Fiddle Studio: The 5 String Fiddle (John Blessing's Delight)

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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 John Blessing's Delight from a session at the Art House Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about the five-string fiddle, but first I would love to reach out and thank a reviewer. Fiddle Fiend One left a lovely review on Apple podcasts and I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. I also have a small reminder that my new course, which is called how to Play Faster, is available on Fiddle Studio. You can go there, you can purchase the course or you can become a member and then you have access to all the courses.

Moving on to the five-string fiddle, here's my secret. I don't play the five-string fiddle. I have almost never. I think I tried one out at a folk festival like 25 years ago and it was fun. Yeah, I don't have experience on the five-string fiddle, but we are in luck because my guest from last week, Jenna Moynihan, has played five-string fiddle for years and years.

So as a special bonus, today we're going to hear kind of a cut scene from the interview Jenna and I talked for a while, but interviews are, I guess for me, they definitely take the most time and money in terms of preparation and all of the work that goes into editing it and then finishing them and hosting them. They're just. They're a lot and I don't always get to include everything, but we're going to hear Jenna talk about the five-string fiddle.

And if you haven't heard the interview from last week with Jenna, please go back and check that out. It was so fun to talk to her. I wish she could be on the podcast every week. We had a great time really, kind of diving into how to find your own voice as a musician, about carving out time to work on projects that speak to that voice. Yeah, we talked. We talked about a bunch of stuff. So, without further ado, here is the five-string fiddle. So, Jenna, you play a fiddle that has five strings. So what are the strings?

Yes, five strings. So it has an E, a, d, g and it also has a C. A C, like a viola.

Yes, when did you start playing five string?

I got that fiddle in 2013. It was new and I never, I have to say I never thought that I would be playing five strings, because four felt like plenty. But it kind of came into my life and now I can't really switch between. It's a little confusing for me to go back and forth between four and five, and it's been pretty fun. I think I've also feel like I've really learned how to play my fiddle. I can't, you know, picking up another five string fiddle doesn't necessarily feel good. This was made by Barry Dudley. He makes both four and five string fiddles, but a lot of five strings near Atlanta, georgia.

Yeah, and how would you use the C string for because fiddle tunes are mostly written with G as the lowest note?

Yes, so it depends. I use it a lot, a lot, when I am not playing the melody, If I'm for sure. If I'm playing and supporting a singer, it's great to be even lower. I also play a melody like down and octave, which we can do on many fiddle tunes but some of them you can't. So it gives me that extra real estate down there that's usually not occupied. What else do I do that? Yeah, I mean when I'm being in a supportive role, which is a lot of what I do actually feel like in a lot of the projects I'm in. It is totally, totally handy. I don't usually play like a blazing fast melody down there, it's just a little clumsy. But if I tune it differently, if I cross tune my fiddle, then also it kind of opens up a whole new world. I think it's some lower drones.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Sometimes that C string will. Just what would I do Make it? Sometimes I think I do some ill advised tunings so I'm like embarrassed to say but yeah, I've made it like a super low, like floppy A yeah, which is you can't really play on it, but you can drone on it. If it's a cross A tune, that's pretty fun. It sounds great.

Tuned up to a D, yeah, those thicker strings are a little slower to respond so it's harder to play just like a real up to tempo. Yeah, it is.

But I love the way it resonates. You know, even just like playing in the key of C never go into the C string, but yeah, it's pretty it is. Do you use it on the albums? Yeah, both of the albums, that's all it is. There's a couple things on there that I tune differently. Yeah, maybe I mean cross A on some of those, or cross G, something like that or both, and then it feels like you're playing like a different instrument. It's like a new lease on life.

So check out the albums Woven and then the newer one.

Yeah okay, indeed, our tune today is from a session my local session at the Art House Bar on Wednesday nights. This was a session led by Matt Mulqueen, who is a local Irish piano player. Yes, there are Irish piano players, it's a thing. And there were two players in from out of town who were awesome. One was Sean Gavin, who was playing the flute. I believe he also plays the pipes, but he had his, his flute. There was another pipes player there, so it's probably good. There weren't two sets of pipes. If you play with your own pipes players, you know what I mean, if you know, you know.

So Sean was playing the flute and he sounded great. He was there with Colm Gannon, and Colm Gannon is a box player. He had a. He had a BC box. He actually had brought several accordions and melodians. We had sort of a show and tell, because there, of course, there are a bunch of box players in Baltimore and when you get them together they love to talk about gear. I thought that was only a thing with flute players, but we talked about gear. Of course.

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I've been learning it, so I found it all fascinating and this is one of the tunes that they led at the session. It's a nice little jig in G, John Blessing's Delight. I did find it on the session you can look it up there and someone had posted a link to a kid playing it in A. So I don't know if anyone else plays it in A, but this kid sounded good. I guess you can play it in A. We played it in G. I'm going to play it in G here.

It's similar to Munster Jig. There's a couple of little shapes in the melody that are different, that make it a little bit unique From that other tune. But Charley and I are going to play it for you now. Here we go, you. You Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddle studio.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.