Not All Notes Are Equal (La Moquine)

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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 La Moquine by Claude Methe from a Jam at Fiddle Hell. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Our topic today is Not All Notes Are Equal. I've been thinking about this topic a little bit, that in fiddle tunes different notes are played louder or quieter or more or less accented during fast passages. Trying to kind of get to the bottom of some of this in my brain, maybe because I'm transferring fiddle tunes to a different instrument with a concertina and trying to figure out how to make them sound like dance music. Part of it is the fact that not all notes are played equally loudly or accented in fiddle tunes, so it's very different. In classical music or even a lot of times in many kinds of singing, classical violin, there are dynamics. So dynamics is playing loud or playing soft, doing a crescendo getting louder, doing a day crescendo getting quieter. That's not really what I'm talking about. It does mean that those notes are not equal, but your tone, your sound kind of stays stable and beautiful and then you bring it up, you bring it down. You might try to find different colors in your tone, but you're not ever really in classical violin unless you're playing something fast, with accents, which is really imitating dance music. You're not playing passages and trying to make the notes different. You're trying to make them run smooth, whether it's all in the slur or it's all separate notes. You're not trying to make a lot of notes stand out in like a rhythmic, danceable way. It might be more about the phrase, the way that fiddlers do it, rather than these long crescendos and then playing loud and then getting very quiet. And playing quiet is that it's more like a percussion groove. So if you think about several percussionists playing together for Latin music or even one person playing on a drum set but it's several different kinds of drums and cymbals, some of the hits are going to be louder or softer or more accented or just have a different quality, and it's all of those together in a rhythmic pattern that makes it feel usually like dance music. 

Dance music isn't all the same rhythm all the same way. It's a mix of things. And so you hear like the cowbell and you hear the congas and you hear the bongas, and it's the difference, but they're all together and they're moving rhythmically through this pattern Fiddling, playing a reel or a jig, a fast fiddle tune. We're trying to do that. We're trying to play different notes in different ways to make it sound dancey, like a rhythm, like a drum set playing a rhythm. The difference with classical violin might be more like somebody singing a song. 

There's different kinds of singing in Irish music. Sometimes we have a singer at our session who does ballads. Her name is Catherine O'Kelly. She's a great ballad singer. She is focused on the shape and the words and the story but she's not trying to create a danceable rhythm with her voice. But there's another kind of singing in Irish music Lilting, where they're actually singing the fiddle tune using different syllables, trying to make it sound like dance music with their singing of it. They're Lilting, so I don't really scat, but it's a little bit like scatting and I'm not using the same syllable for every note. We actually do that in Jewish music. We go lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie and it's all lie. But in Lilting you use a mix. Just like for fiddling, playing reels, playing jigs. You're using a mix of tones and attacks and dynamic and accented levels to give you that lilt in your fiddling, what I would do, because different styles have very different patterns and ways of doing this. I would say almost every traditional style that comes out of dancing for fiddle does this to some degree. 

What I would suggest is, whether you're interested in Scandinavian or old time or French-Canadian or Irish, that you first go and listen to some fiddlers from that genre and try to hear it. Hear what is making it not sound like every note is the same, like a jig. An Irish fiddler doesn't play a jig (lilting) because usually the first note is more accented, louder, and I'm going mm. Because the second note is quiet. Some people ghost it, basically barely play it, and then ba, because it's sort of a medium note at the end. So that's just the way that I think about playing an Irish jig. 

I would go, you know, listen to Brian Conway, listen to some fiddlers and see, even like see what syllables you might put to their tunes to kind of get a flavor of the mix of accented notes, ghosted notes. We go back to the example of the Latin band, like what the groove is, not the groove that the guitar player is playing although that can be helpful to sort of inform you on this journey but the literal groove of the notes that the fiddler is playing. You know, if you listen to Noah VanNorstrand play, there is a groove usually going on in his feet he's doing foot percussion and then there's a groove going on in the notes of his fiddle tunes so that the fiddle is being used partially as that percussive, like a drum set that can do these different accented notes and make it sound like dance music and not just like a lovely song. I grew up playing in New England and French-Canadian and they have a very syncopated  (lilting). So you get a lot of unexpected notes punching out and so I love that, although I don't get to use the dissonant sound here. So how we play old time in Maryland, like I said, you can listen to the backup instruments to kind of hear the groove they're doing. But you can bring that into your playing a little bit. It's nice to hopefully your guitar player is also listening to what you're doing, bringing that into their groove, so you can get a nice synergy going there. 

