Faster Isn't Always Better (Gilsaw)

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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 Gilsaw from an old time jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today. I have the topic. Fast Doesn't Make it Good. It's been a month since I recorded. It's very nice to be back what happened in the last month. I almost feel like I need to catch up a little. Our album came out, my album with my husband. It's called Broke the Floor. It is on band camp if you want to buy it or you can listen to it Basically anywhere music is streamed Musically. 

I've been focused a lot on the concertina. I've been playing my concertina all the time, mostly learning Irish repertoire. On the English concertina I need to get an Anglo. I'd like to learn both of them. Charlie, my husband has been practicing tenor banjo. There are a lot of things. I just came home from Fiddle Hell. There's a lot of things I would like to learn to do on different instruments and on the Fiddle. I'm trying to keep my focus to one thing at a time. Set the goal to be able to play Irish tunes at a medium session speed on the English concertina. Then I'm going to move on. I don't know. See what's next. 

This topic Fast Doesn't Make it Good. When my oldest child was little we got them a book called Complicated Doesn't Make it Better, which was a book about design. Getting the hang of speed and how to use speed in traditional music is. I think it takes a little while. I see people go through different phases. In my early 20s I started this Fiddle camp and taught a lot of kids to fiddle. They'd come in, they'd be playing things, learning them very slow, and they would get faster and faster and faster. Basically keep playing the tunes. If they could play it faster they would keep playing it faster. It didn't always sound the best at tap speeds. The kids had to grow up and mature a little bit to be able to see that. I feel like if you look around to other kinds of music, other genres, you right away see that really, really fast music is like it's not the norm. It's not the norm in pop music, it's not the norm in classical or really a lot of kinds of music. I will say my kids listen to one kind of music called Speedcore. It is the norm in Speedcore, but I don't know why people would want to listen to that. It's like when I say please put your headphones on. 

I was thinking about speed because I was walking around when I was at Fiddle Hell to hear all the different jams. I think the fastest jams were the intermediate fiddlers. They were the ones they had gone through this process. That I saw with the kids when I taught at camp, where they'd play slow and then, as soon as they could play faster, they would play faster and keep going, going, going and get to this intermediate stage where they're playing everything as fast as they can and start to pick a variety of tempos, play things a little slower and enjoy different speeds. And I'm not saying you should play everything slow. That can also be a phase I've seen artists go through. 

You know I grew up in the same area as the Van Nordstrand brothers, Andrew and Noah. Noah was on the podcast a couple months ago and I remember when they played fast. And then I remember when they played slow and all of a sudden everything they wanted to do was very slow. It was like, ooh, the slower we go, the deeper and more meaningful the music will be. I mean, the really interesting thing about that was that Andrew came to camp that year and he got the kids to slow their tunes down. You know, all the kids had been playing a while who were getting really good playing really fast. He was like we're going to take some simple tunes and play them slow and the kids were like, well, this sounds boring, aha, well, what can you do to make it sound more interesting? He was really making them pay attention to the rhythm of their bowing and shuffles and adding double stops and making the tune sound very rhythmic and getting the beat in there. And I was impressed because I was like, oh, I don't want to be the one making these kids play slow. But yeah, andrew, he brought that to them. I think it made a lot of them better. 

So if just playing fast doesn't make your fiddling better, what does make it better? That phase beyond everything fast and beyond everything slow, where you're enjoying a variety of tempos. Whatever tempo you are going, you want to have your spot on the beat, whether you're playing at the front of the beat maybe a contradance, kind of syncopated, pushing French-Canadian style whether you're playing right in the middle of the beat or kind of behind the beat, which Judy Hyman and some of the old-time fiddlers talk about playing on the back of the beat. You see that in jazz too. So you're not just rushing but you're really focused on where you are in the beat and kind of sticking right there wherever the beat is. 

I don't know if I'm playing too fast, if I'm moving around on the beat, not hitting it in the right place every time. Also, if I can't improvise, if I want to take a little break or I want to play something a little differently, add in some ornaments that I don't usually do and I can't get them in there. My brain kind of short circuits and my hands won't do it. Usually it means I'm just playing too fast, I'm trying to play it too fast. What I would suggest food for thought is noticing music at different speeds. People think about fiddling as always being this fast thing. Notice the different speeds that professional musicians will play tunes at and how that can sound good, what you like. Go ahead and notice how most music is done at a variety of speeds that are not super, super fast, and then go ahead and try playing at those different speeds. Experiment with trying to make your tunes sound really awesome, really rhythmic at every speed and let your tunes breathe. Basically, when I talk about not playing it so fast that I can't improvise on it, I can't spice it up, add new stuff, I'm playing it slow enough that the tune can breathe and I can breathe while I play the tune. Yeah, breathe, that's another thing. A little bit about playing fast. 

Our tune for today is called Gilsaw. Sometimes I see it G-I-L-S-A-W Because it's like two words. Gill Saw, it's an old time tune from Missouri. This is a D major tune, usually done in standard tuning. This tune comes from the playing of Pete McMahan, who is a Missouri fiddler in central Missouri. You'll find it on. Charlie Walden has a list of a hundred essential Missouri fiddle tunes. It's on that one, Gilsaw. And of course Howard Marshall, a Missouri fiddler researcher, writes about it. He said about this tune that there was a fiddler playing it while busking at the Wabash Railroad Depot in Montgomery City, Missouri, and someone, either McMahon or his uncle, heard it and learned it from that fiddler who was busking with the tune and, you know, asked the name of it and he said it was Gilsaw. But he thought maybe that was the guy's name, was Gilsaw, or maybe that was the name of the tune. Who knows? This tune goes by Gilsaw. It is featured. 

I don't know if you guys know about this collection. Gene Silberberg has two collections. One's called Fiddle Tunes I Learned at Tractor Tavern and the other collection's called 93 Tunes I Didn't Learn at Tractor Tavern. This guy has a sense of humor. So Tractor Tavern was an old time jam in the Seattle area. So these are old time tunes from the Appalachian Mountains originally, and some sort of Midwestern tunes. But they were collected in the far Northwest, which is where Gene Silberberg was playing and collecting tunes. And this book is still around. Sometimes you can find them both as a collection, or you can find one or the other Tunes I Learned at Tractor Tavern, Tunes I Didn't Learn at Tractor Tavern. This one is in the Didn't Learn, yeah. So that book is an interesting resource, yep, and now we're going to play the tune Gilsaw.