Fiddle Studio: Articulation on the Fiddle (Dusty Miller)

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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 Dusty Miller from a jam in Baltimore, Maryland. You a setting of Dusty Miller from a jam in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. I'm excited to talk to you today about articulation. Now articulation is in music.

So I looked up the musical definition on Wikipedia and it wasn't that helpful. They said articulation is a musical parameter that determines how a single note or other discrete event is sounded, determining the length of its sound and the shape of its attack and decay. It's attack and decay, hmm, okay. So on the violin, articulation is, I guess they said in a not very clear way in that definition it's about the beginning of the note and the length of the note. I'm trying to think of how articulation would affect more than that, but it's pretty much the beginning and the length.

The way we teach it to kids, the way I teach it to kids as a Suzuki teacher at first, I just teach them to move their bow back and forth. You know they're playing whatever they're playing. Boil them, cabbage down, twinkle, twinkle, little star their bow's on the string, get them to leave it there on the string, not be pulling it up and off the string and moving it back and forth. Just move it for each note, change directions.

Then I teach them staccato. So that's the first articulation In the classical world. They often use the Italian to refer to the types of articulation In the classical world. They often use the Italian to refer to the types of articulation. So staccato is making a note short, and so I teach the kids to stop their bow. So they're playing and they stop. It's not really that much about the beginning of the note, it's more teaching them to stop staying on the string in between their notes. Then we teach them legato. So legato is a lot like how they were sort of playing to begin with, but legato, making the notes long and smooth and connected.

We get them to slow their bow down to connect the notes even more and try to make it real smooth between the notes so that there aren't any spaces. So now they have, hopefully kind of a regular autopilot way of playing and then they can play staccato, stop their bow, they can play legato, slow their bow down, connect the notes really well. Then we teach them the accent. So that's digging in at the beginning of the note for a very kind of explosive ka, getting an explosive sound.

And in classical technique there are more kinds of articulations. You can get into spiccato and bouncing your bow and all kinds of things, what it means to have a line and a dot. So you've got the marking for legato and for sticcato a dot. So you've got the marking for legato and for staccato. There's sort of a long note with a little space in between. For fiddle we don't use most of that. Yeah, you're not stopping your bow and you're mostly not making it legato either.

There are some fiddlers who play without articulation. I was talking last week about studying up on fiddle contest winners and some of them play real smooth kind of Texas style without a lot of articulation. Bluegrass some bluegrass fiddlers I hear articulation in most fiddlers playing. Nobody actually taught me this about fiddling. My dad, who had gone to Pinewoods and to old songs, learned from some of the old timers there and he taught me to do an accent on two and four. You know (speaking), make those notes louder, make that explosive accent, grabbing the string there, using more (speaking) from some fiddlers.

I did workshops with Brian Conway and Becky Tracy who taught me about ghosting notes. So that was when you barely play a note, sort of the opposite of an accent, where you play a note much less, and so that's a way to bring attention to the other notes. Basically, in a jig you might play dot and (speaking) and those n in the middle, (speaking). But when I started teaching fiddle, especially to classical players, I felt like something was missing from their playing and I would call it being scrubby. So I would teach them to be scrubby. Then if they were playing fiddle and it was really smooth and it didn't sound very rhythmic, I'd say, oh, you need to make it more scrubby. Remember to be scrubby. Use your k-k-k-k-k-k.

What I mean by this is it's a grabbing of the string at the beginning of the note. So a little bit like an accent, but smaller, because it's kind of every note I'm using like a d-d da for a lot of the notes, and those are all instances where I'm grabbing the string with my bow. So I'm not just la, la, la, la, la, moving my bow back and forth, but I'm digging into the string to make almost a little plosive like explosive sound, a buh or duh or cuh at the beginning of the note and doing that over and over again, up bows and down bows.

I'm not using a lot of bow for this and it makes it sound for lack of a better word scrubby. If you're trying this at home, different strings take a different amount of force to get a little consonant on the beginning of your note. So if you're talking about the lowest string, the G string, you're going to have to grab it harder Then for the E string. You don't want to be putting tons and tons of weight over and over again into the E string. It's not going to sound as good.

You use it rhythmically. You use it to keep the beat. You're playing for dancing and you're playing them a tune and you're also keeping the beat for them. That's the whole reason I'm doing it. So you got to use it really rhythmically. It's common to slur some of the notes and it's common to slur some of the notes. So now you've got a few notes that are slurred or ghosted so they're not showing up in your rhythmic pattern.

And then you've got your other notes that are scrubby, or you're grabbing them, getting that little attack at the beginning of the note, and those are keeping the beat for you. Yeah, experiment with that scrubby sound. I don't know, you can. Once you learn it you can use a lot of it or you can just use a little bit of it, but it's a nice thing to have in your toolbox.

This tune that we're going to play today is Dusty Miller. I guess it has a lot in common with Miller's Reel. I play a New England version of Miller's Reel and they have some things in common. I's Reel. I play a New England version of Miller's Reel and they have some things in common. I don't know. The A part's pretty different. So I grew up playing Miller's Reel.

I guess this is you know. I learned this tune from my friends and they got it from the old-time fiddlers' repertory, from a book by RP Christensen Repertory from a book by RP Christensen. He got it. I guess he transcribed it from the playing of Bob Walters. It's a tune in A but I guess Bob played it in standard tuning and there are a lot of versions of Dusty Miller.

Holy cow, if you look up this tune you will find a lot of different versions, but this one is it's close to Dusty Miller. That was recorded for Victor Records on the Texas Fiddler Captain MJ Bonner and Eck Robertson's version, which is maybe the parts are switched, but more similar to Bob Walter's. The one that we're doing switched, but more similar to Bob Walters, the one that we're doing , is from he's from Nebraska, so it's a Midwest tune.

I guess we were playing Midwest tunes that night, so we're going to go ahead and play Dusty Miller . Here we go 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.