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 Shippensport from a jam in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to talk about the mandolin so not the fiddle, but there are a lot of similarities and if you're a fiddler or you're learning about fiddle, it's nice to know about the mandolin too, and we'll talk about why. that is.
A little bit of housekeeping first. Our new puppy, Silas, is getting used to the violin. He kind of likes music. He sometimes gets worried about cases. We were all laughing at him yesterday because he was barking at the banjo case, which I don't think was a commentary on my husband's banjo playing. But you never know, I don't think he knew what was in the case. Actually, the dog.
I have been practicing for Clifftop. I will be at Clifftop. If you'll be there, please reach out and let me know. I'd love to meet up. It'll be my first time and I will know a few folks, but I'll be trying to find my bearings. Charley and I will be at Clifftop this year and I am going to enter the fiddle contest. Still need to pick out some tunes.
For that I have been practicing the tune Sweet Milk and Peaches. It's a great version from Naramore and Smith. It's a tune I grew up playing many years ago. Actually, looking around for some other things from my repertoire, sometime between now and August I'll figure it out. I'm sure
I wanted to say a thank you to Kentucky Small Batch Strings, which is a little company down in Kentucky that sent me some rosin and I really enjoyed using the rosin. I'm using their dark variety, so this isn't a paid endorsement, but they did send me some for free for me to kind of try out, and I have enjoyed using it. It's been a nice break from the cheap rosin I would stockpile for students way back when, and so I wanted to say yeah, thank you for that. It's the Colonel Marcy's Bourbon Barrel Rosin. I really appreciate that. Yeah, Ggreg sent me some and I have switched over to using it Works great.
And the last thing is that I will have a course coming out this summer. I've been working on a course in kind of a fiddle class format. The course is called Fiddle for Kids, but can be used for all ages. Sometimes can be used for all ages. Sometimes kids like a format where maybe they have a little less initiative, or maybe this is just what kids are used to. Some people like to decide what they want to learn and then go squirrel around and find it, and some people want to just sit in a class or turn on a video and follow along and learn.
That way I have different parts of my life when I enjoy being a little more spoon-fed or being a little bit more of a researcher. So this is a format where I'm teaching a variety of tunes and techniques and you can just kind of turn it on and experience it. And a fun thing about it is that I'm working with another player. It's a video course with two fiddles I'll be teaching, but a former student of mine who studied with me when she was just a little kid, now a professional fiddler, Rebekah Geller, will be playing along for some of it, and it's kind of fun to see the two fiddles playing together and I think it makes for a nice video course.
So I'll let you know when that's out, but you'll be able to check it out later this summer for sale just as an individual course on my website for $50 or as part of my membership, which is just access to all of the courses that I have recorded and finished and put out through my website, fiddle Studio.
Okay, moving on to the mandolin, I don't play the mandolin. Charley does. My husband and I've had a lot of students play the mandolin and learn the mandolin. The reason that I'm covering it is that it is tuned like a fiddle. It has G, d, a, e strings, just like a fiddle. So if you play the fiddle, you've got a little bit of a head start on the mandolin. It does have eight strings, so it has two of each. Probably most of y'all knew that already. It's fingered like a fiddle same fingering, but it's got frets.
So if you have some experience playing frets you've played guitar or banjo that's going to be pretty intuitive. If you've never played an instrument with frets, it's a nice way to try it out because it'll be the same fingerings that you're used to on the fiddle. But it will feel a little different because your fingers are a little farther apart. You're aiming to push the string down, kind of right behind the fret, but there's a lot of wiggle room in there. It could be right on the fret, it could be halfway between, I mean, as long as the string is touching that fret and has a good connection there, that's going to set the note. It will sound at that note. So you don't have to get your finger in exactly the right place the way you do with fiddle. But you got to get used to having the frets in there on the fingerboard. So that's kind of how it works.
If you're just playing through a tune that you know on the fiddle, you can finger it. The same way on the mandolin and with the right hand you're picking it. The same way on the mandolin and with the right hand you're picking. So have your pick. You're going back and forth plucking the strings instead of bowing them, which is, you know, picking takes a little bit of work to get used to and to get really good at, but let's face it, it's easier than bowing. Bowing is pretty hard, bowing is pretty hard and I speak from someone who teaches it, so I don't think there's too much that's easy about a bow. Once in a while you get someone who's very intuitive with it, but generally it is challenging. So it's nice to use the pick and just pluck it. You get a nice sound right away.
One thing I really like about the mandolin is that you can play chords on it like you would a guitar or ukulele and you're learning the chord shapes for fiddle. I've had students who went to the mandolin and they learned some basic chords. You know a shape or two for G and D and A and then they come back to the fiddle and all of a sudden it's much easier to learn back up to play double stop kind of back up, just shuffling along with a tune, and it's also easier to improvise because you've got some shapes in your hands. You know a little bit closer to what that chord or what that scale, that group of notes feels like and you've had some experience changing chords within a tune. So hopefully you're hearing the changes is what they're called.
People will call the harmonic shape of a tune, the changes or the chords, and if you only ever play melody you might not be aware of the harmonic shape or you might not have a sense of when the chords change, where the changes are in the tune. And learning something like the mandolin and just following along with the guitar player or looking at a tune in the book at where the chords change and playing the chords along with that, is going to give you a whole different sense of the music and of the tunes and you'll start to get into that rhythm backup mode.
So that's what's nice about playing chords on the mandolin is you get a chance to play rhythm if you don't already play guitar, piano, something like that. And they call it rhythm because even though you're doing, you're making the shape of the chord and so you're providing some harmonic accompaniment to the tune. Just as important, or possibly more important, since we often call it rhythm, is that you're strumming in a rhythm and that rhythm is providing the rhythm for the dancing, for the tune, for the listener, for the players.
Really good rhythm with really good time is so fun to listen to and play to. The older I get and the more I hopefully grow as a musician, the more I really love to play with players who are super steady and just rocking on that rhythm, especially if you have a couple like mandolin and guitar, guitar and banjo, uke, something like that. Love to hear a couple of rhythm players together when they're really locked up and synced in. I think a great thing about mandolin is just that with one instrument you can do both right. You can play the tune if you know the tune.
If you get tired of playing the tune or you don't know it, you can play rhythm. So you get to practice both sides of it, whereas with fiddle it's a little less common to be playing back up, or if you're playing something like guitar it's a little less common to play the melody. But mandolin, I think, really goes back and forth very easily, very naturally. If you want to look around for an inexpensive model that'll have a nice sound, you can check out the Kentucky KM-150 or the Eastman 305. I think we have an Eastman.
I think we've had a Kentucky and an Eastman. Different mandolins have come in and out of our lives over the course of the time I've been with Charley. Anyway, check out the mandolin if you play the fiddle or if you just want to check out the mandolin.
Our tune today is Shippensport. This is a fun tune. It's a tune out of Kentucky G major. There'll be a number of G major tunes coming up in the next few episodes. Pulled from a jam where we were playing in G, sometimes played with two parts, sometimes played with three parts, sometimes played with three parts. Shippensport is a town in Kentucky, in the northeast part of the state
Now it's sort of part of Louisville Near the Portland Canal. There used to be falls as part of the Ohio River at that location, and so they would have to take things off the ships and move them to the other side of the falls and then get them back on other boats and send them on their way. So there was a town that grew up around the falls, Shipping Port that kind of catered to the traffic between the upper and the lower Ohio River. It's not really there anymore, but we play this tune generally called Shippensport. The two-part version is played by Doc Roberts and John Masters, and that's what we've got today. We've got the two-part version of Shippensport.
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