You can practice the groove if you're getting a sense of how you want it to sound. You can practice it on open strings or something really easy scales. I spent a lot of time practicing like I teach kids and adults little one string exercises ba-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and I get them ba-ba-ba-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, or putting slurs in and before they try to put it into a tune to get that groove and just having them run up and down oh, one, two, three, four, three, two, one, oh, on every string, just getting it into their right arm on one string, without having all the string crossings and everything to deal with trying to remember a tune. So just on an open string or just with a really simple pattern on one string, getting your groove or your lilt going and then trying to push it into a tune. I actually would say you want like a pretty notey tune. Sometimes I'll use the Dancing Bear, this really repetitive New England tune by Bob McQuillen, because it's very easy and very notey. So if the tune has a lot of funky rhythms it might not be the best one to practice your groove on. You might want something with a lot of filled-in groups of three for a jig or a lot of filled-in groups of four for a reel. So that's a little bit about not all notes being equal. Hope that was helpful If you haven't thought about that before. 

Our tune for today is another French tune. I don't know why I do this to myself with the pronunciation, but actually the tunes are so good that this is the hill I'm going to die on. I guess this tune is by Claude Methe. He is a singer, fiddler, collector of Quebecois music, travels around, plays a lot of traditional music and composes a lot of tunes and his tunes are very popular. This is a really fun kind of French-Canadian house party tune, La Moquine, and it is named for a fiddler named Elizabeth Moquine. I heard this at a jam. 

I'll tell you this story. So this is what happened On the last night of Fiddler Hell. Charlie and I were playing. We left the concert a little bit early because I was actually just feeling really sleepy and it was like dark and with beautiful music and the concert and I was having trouble staying awake. So we left and we went to play a little bit of music and somebody else was playing some music had also left the concert. 

There was another fiddling guitar playing and they were all the way up. They'd kind of gotten a spot away from us. They're in this stairwell, right at that sort of top floor, and the stairwell did sort of amplify what they were doing down so we could, even though they were sort of far away, we could hear them pretty well down on the first floor and they sounded really good. I was like I think that might be Lissa, Schneckenburger and Yann. So we ended up going At some point. I actually just put my instrument away for the night. My fingers were totally done and I didn't want to like be in pain or overdo things and I've been playing all day. So I was like I think I'm done for the day. I put my instrument away. We went up to listen to them a little bit. 

Nicholas Williams came with the accordion and people were joining this little jam way up in the stairwell on the third floor. Down on the first floor they started organizing the big final night Scottish, cape Breton Irish. They had all these players. There was dozens and dozens of players playing all these Scottish and Cape Breton tunes. They were playing a lot of A and Lissa and Yann had been playing some tunes and some funky keys. So there's actually kind of a clash, like if you're standing in the right spot you're getting a lot of like A major C sharps in one ear and then from the smaller jam you're getting flats in the other ear. I think they could hear it down on the floor because they sort of started calling up like can you guys stop and just come join our jam? But instead of doing that, they just started picking more keys and more songs and playing them in F, which is a very clashy key with A, all of these tunes and funky keys and some Berkley kids came and it was a beautiful jam. 

You can see it actually on if you go to like the Fiddle Hell Facebook group. Somebody posted a video and it's me and Charley and we're dancing to this tune that we're going to do La Moquine, which was the final tune they did before they actually did stop and just let the Cape Breton Scottish Fiddlers take over the soundscape. But that F jam was fun and maybe a little bit trying to tease the fiddlers playing an A. Some of it was definitely trying to tease them. Oh, they sounded so good. All those folks up in New England. I just love the way they played. So we're going to play this tune for you now, La Moquine, and I hope you enjoy it. 

