The biggest mistake I see (The Birds hornpipe)

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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 Birds from a session at the Art House Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, happy New Year. I hope you are well. Today. Our topic is the biggest mistake I see this month. I'm working on a course for how to play the fiddle faster and this is part of it. One of the areas of the course will also be the subject of this podcast. 

00:55

When I started this podcast it was last fall I was also working on a lot of filming videos for how to learn the fiddle. Why was I filming all these videos? Well, I taught fiddle and violin Suzuki violin for 20 years and I learned a lot at that time about teaching, about violin, about fiddle and fiddling and teaching fiddle. I've recently reduced my teaching load. I don't teach a lot anymore here. I don't have my own big studio of kids anymore, but I didn't really want to walk away from all of that and that part of my life. I did do a lot of filming and I wasn't quite sure at first what to do with the videos whether to just put them on YouTube. What I ended up doing was putting them, organizing them into courses and putting them on a website so that people could take them as courses, buy them and then use them. I had intended to keep creating more courses and put one up basically every quarter. I will say last year my album and some of my writing got in the way of that. It's nice to be diving back into filming. I have a great plan for this course. I have time set aside next week to film it and it should be out in February. 

02:25

A lot of different ways to practice playing faster, and some of them you might expect and some of them you probably wouldn't. For today, the biggest mistake I see. As I said, I no longer teach full time but I can't quite lose my teacher eyes, which isn't to say that if we play together I'll be judging you, but I do notice what's happening with people's playing because I for many, many years, six hours a day, I was training myself to notice what was happening with people's playing and think about it. So this is going to be about the right hand, the bow hand. There are a lot of issues with left hands. I see all different kinds of things, usually what people could work on more is kind of unlocking and developing some softness and flexibility to move the fingers around, and that's actually going to be one of our topics later this month. But the biggest mistake I see is people using too much bow, more than they can control. It's a little bit about keeping your bow straight. It's a little bit about the grip on the string, the contact point, but it's also just about not using more bow than you can control. It's funny. 

03:52

My family has been watching Star Trek, the next generation, and of course, Data, the Android character, plays the violin, and so there's these episodes where Data plays the violin. He's doing these big long movements with his right arm. I mean it's really terrible. It doesn't look like they gave the actor any help at all to try to look realistic. In fact, sometimes they just film him from behind or someplace where you can't see quite how ridiculous the impression of violin playing looks. My kids enjoyed that because they could see how bad it was. The thing that I did notice was that he's doing these long movements with his right arm. They don't ask anyone on the street. You know what's the motion for playing the violin. They'll draw out these lines with their right hand, they'll move their arm back and forth, and that's what everyone thinks of, and those big arm movements are really the hardest thing to play with a violin. A good tone to really grab the string and keep a firm grip on it all the way while your arm moves farther and farther away from the string and then changes directions, even keeping your your hold on the string there, but not too much of a hold, or you'll crunch and then bring your arm all the way back in towards the string, and having a firm contact point the whole time Working on long bows is how you work on your tone. 

05:27

When people say to me why really want a really good, clear tone, like a classical player, or they'll give me names of fiddlers who have a really beautiful tone. Sometimes they have classical Training and I tell them it's not reels and jigs that gives you that tone. It's playing slowly, so whether it's classical waltzes, airs, it's using a lot of bow and learning to control it. But when you're playing a tune up to speed, you only want to use as much bow as you can control so that your bows staying completely straight, it's not moving around on the string, so that you're not getting that bow to string noise entering in with your tone and it also affects how rhythmically you can play. This is also something where I'll see people who's left and right hands aren't that coordinated and it makes their playing sound messy and it's usually because they're using too much bow. So you want to use really small bows trying to play a real or a jig up to speed At home. 

06:37

If you're learning bow control, which is a whole area, you can go nuts experimenting with all kinds of things. Violin players will do like 30 second bows. You know one down bow for 30 seconds. I used to do like a tiny down bow at the frog and then move my bow in the air and do a tiny up bow at the tip and come back and forth and learn to do that rapidly, which requires quite a bit of control with your right arm. Repeated down bows and up bows, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Getting that control that way. Slurring patterns are great for this, even just playing a scale with changing the amount of pressure speed you're using. Try everything at home. But when you're working on a tune, use less bow, use less and less until your contact point is very solid, your bow is very straight, the hands are coordinated and don't worry about using more until you know, until that's really really steady and really how you want it. So that's the biggest mistake I see is just people using a lot of bow who don't have that control. 

