Fiddle Studio: Tapes on the Fiddle (Broken Down Gambler)

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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 Broken Down Gambler from a jam in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. I'm excited to talk about tapes on the fingerboard. This is a very Suzuki teacher topic. If you're listening to this and you're a fiddler and you don't know, I'm a fiddler too, but I also was a Suzuki teacher, so I think a lot about things like tapes on the fingerboard. I wanted to let you all know that next week we're going to have an interview with Rachel Eddy, a fiddler from West Virginia, who has lots of cool stuff to say about fiddle and music in West Virginia, so I'm excited to share that with you. That'll be next week in May.

So let's talk about tapes. Tapes are like your training wheels when you're playing the fiddle. You want to have them on A lot of. Of course, these kids learn on those other kinds of bikes that don't have training wheels, but I learned to ride a bike with training wheels, had them on for a while, then I had to take them off. There's three things you're using to know where to put your finger on the fiddle. If you're using tapes, you can use your eyes fiddle. If you're using tapes, you can use your eyes. If you don't have tapes, you're using the feel of what you can feel in your hand kinesthetically and of course you're using your ears to tell you whether it sounds right or not, whether the note is in tune.

Yeah, it's annoying that we don't have frets, but a lot of other instruments need to learn eventually to make micro adjustments. If you're a wind player, you might learn that you press these buttons down to get a C, but eventually you're going to have to have some training in. Is that C in tune? Does it match the piano? Does it match the tuner? Does it match the other people I'm playing with? And how do I adjust my embouchure, the way I hold my mouth on my mouthpiece, to bring the note sharp or flat, to make it be in tune? I mean, the nice thing for them is that you can play for years.

You can just get your instrument generally in tune and play the notes and you don't have to make those very small adjustments until you get to the high level and then you do. You absolutely do For the fiddle. Look, there's just a lot of notes all in one place on those strings. It's a small space and you have to be very exact about where you put your finger to make that string the exact length it needs to be to play that note in tune. You could put your finger anywhere you know, so you've got to learn where it goes and you've got to train it to go there.

When we put tapes on the fiddle for beginners, for kids who are learning, even for adults who are just starting out, we're bringing the eyes into it. Not because I want someone to have the habit of watching their fingers. I I don't think that's good at all. Try to do it, keep an eye on it, especially if you have tapes, but don't get in the habit of watching your fingers all the time. You want those puppies to run on autopilot, watch your bow or, you know, watch the world around you, but you put the tapes on and then you have a visual reference. You put the tapes on and then you have a visual reference to where that note is where to put your finger.

If you do have tapes on, it's very important to have your fiddle be in tune every time you play so that you're still hearing the notes in tune, but eventually everyone is going to take them off. If you have issues with your hearing, you're going, or with identifying the differences between notes. If you're tone deaf to some degree, you could just leave your tapes on forever why not? I don't care, I give you permission. If you can't play and enjoy it without your tapes, you can leave them on. But for most folks we're going to take them off and it could be after a month or two. You could use them for a whole year.

Depends on how long it takes you to get some autopilot going in your hand, because you want your fingers to know what they're doing to some extent so that you can work on those little bitty fixing your tuning motions and not like, oh my gosh, I have to go from a C to a D or from one note to the next higher note. Which finger do I use? You want some of that stuff to be happening on autopilot so you can zoom in on the tuning when you take your tapes off. Yeah, it wouldn't wait too long if you can help it. Once you've got them off, think a little bit about unlocking your hand. I think I have.

One of my recent episodes was on gripping the fiddle. I've also got other left hand oriented episodes you can check out. You want to do things to relax your grip on the fiddle a little bit. That's going to make it easier to fix your tuning, because, of course, if you're going to make it easier to fix your tuning, because of course if you're gripping the neck as hard as you can and you suddenly have to move your finger into position, it's going to be hard to move it if it's pressing really hard into the string. Yeah, definitely just be using one finger at a time. If you've been blocking your fingers, using them all, you know you're playing a three and you've got all three fingers down. You want to transition to just using one at a time. That makes it much easier to fix your tuning.

Play in tune without your tapes the kind of work you need to do to get used to playing without tapes and to get better at playing in tune. It's a lot like working on your tone. I wouldn't do both at the same time, but it's playing slow, very slow, so slow that you feel like you can catch it if things are going wrong. So you're listening to catch it and then you try to figure out how to fix it. And it might be that you slide your finger a little bit up and it was the wrong way. Go back and slide your finger the other way.

But that process of hearing that it's wrong and moving your finger until it sounds right, that's the only way to do it. It's going to be a little bit of time of doing that. You don't have to do it the whole time. You practice, but I would devote a few minutes of practice to it every day until it's happening automatically, make a recording of yourself and you listen to it and you're like that's pretty in tune. Okay, then you're. I wouldn't necessarily work on tuning, unless you're having issues after that. So yeah, putting tapes on and taking them off.

Our tune for today is the Broken Down Gambler. This is the last tune I'm sharing from the jam that I did with my friends back in I think February it was and this was a Skillet Lickers tune from the Milliner-Koken collection. Aha, the blue book. I don't have that book but I look at it when I go to my friend's house and it's got a source recording. Broken Down Gambler. It's from Missouri, one of these Missouri or North Georgia tunes. There's a 1930 recording Gid Tanner. Oh, the members of the Skillet Lickers were Gid Tanner, Riley Puckett and Lowe Stokes, and they recorded it in 1930.

Some people compare it to Waynesboro or Scott no 2. I've heard of Waynesboro. I don't know what Scott no 2 is. Other people think it's similar to Katie Hill. Why, you know? To be honest, I don't really care what it's similar to. It's a cute tune and I was happy to get it at the jam and I'm gonna play it here for you. Thanks everyone, you, you, you, 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.