Next week is right around the Christmas holiday and I am going to be taking a week off, my first week. I think I've done 66 or 67 episodes in a row. I am going to replay a popular episode from about a year ago that I did about playing in tune. So next week will be a replay and I should be back in January with an interview with fiddler and banjo player Brad Kolodner that I'm very excited about and more topics. Thanks everyone. 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. 

Jamming vs. Practicing (Sleeping on the Floor)

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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 Sleeping on the Floor from a workshop by Genticorum by at Fiddle Hell. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we will be talking about jamming versus practicing.  We are talking about jamming versus practicing. It would be nice if I had someone to debate this with. Which is better, going to jams or practicing at home? I don't, so I'm just going to debate myself. It's kind of what I do all the time. I have at times suggested more jamming or more practicing to students or to people who just reach out for advice. So when I was planning this podcast, I was thinking about that. I was thinking about, well, what are the times when I feel like more playing with other people will be helpful for someone's playing, and when would more playing by yourself be helpful for someone's playing? We're going to start with practicing. We'll talk about what practicing is good for, and by practicing I mean playing completely by yourself and listening to yourself. It doesn't necessarily have to be that you're playing scales and etudes and you've got your metronome on and you've got your drone on. It is playing alone and paying attention to the quality of what you're playing is what I'll define practicing to be. So the big strengths for practicing one is you can take your time. So this is pretty different from jamming, where you have to keep up with everyone else. You can take your time and think through what you're doing. 

I really saw this with one of my kids who thinks through things a little bit slower. They would go to their violin lesson and their violin teacher would be very frustrated that they weren't playing in time in tempo. And she thought she was a great teacher, but she thought that they couldn't feel the time, that they didn't know what the song was supposed to sound like. They didn't know how to play in tempo. My theory of the matter was I mean partly because I knew that this kid knew the music, because my kids hear a lot of music. I mean they're going around humming fiddle tunes and Suzuki songs all the time so I knew that they knew the music. 

I saw them work on it at home and when they went slowly and they would stop to think about what comes next, they could get the next note. It was sort of thinking, and then the finger would go to the spot and then they would continue and it would be correct. But when they were trying to be forced into a tempo they were starting to be a lot of mistakes and it was like, well, why can't you play in tempo? Oh, why don't you know this? Why are there so many mistakes? If you're flailing I certainly know what it feels like to keep up with a tempo Then you may want to practice at home and stop if you're not sure what comes next or if you're having trouble slow way down. 

So it just gives you the ability to slow down or stop to let your brain catch up, and I think it's useful, because if you don't take the time to think it through yourself, you're not like creating those neural pathways. So, in addition to the ability to be sort of dragged along by the group, you also want to be able to do it on your own, even if it means stopping to think about, like, okay, I have to go to this string and use this finger After you stop and think about it and do it slowly by yourself. You're starting to practice that action, practice that thinking process and start to make it more automatic in your brain and in your hand in your playing. What was I talking about? Yeah, so one great thing about practicing is that you can stop and think while you're doing it. Another one is that you hear the honest truth of how you sound. So that's what I wrote down in my notes. It's kind of a harsh way of saying it, but when you play with other people, it can sweeten the sound of what's happening. I think that's great. 

I play a lot with my students, especially kids, especially beginners. I play with them to sweeten the sound, to sweeten the experience, to give them more opportunity to hear the kind of sound they're going for, and just to make it more fun and beautiful for them to play. They're playing, but they're hearing something that's sweeter than what they're producing on their own, because I've been doing this for oh my gosh, like going on 40 years, and it sounds better when I play with them. If you're looking for ways to identify things to work on, you need that for lack of a better word harsh reality. So, whether it's playing completely by yourself and listening to it, that way, sometimes I can't really tell what it sounds like when I'm playing by myself and I actually have to record myself and listen back. So it's sort of an extra layer of detachment and that helps. So whether you record yourself and listen or just by playing alone, you can listen. 