07:51

Yet Our tune for today is the birds. This is a hornpipe. I looked it up on the session wasn't the most useful set of comments. There were a lot of people just making bird jokes and then there were people complaining about the bird jokes. It was entertaining. It wasn't that informative. There was a post from Jimmy Keen who talked about recording this hornpipe with Mick Maloney. On the album there were roses and he says that Kevin Crawford learned it from that recording and a lot of other players and that he also liked to play it as a slow reel. He went on that the Galway box player, Sean McGlynn, liked playing it as a reel instead of a hornpipe. You know, some tunes are kind of flexible like that. 

08:48

The tunes for this month will be Irish tunes and I pulled them off from a session I went to over the holidays with two brothers, Connor Hearn and Brendan Hearn, who play cello and guitar. They both play guitar. Connor's a great guitar player. Brendan plays cello and guitar and all the things and Dan Isaacson was there playing bagpipe. Dan plays bagpipe flute whistle has a very long history in Irish music, played in Boston and studied there, now plays in Baltimore and does a lot of leading of sessions around here and performing. 

09:28

Charley and I were the only other folks there so we got to play and hear a lot of their tunes and lead some of our own tunes and it was fun. So the birds hornpipe is a tune I think. I think Connor played this on the banjo. It was played by Noel O'Donohue, a flute player from County Claire, also played by Hugh Healy. Somebody founded in the O'Neill's book as Jerry Dolly's and then it was recorded under that name by the Mulcahy family in their album Real and in Tradition and we're gonna do it now for you as a hornpipe. Here we go.

BEST OF: How to play in tune (The Kilmovee)

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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 the Kilmovee Jig from a session at the Art House Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today I'm going to be talking about playing in tune. Just a little topic for the fiddle. This is for you if you have recently taken your tapes off, if you had something on your fingerboard or if you notice that you play out of tune. I play out of tune sometimes. I don't usually notice when it's happening, but I will sometimes hear recording of myself, even on this podcast, and think, oh, I was playing out of tune. I hope that it's comforting to you that for me, after playing violin and fiddle for 38 years, with a degree in violin performance and 20 years of teaching, I still play out of tune. Tuning is connected to what you're hearing and what you're noticing about what you're hearing and then what's happening with your left hand on the string. There's two different issues there. It's a little easier to fix issues that are happening just with your hand. There's three parts of your hand. There's just where your hand is on the fingerboard. Then there's getting your finger spacing and finger placement correct. Finally, there's the micro adjustments. That's the one we're all still having fun with all these years later. 

Fixing your hand is easy. I call out to my kids One of my kids was just practicing and I just called out fix your hand. Because they weren't listening to what was happening on their instrument and their hand was literally just in the wrong place. They don't have tapes on. So they got their hand in the right place. Then it sounded fine. Make sure your hand's in the right place. That's an easy fix. Getting the finger spacing right this is a second year problem. Oh my goodness, people play their first year. They still have tapes on. They're playing a lot of A major, a lot of high twos, and then suddenly you're in the world of high twos and low twos and your tune needs to move around all the time. 

It can be a big issue with tuning. You'll really want to make sure that your fingers are working independently, only one at a time. If every time you play a three, you're blocking your fingers down your two, just automatically going to that high two spot, oh, you're going to have problems. So you need your fingers to be working independently, you need to make sure you understand what you're playing, what key you're in, and I would say and this comes a little bit from my music education background I studied music learning theory in college. 

Music learning theory is really big on hearing the roots and the chords and the patterns. I think knowing the chords, which is basically hearing the chords, playing the chords or playing the bass line, is very helpful in developing the instinct to put your two in the right place. And that connects to the third level of tuning, even once your hand's in the right place and you're getting your fingers spacing. Basically right, we all put our fingers slightly in the wrong place sometimes and you're going to have to make micro adjustments. On the hearing side of this, you can work on it by practicing with a drone or in unison with someone or with accompaniment I didn't mean the wrong order, but kind of easiest to get it exactly in tune in unison. And then you can go from there to working with a drone and from there to working with accompaniment with like chords. The highest level would be playing with, with nothing else, and and that's that's tricky to stay in tune like that On the other side, out of your head out of your ears and into your hand. You need your hand to be unlocked on the string in order to make those micro adjustments. So if you're gripping the neck, if your fingers are really heavy and locked down on the string, you won't be able to to react to what you're hearing. So those are things you can work on. Stop being sliding your thumb back and forth on the neck, swinging your elbow back and forth. Make sure your arm is unlocked, shaking your hand out, trying not to grip the neck so much. That will actually help your tuning because your fingers will be able to react to what you're hearing. 

