, when they come back to the instrument, want to try tackling a new skill. It's like this is the time I'm going to really learn to read music or get my vibrato down or learn to do chops or just a new tune or a piece to work on.
I did ask this question on Facebook and, in terms of the mental side, a lot of the advice was to not expect too much of yourself at first. Yeah, just to be gentle with yourself. And forgiving the fiddle can be challenging, because when you're first starting out at something, you're so focused on how to do it that you're maybe not listening as carefully to the sound that comes out, and in some ways that can be kind of a blessing. But if you're coming back to it and you played a lot when you were younger, you probably know what it used to sound like and so you want to be forgiving of yourself if it doesn't sound like that when you first start out.
I find one of the things that goes for me pretty quickly. My right arm stays okay, but my left hand will go out of tune If I take a couple weeks, a couple months off. The longer I take, the more my tuning suffers. I have to force myself to pay attention to it and to work on it, but also just trust that it's going to get better the more I play and I'm gonna get my my tuning back to how I like it to sound In terms of physically starting up the instrument again.
Whatever you could do to manage pain or tension not all of us have this, but many of us do Stretching I roll my back on a foam roller. Gosh, if you don't do this and you have pain in your back, I would check it out. It has been a game changer for me. If I could afford to go and get a professional massage every day or every week, I would, but I can't.
I'm a folk musician, but I have my cheapo foam roller and I lie on the floor and my kids laugh at me and I roll back and forth and make little noises when I find a part that hurts and then I kind of wiggle on that part for a little while. I get a lot of release from that and it really, really helps my back in that I do so much hunching over the laptop and playing violin and driving children around Stuff that puts a strain on my back.
You want to stop. If you're feeling tension and pain in terms of your wrists, your elbows, your fingertips, building up your calluses slowly. Try to be aware of when you're hitting the edge of pain that's not just a little discomfort but something starting to hurt and make sure you stop. Then Come back to it on another day.
I build my hand strength with double stops. This might just be a classical thing, but I'll tell you what Double stops playing two fingers at once, two different strings will make your hand stronger. They're very challenging and they will improve your tuning because they're hard to get in tune. So that is one of the things that I play a lot of when I'm trying to bring my technique back from a lower level to a higher level, I'll play a lot of scales and double stops.
If you're working on your tuning, just go slow and careful. You can use a drone if you want. If you're working on your bow, if you're hitting other strings and kind of squeaking a lot, try using less bow and going a little slower. And if you can play something that you know you don't have to read music for and just watch your bow, see what's going on with it.
Take a look at it, either right from where you are, from your eyes, or in the mirror, where you can see what's going on. Don't be afraid to experiment. If you had a teacher a long time ago and you don't now, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Now there's no one to tell you oh, you have to do it this way, you have to do it that way you really can experiment and try to see what feels good in your body.
There's a lot of different ways to hold and play the fiddle and, even though I talk a lot about how I think the best ways are, there's no right way of doing things. I think the best thing you can do for your body is to try to develop the awareness to feel when something feels good and isn't placing a lot of tension on your body, that's going to help a lot.
Our tune for today is a hornpipe Kitty's Wedding. I guess there's a jig the Ships in Full Sail which is also called Kitty's Wedding. It's not the jig, this is the hornpipe. It's Irish, played in County Claire, also played in West Virginia and all the way up to Cape Breton in Canada.
Wow, it just gives you kind of a scope of the reach of the music from Irish immigrants in North America. It was published in O'Neill's recorded in Off to Dublin album in 1966. In County Claire this tune is normally played third in the set after Sonny Murray's and the Home Ruler. We played it in the middle of the set. We did Home Ruler first, then Kitty's Wedding and ended with Harp and Shamrock.
This isn't really a thing in old time but for Irish musicians and I'm of course still feel like I'm kind of an advanced beginner at Irish music, but there are these sets that people know. A lot of times it was a traditional set of tunes, three tunes normally that were played in a certain area and musicians learned them there and traveled around, and so people just got used to playing these three tunes always in the same order or these days.
A lot of times it was maybe on a famous album for a musician and everybody loved the way the tunes sound on that album and so then they will still play the tunes that way. Sometimes I play one of these tunes in a set and then everyone will just run into another tune that I didn't even know was coming and it takes me by surprise, but it's because that's a tune that everyone always plays after the tune that I was playing.
There are these well-known sets and I guess playing this hornpipe after Home Ruler, which we're gonna do next week, is a really traditional way to play this. Right now we'll just do it on its own. You ready?
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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