There are a lot of things that will get glossed over when you're playing with other people, but when you're playing completely by yourself and it certainly if you're playing by yourself for someone else, like a teacher or performance or in some way that makes you nervous you will become hypersensitive to your issues, and by becoming sensitive to them and being aware of them, that does allow you to start to make a plan to work on them. I guess the other thing I'll say about practicing is it gives you a chance to noodle around, to try things, to play a song that you like over and over again To do the kinds of things that help you. I use a ton of rhythms when I practice. My poor family they hear me play a reel slowly and then go through the whole thing dump, dump, dump, dump, dump and then do it Ducka, ducka, ducka, ducka, ducka, and they're like, oh, when will this end? Or do very slow reps or whatever is helpful for you that other people don't want to play with you. You can do that on your own. So good things for practicing slowing down, letting your brain catch up. What was the second one? Hearing the honest truth of how you sound, becoming aware of that and noodling, and also doing the kind of woodshed practice, repetition, metronome work, drone work, whatever helps you. That might not be what other people want to do in a session. 

The benefits of jamming. Let's move on to that. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind about jamming is just that people keep going. It keeps going and you have to try to keep up and if you get off you have to jump in. So jumping in is hard and it's a skill, and usually at a jam somebody else is starting the tune and you're going to have to jump in and in order to do that you have to either know how to start to noodle and pick up a tune as you go, or even if it's a tune you know, you have to know it well enough to just come in while it's still going on. If you think about picking up the pledge of allegiance in the middle, you have to know it pretty well to just pick it up from a random word in the middle and then recite the rest of it correctly. So that's kind of what you're practicing in terms of jumping in and then keeping up with the group. A wrong note goes by, you just keep going, you squeak, you just keep going. You're on the wrong string. You realize it. You just keep going. Usually, I guess, when you practice that's probably not the case. So the jam sort of requires you to do that. 

I guess the opposite of what I said about being aware of your sound jamming with other people will sweeten your sound. You know, if you, as long as you're not overpowering anyone, it's going to sound better and it will probably be more fun for you. More beautiful sounding. It's nice to do all the motions of playing your instrument and be listening to something really enjoyable. It's the same thing if you love singing in a choir. I mean, I've played in really big orchestras and there's like a dopamine rush that you get from playing and having your sound join a big, beautiful group sound. It's just great, whether it's a jam or a session or an orchestra concert. 

Jamming also helps you get reps in. I don't think I ever play a tune seven times in a row at home, but I do it in an old time jam. Getting in your reps. That's useful. I'm sure you all know what that's useful for Just burning the tune into your brain, the finger patterns, all of it. So when would you want to jam more? If you need more repertoire, jamming is a good way to do that, especially if you're good about getting your phone out recording tunes. You don't know If you need to work on your memory. Jamming is good for that because you're just like I said, getting your reps in helps your memory. 

If you're working on style, I think a jam is a great place if there's good players and you can hear what they're doing and you're just sort of imprinting. It's like picking up the accent of the language you're learning. So you might go and speak to people in French to kind of practice your French, but you might listen to French radio or watch TV to just try to hear more of the correct accent. That would be like picking up style at a jam. And if you're mostly up to speed and you're trying to get over a hump, I remember my husband was mostly up to speed on his flute reels. He was able to like play along, but not. It was hard for him to lead or start a tune and I suggested I thought that more jamming would help for that. I don't know, it was my take on it. 

When would more practicing be useful? If you want to jump up a level in the quality of your technique or your tone or your sound, you probably need to do some solo playing and introspection, some practicing to do that. If you feel like you're hitting a plateau or a wall in terms of the sound coming out of your instrument or how fast you can play, practicing is going to usually be necessary for that. If you kind of have to know a lot of tunes that you've picked up at jams and you want to fully know them, you probably need to practice for that. If you want to be able to lead more or get up to dance tempo, yeah, I guess for goals. For a lot of goals, practicing is useful, but for a lot of general long term like picking up the accent, getting the reps in, making things into your subconscious so you're not thinking about them as hard, going to lots of jams is great for that. I don't know. If you have other ideas, let me know. I guess there's a comment section in YouTube so you can leave a comment. 