All of this is challenging and I would say possibly the most challenging is just paying attention to what you're playing and what you're hearing around you. I mean, that's when I'm playing out of tune, it's because I wasn't paying attention. I find that my students pay a lot more attention to what they're playing when they're not looking at music and reading. I mean it's one less sense that you're using. So you want to have music that you can play without reading it off the sheet. So you're playing it from memory. You're already going to be listening in a different way, listening closer, with a lot more awareness of your tuning. 

This one's maybe not as common, but when I work on improvisation with kids and adults, I find that their tuning improves. I got this from Alice Kanack when you're making up your music, you're listening to it in a different way. You're not just recreating something that someone's given you. You're listening to it as it's being created and you're kind of evaluating whether you like it or not. Well, that goes for the tune, but it also goes for the tuning. So when my students are improvising, their tuning tends to be a lot better. I'll do a podcast on how I ease people into improvising and composing. I think it's really useful. But even if you're just messing around on your fiddle, making up some stuff that you think sounds good, you may find that that has a beneficial effect for your tuning and playing in tune. Good luck, it's a big project Moving on. Our tune today is The Kilmovee. 

This is a jig that was popularized by a player named Dermot Grogan. Dermot Grogan was a flute player and button accordion player from County Mayo in Ireland, and so some people call this tune Dermot Grogan's, but it is, I believe, a traditional Irish tune. Dermot was born and raised in the town Derry Tavrain in Kilkenny in County Mayo and learned whistle and flute from his father, who was a musician. He also played the accordion. He was a button accordion player and as an adult he moved to England and then in New York and he was very well respected musician. Sadly, in the early aughts he had a very serious cancer diagnosis but was actually able to move back to Ireland, reconnect with some friends and play music there in the last couple years of his life. He passed away at the age of 48. 

This tune I found on the session. You can look for it there. I will put my transcription on my website, my blog, and it's also recorded on Brendan Callahan CD where I am, so you can check it out there. Okay, here we go. Hey, 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. 

Joanna Clare (Amédée)

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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 Amédée from Joanna Clare. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking to Irish Fiddler Joanna Clare, but before we start, just two quick things I wanted to tell you. 

One is that I'm finally feeling much better. I appreciated people who got in touch. I did have long COVID for about the last six weeks and I'm pretty much back to normal and hopefully my voice is too. That is good news. The other good news is that I will be at Fiddle Hell the first weekend in November. It's a convention up in Massachusetts and if you're interested, I think they still have tickets. I would check it out. If you want to hear more about Fiddle Hell, I did post about it last year after I went. That is episode 14. I think it's called going to Fiddle Hell. 

Joanna Clare is an Irish Fiddler and a professional musician and teacher in Baltimore. She performs and she competes on the fiddle. She plays in sessions and for dances. She composes fiddle tunes and also teaches fiddle and violin. Joanna, welcome, I'm so glad you could make it. (Thanks so much for having me, Meg). It's funny, Joanna and I both live in Baltimore now and we used to both live in Rochester, new York. I know, Joanna, that you started learning the violin with the Suzuki method when you were pretty young. I did too. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about starting the violin in Rochester and, I guess, how you got from there into fiddling? 

Joanna Clare

Yeah. So I went to a concert of child violinists when I was about two. My mom took me to an Ithaca Talent Education concert. I ended up being so infatuated with the little music students who are just a bit older than me that I got out of my chair and jumped up and ran up to the stage and would have gotten on if my mom hadn't caught me soon enough. So that was the beginning force that propelled me to learn the violin. I then started playing when I was three at the Hochstein School and I had a really good time with it. 

I grew up listening to all these different Irish albums because my mom was influenced by the late Mick Maloney when she was at University of Pennsylvania and he was at University of Pennsylvania. I grew up listening to albums like Three Way Street. There were a few Cherish the Ladies albums, a few Chieftain's albums, Eileen Ivers, Seamus Connolly , Liz Carroll. I kind of listened to a bunch of the greats from a young age and took a liking to it and started learning tunes from albums when I was about seven. I actually my first fiddle teacher was Dick Bolt when I was about five. I don't know if he knew of Dick in Rochester. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, I did know Dick, when I lived there and I taught fiddle. Yeah, he was a character? 

