Cross Tuning (All's Quiet)

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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 All's Quiet from the album Broke the Floor by Meg Wobus and Charley Beller. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about cross tuning, finishing up my podcast recording here. There's a lot of Tuesdays in October I've been trying to do an interview kind of once a month, so we'll probably be hearing that. Next week will be my interview with Casey Murray, a cellist who plays fiddle and a fabulous musician with the band Corner House, and then we'll be doing some new topics for November. 

There are a lot of things to talk about with the fiddle, but my kids kind of tease me that my eventually I'll just be writing about like the third finger, the fourth finger, the second finger, because I'll just run out of things to say. If you have an idea for a podcast, something you'd like to hear about, please let me know. That would be great. 

We're going to be talking about cross tuning and this is a topic that I know some things about and I'll share that with you and I want you know if you don't know anything about cross tuning it'll probably be helpful, but I am in no way an expert on cross tuning. I really didn't even start cross tuning my own fiddle until, like the last six months, got inspired to learn about that and get more into it. So in classical music we usually don't change the tuning, it's just set G, D, A, E and because I grew up in the New England tradition and a lot of those fiddling traditions that they use piano and piano is a very traditional instrument for New England fiddling the piano can play pretty easily in most keys so the fiddlers don't change the tuning because they might want to play. 

I mean there's New England tunes in B flat and F and all kinds of fun keys that a guitar player at an Irish session may decline to play a tune in B flat, but a piano player it's probably not too bad. They can do it no problem. So I didn't grow up cross tuning. It is used, I guess, very occasionally in Irish or Scottish. I saw some examples online. 

But really the place where people are most often changing the tuning of the strings of their fiddle and then playing fiddle like that with strings that are tuned to a different set of notes is in old time and the different tunings have different names. You can go and look up the Wikipedia article on cross tuning. It gives you a little bit of an indication. There's one called Cajun tuning Sawmill, I've heard of that. Some of them are named after like what, the, what the letters spell out. 

So if you tune your fiddle G, d, a and then the top string D, so you've tuned your E down a whole step to D, what people call that G-dad. There's a tuning called Dead Man's Tuning. Yeah, cross tuning, cross A, that A-E-A-E tuning. That's the one I've used the most. Calico tuning with the C-sharp. I don't know any tunes that use calico tuning. 

So there are a lot of different ways you can tune a fiddle. I mean there's no law saying that the bottom note of a fiddle has to be G. You just turn that peg, turn it up to A and you've cross tuned your fiddle. So that's what cross tuning is. It's tuning one or more strings on your fiddle to a different note. 

When you hear someone playing with a lot of double stops and drones and a lot of close harmonies, often a kind of lonesome sound, it sounds thick, like there's a lot of strings and intervals that you're not usually used to hearing on fiddle. They've cross tuned their fiddle and it's a beautiful way to incorporate drones into old-time tunes and it's a very unique sound. There's a lot of tunes that you really can't get to sound complete without cross tuning. 

Or you listen to how someone plays it and I'm thinking like well, I could hold my fingers and do all these complicated double stops to try to recreate that, or I could just tune my E down to a D and then I'm going to have that D drone across the top of the of the tune. So if you can't get it to sound right with your drones, you might need to cross tune. It's common enough for old-time that if you hear an old-time fiddler at a performance at like a dance or a concert, they may actually have multiple fiddles there. 

So they'll have a fiddle that's already been tuned up into A A-E-A-E so that they because when you change the tension of the strings tune it to a different note, it's gonna kind of make the other strings on the fiddle go off a little and the fiddle's gonna have a hard time settling into that new tuning quickly. So that's why people will have multiple fiddles for performing tunes in different tunings In a jam. 

Usually everyone just stops and says, okay, no more G tunes, we're changing to D or we're going to A now, and everyone will stop and adjust their tuning. If you're gonna cross tune on a regular basis, you definitely want to have fine tuners and probably one of those little micro tuner guys you know that you put on the shoulder of your violin so that you can just double check your strings. That's really easy to do and then you've got the fine tuners. So you're not always using the pegs, but you're using these little little bitty screws at the top of the fiddle to get your strings in tune. 

So the, the alternate tuning, the cross tuning that I most familiar with, is is that a tuning a, e, a, e, and the violin or the fiddle sounds completely different. I mean, my violin sounds really different, louder for sure. I mean you'll. You'll hear people say, oh my gosh, the. The jam got so loud after everyone tuned up to a because those bottom strings are tighter now and there's going to be a different resonance coming out of the instrument. 

You've got more overtones, the whole thing is going to be louder and more resonant and kind of kind of amazing sounding. But we, we shouldn't. But along with that amazing sound that you're going to get when you cross tune, it is fingered differently. So so don't panic. I mean, if you've never, ever played a different instrument you've only played fiddle and it's only been G,D A, E it is going to make your brain buzz a little to try to play with a string tuned to a different note. 

But it's not rocket science, you know, it's not like inventing the wheel. If you've tried to pick out a little tune on the ukulele or a little tune on the piano, I mean it's basically like that. To me it feels like playing on a slightly different instrument to play cross tuning, and there often aren't a a ton of notes on those other strings. So you just have to get used to like, yes, the first time you play an F sharp with your one, it's going to feel funny. 

I mean, if you've, if you've done a lot of classical, it's a little bit like playing in second position or something. But you get a feel for it pretty quickly and then it's just a different way of playing that tune. And you know what, if you put the wrong finger down and a different note comes out, it's not the end of the world, it's just fiddling, it's just folk music, not too big of a deal, as with all playing by ear and we talked about this earlier this month you want to be curious, play around with it. 

Cross tuning definitely goes hand in hand with droning. So if you're interested in getting this kind of gorgeous, loud cross tuned fiddle sound, you want to practice your droning too. I have an episode on droning. Episode 15 is called double stops and drones, one of my most popular episodes. I also have a whole course at fiddle studio. If you, if you really want to dig in and practice all different ways of droning and and get a lot of tips for that, you can look up my droning course and learning to drone. 

Be careful when you're tuning. You don't want to break a string. Most, most strings break when you're you're turning the wrong peg, you know. So you want your A to sound different, but you're you're turning the D string. You're like why isn't the A getting higher or lower? But you're turning the wrong peg, and then that you can actually break a string that way. So just be careful anytime you're tuning your violin. You don't want to break your strings, since they're a little pricey, I guess, especially if you get the good ones, but have your fine tuners and your little micro tuner and, yeah, look up some, look up some fun cross tunes. Get your drones happening. Such a such a great sound. 

Our tune for today is a jig from my album. This will be the last tune I'm sharing from my album, broke the floor. You can look for it. Look for it online. It's called broke the floor by Meg Wobus and Charley Beller. It's on my bandcamp, megwobus.bandcamp.com, or just look. You know, look in the description of the podcast. Hopefully I'll stick a link in there. 

I was thinking about Irish sessions when I was writing this tune and trying to maybe write a jig that would fit in a session. That would sound a little bit Irish or at least not too contradancy. I'm not sure I achieved that. It does have the key switch at the beginning of the B part which is I mean, frankly it's a very New England, french, Canadian thing. I can't completely shake that. You know, when you're raised in it and steeped in it, I always have that, those New England habits, that they creep in, even when I'm trying to write an Irish tune. So key change in the B parts a little little northern sounding but it's a little bit like an Irish jig. We'll see. I kind of like that. This tune is mostly just a scale. You know you can do a lot with a scale. It's kind of that D-scale and then I just skipped a note, so we'll hear it now. It's a jig. It's called All's Quiet.