We are going to do. I'll prepare myself for this. I really wish I could pronounce French, especially French from Quebec. We're going to do a couple of tunes that I got from Fiddle Hell, from the band Genticorum, who I'll talk about in a minute. In researching these tunes and even in the names of the tunes there's a lot of French and just admit, I don't know any French at all. I'm sorry, it's hard with specific people's names or to find the pronunciation. I thought about just trying to call Nicholas or Yann and saying, can you help me with this pronunciation, but I was shy to do that. So we're going to go ahead and I'm going to pronounce the French wrong. But we have a goal to learn that. If I had to decide between being able to pronounce Quebec French or just be able to play French Canadian fiddle really well, I'd probably pick the fiddle, that's one of my goals, but first I got to do guitar. 

So this tune the English name they gave us was Sleeping on the Floor and I did see it. It looks like it's a song by La Bottine Souriante, which is a really fun kind of party trad band from Quebec. If you've  you can look up the song it's. They have an album called Cordial, like the drink Cordial, and this song Ma Paillasse Sleeping Sleeping on the Floor. So maybe that's related to pallet, like pallet on the floor, and it has French words, which I will obviously not be attempting. We got it from Genticorum. So Genticorum is Nicholas Williams plays flute, an accordion and piano. Really great flute player. Charlie's a big fan. 

The Fiddler is Pascal Gemme and he is just awesome French-Canadian fiddle with the feet, you know, very fluid, lots of improv, really fun tunes, really fun. Smiley, lovely man. Really great to work with him in fiddle hell. I really enjoyed it. And Yann Falquet plays guitar. Yann, I knew Nicholas and Yann from years back in Rochester. They were in a band called Tuq that would come down and play the contra dance there. I think Yann lives in Vermont now but great guitar player. Lots of different styles. They sing French songs. They play French dance music. Definitely check them out. Genticorum, they're on band camp. They have like their music there and their merch you can buy. 

And the other thing I wanted to tell you is that Pascal the fiddle player has a website that's like an online compendium of French-Canadian fiddle tunes. So there isn't really something like the session for French-Canadian tunes and they're so fun. But you can go to his website, pascalgemme.net, and he's got a whole bunch and he puts up the sheet music and the sound files for free. It's really cool. I founded the website and just kind of had a field day with it. So we're going to play this tune for you and I'll use the English title, which is Sleeping on the Floor. It's really fun. Quebec tune, if it sounds to you a little bit like Cajun or Zydeco, french Fiddling went north and French Fiddling went south. So there are similarities that you hear between the French-Canadian fiddling in the Quebec area and traditional music up there and the kind of French-Louisiana fiddling, cajun, Zydeco from down south, even sometimes the same tunes or the same rhythms that kind of remind you of it. Okay.

Coordinating the left and right hands (Reel de mon Gibard)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller, and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Reel de mon Gibard from a workshop with Eric Favreau and Fiddle Hell.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about coordinating between the left and right sides of your body when you're playing the fiddle. The reason this is hard to do, in my opinion, is that your right arm, your bow arm is doing a gross motor motion, it's moving your whole arm back and forth, your left hand is doing a fine motor motion. 

And if you're right handed, more commonly, it's already your weaker hand. So you've got your weak hand, doing fine motor, and trying to coordinate exact timing. With the other side of your body doing gross motor, it's a little tricky. 

You can tell if it's not lining up, you'll be getting blips and things will not be happening at the same time, you'll get a lot of sort of special effects in here playing that you don't want to be there. So if this is what you think is going on, here are some things to try. 

