Fiddle Studio: Gripping the Fiddle (Madam if You Please)

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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 the tune Madam, If You Please, from a session at the Art House Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to talk about gripping the fiddle, so we have one of the topics that dives into the weeds.

Of course I like these topics. This came out of a question from one of my occasional students, Tim. I don't teach any weekly Zoom lessons but I am more than happy to consult, you know, if any of you have questions and you want a lesson, a one-off or kind of quarterly or, as needed, meeting over Zoom to answer any questions you have about fiddling. Or at least I'll give it my best shot. You can always reach out to me on that. My email is meganbeller@fiddlestudiocom.

Tim was wondering about the grip on the violin. So we're talking left hand and you can picture or think about what it feels like the neck of the fiddle sitting between your usually somebody's thumb and the base of their first finger. You know, sometimes more of their hand is touching it. You know you might have your bent wrist and so the heel of your palm is touching the neck too. But that's how we teach beginners. We teach them to have the wrist straight and the neck sitting there between the thumb and the base of the first finger.

I guess I'm already breaking classical violin teacher rules just by talking about gripping, because they can get very particular about language. I like to say holding, so that you're not in any way indicating someone should be squeezing with their hand. I don't think anyone here is going to be getting the wrong impression from that. So a little bit more about the grip that's touching the fiddle. The thumb is always touching the neck. The thumb is on the neck and it doesn't leave the neck. You might move around when you're shifting, but it's always going to be touching the neck.

Or if you're playing really high, it might come around to where the neck curves, or even very occasionally around to the side of the fingerboard. If you're playing at the very, very top of the fingerboard you have very small hands. In general, thumb is going to be on the side of the neck, there Now on the other part of your hand, the base of the first finger. That is a different story. I teach beginners to hold it there and to play with their fingers on the strings. And the fiddle neck is touching both the thumb pad wherever that's comfortable for your hand, and then at the base of the first finger.

Tim was asking about vibrato, because if you've got a firm grip on the neck of the fiddle between your hand there and then you try to shake your arm or your wrist in trying to do vibrato, well, you're going to shake your fiddle back and forth and you're not going to achieve vibrato there. So he said what am I supposed to do? How much of my hand comes away from the neck? Do I hold it like that all the time? That's a really great question.

I have two positions that I play the fiddle with. One is touching both sides of my hand and I use that for any time. I'm playing a lot of stuff in first position. That's fast so for fiddling most of the time, but anytime I'm doing slow music with a lot of vibrato shifting around, my thumb is going to stay on the side of the neck, but my hand is going to tilt a little and the part at the base of the first finger is going to come away from the neck. I'm going to hold my hand a little bit differently, maybe more, a little bit like a classical guitar, if you can picture that or cello, right, I'll really only be touching the fiddle with my left hand, with the thumb, and then whatever fingers are on the strings, so be holding more of and supporting more of the weight of the fiddle with my under my jaw, with the weight of my head, in order to do that, because now my hand is doing almost nothing to support it.

If I'm playing something that kind of goes back and forth between a lot of fancy finger work and, you know, long notes with a lot of vibrato, so I might shift my hand between those positions. But the truth is, if I'm playing a fiddle gig, I am almost always supporting the fiddle more with my hand, using that base of the first finger, and if I'm playing classical gig, I'm supporting the fiddle more with my head and I'm going to be using a lot of vibrato and my hand is going to be in that more classical, opened up position. So yeah, if you're just playing fiddle tunes, you don't even really need to worry about the other way of holding. We're only touching with your thumb. But if you're trying these other things out, like shifting vibrato and you're having some trouble. That is where you want to shift your focus. You know, try some things, see how it goes.

Our tune for today is Madam, If You Please. This is a hornpipe in G on Irish tune, very famously on an album from Julia and Billy Clifford, their album Star of Munster Trio. Oh, and John Clifford, John, Julia and Billy. So they played it on that album with grandfather's thought. People play that sometimes it's two horn pipes together.

It says on the session that they learned the horn pipe from Paddy Moloney who they used to play with in London, and it also cites a version of the tune in the O'Neill's Dance Music of Ireland from 1907. But it was under the title the Rambles of Joe Burke. So folks talk about Joe Burke playing it, but maybe he called it Girl of the Golden Tresses. You can also find it on the album Notes for my Mind by Seamus Connolly. They called it Madam if you Please and we're going to play this little hornpipe for you. Here we go. Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudiocom 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.