To start with, I would think about leaving your fingers down. Now are you leaving your fingers down when you're not using them, or always using your fingers one by one. A lot of beginners learn walking fingers, which is what I call it with kids, when they're learning to use just one finger. I tell them it's like walking where you use just one foot at a time. A lot of people use walking fingers, they use just one finger at a time. 

But blocking your fingers leaving them down when you're not using them can help with coordination because you're not trying to get one finger to go down while another goes up. While your bow you know, it's fewer things to coordinate. If you're not used to that, try it with some scales or easy tunes just trying to always leave the fingers down kind of behind the note you're playing. If you're playing a to have your one down, if you're playing a three, have your one and your two down. And just leave them there until you need to move them,

You can practice that. You can do I had a teacher once have me practice tricky part. So you can take a tricky tune or tune with a lot of string crossings or accidentals, and practice it very slow. And stop your bow between each note, get your finger setup that takes some patience. But I did find it helpful when I worked on that. 

A lot of people will say use the metronome, that's pretty straightforward, just start very slow, basically slow the metronome down until they are coordinated practice that get used to that and then you know, start to inch it up. See if you can get up from there. 

I actually will often suggest rhythms before I suggest metronome. So this is for like a nobody real getting your reals fast. It's an age old problem. You take the real you make it sound like a horn pipe. So you turn all the running eighth notes into long, short, long, short, long, short, long. Then flip it and so it sounds like short, long, short, short, long. So you practice both of those. 

And as you get better at it, you actually make the long notes a little longer and then short notes little shorter. It becomes more like a very exaggerated strathspey or something. What this does is allows you to practice very quick changes in your fingers and your bow, but only every other note. Sometimes our bodies like this. 

I have seen these rhythms really improve reels for my students both in playing a reel that you're finding is a little too hard for you and getting your reel faster but keeping it cohesive. Let's move on to our tune. Our tune today is Reel de mon Gibard. This is a crooked Quebec tune in a major that I learned from Eric Favreau at Fiddle Hell. Eric was a great fiddler and teacher. I loved his workshop. He also did foot percussion. He had his board and his shoes. And he did the foot percussion while he played. 

I can kind of do that. It's not, it's not super rhythmic. The rhythm it's a little worse in my fiddle and in my feet when I'm when I'm doing both at the same time, but if it's in a group, I can look like I know what I'm doing. Calling a tune crooked, means that the form is not 32 bars that divide evenly by four. Instead, it's some other number of bars and beats. So this was a crooked tune. 

It's from the playing of Louis Boudreau, who was a fiddler born in Quebec1905. He played the fiddle when he was very young, he had a very musical family and father was a fiddler. And when he got a little older, I guess he was invited to come to a classical school. But he, his teacher, wow. Times never change. His classical teacher was very hostile to the idea of traditional music. And he ended up quitting because he could not deal with that. Yeah, the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

In his adult life. He was a carpenter. But he still played the fiddle, mostly for like family events and community events. He didn't record really a lot or travel, but then when he was in his 60s and 70s, so in the 1970s, he attended a fiddle competition like with friends, just to go and hear them. His friends were like you should, you should get up there and compete. 

So he's in his late 60s. So he got up and he played and he won. And what that led to was during the 1970s, you know, he had this later life career competing and performing at festivals around Canada was the folk revival of the 1970s. It was just the perfect time. Everyone wanted to hear these traditional tunes played really traditionally. So he had a wonderful and very rich later life fiddling career. 

I do not remember what Eric said to us about the name. I think she's a bard has something to do with a whale. And he talked about fjords. So he talked about fjords and whales, and I could not quite understand what he was saying. But when you're playing this reel think about Wales, and fjords, this was a tricky tune. 

Lucky Charlie was in the workshop. He learned it on flute Yeah, afterwards Eric was like whoa, the flute was really nice. That made it a little easier for us to work it out. It's still a still a handful but really fun tune was in my my head all day after I learned it. Hope you enjoy.

Thanks for listening, you can head over to fiddlestudio.com to find sheet music for this tune and more information about becoming a member of Fiddle Studio. I'll be back next time with another tune for you have a wonderful day.