Joanna Clare

Yeah for sure. And his wife. I remember that she was big into knitting, doing some sort of fabric thing, and I loved her wool. I was just so obsessed with it Like I was almost more interested in that than fiddle at that age. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Five is pretty young, yeah, so I understand that we almost crossed paths, because I started working just out of college at a different Suzuki School in Rochester the Kanack School and teaching fiddle there and started a fiddle camp and then, I think after I moved down to Baltimore you went to that school right and the camp and learned some fiddling there. 

Joanna Clare

Yeah, the Kanack School. I took group fiddling lessons with Liz Hirshhorn, and then I also took improv lessons with Alice, so that was really great. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Oh my gosh, Alice is the best. And how about after that? 

Joanna Clare

I started taking lessons with Brian Conway when I was 11. So by that point I had moved to Syracuse. It's kind of funny how I started with him. I was also an Irish dancer growing up and I guess I still dance because I performed at the Maryland Folk Fest in dance as well as fiddle last weekend. But as a 10 year old I was going to feises, Feshanna and competing in Irish dance and they would also have music competitions there sometime. 

So at Rockland County Feish, when I was 10, I met Maeve Flanagan, who said to my mother she said you know, you should really go to my uncle, Brian Conway, and I think at the time her mom, Rose Flanagan, wasn't teaching online and I lived in Syracuse and Brian lived in White Plains and so it was prudent to take lessons online as opposed to go in person. But about three quarters of a year after that my mom finally reached out to Brian and I started lessons with him and I actually took lessons with him for about nine years, so into college. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, Brian Conway is just a lion in the Irish fiddle scene. For people who aren't familiar with him, he's been one of the top Irish fiddlers for many, many years. When I was Joanna's age, I was able to work with him in workshops and he completely opened my eyes to understand a lot more about how I was playing jigs and how I wanted to play jigs, so I'm forever grateful to him for that. What was it like working with him for so many years? 

Joanna Clare

Brian is a real stickler and you play a role that's a little sloppy and he'll stop you and say, hey, do that again and make it cleaner. And why don't we change this bowing so that it sounds better and that you're following a few standard rules, which are you slur into the downbeat and you slur from lower string to higher string. Those are like two, like pretty major rules or guidelines that he has with slurring. So a lot of it was being really intentional about slurring and then being really intentional about ornamentation, borrowing ornamentation from the greats like Michael Coleman and Andy McGann that came before us, but also coming up with our own ornamentation variation. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, so kind of developing your own style, and you also write tunes yourself. You write tunes in the Irish style. When did you start doing that? 

Joanna Clare

I started writing tunes when I was 14 and actually my first tune, which is called the Mouse Catcher, named after my mom, my dad and my cat, who all, in various ways, caught mice in a week apart from each other. Yeah, so the Mouse Catcher was the first reel that I wrote 2014 and I competed with it and actually went over to Ireland and played it there in the newly composed tune competition. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Can I ask you about competing? My understanding, the dance competitions are Feis, called a Feis, and then the music competitions are called a Fleadh . Yes, it's a completely different world from the New England contra dance world that I grew up with, because competing is a big thing in Irish music and they have flaws in the US and they have them in Ireland. How does it work when you go and compete with the categories and everything? 

Joanna Clare

So there's age groups, so under 12, 12 to 15, 15 to 18 and over 18. And then there's different instruments like fiddle flute, and then there are like fun ones, like the newly composed tune competition, which is open to all ages and there's not different age groups. So you go to Parsippany, the Hilton in Parsippany. If you get in the top two in your competition, then you qualify to go over to the All Ireland Fla Keele, which this past year was in Mullingar and I was fortunate enough to attend that. But it moves around from city to city and so different parts of Ireland get the economic benefit of having the Fleadh there. 

Meg Wobus Beller

So when you see in someone's bio like All Ireland, this or All Ireland, that's because they were competing in that national Fleadh (usually 

Joanna Clare

Yeah, and it's a pretty big honor to get a All Ireland championship to win the Fleadh.  All right. This person is like really great. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, how do you? What's it? Kind of like the mindset, Because you also have performed for dances and for live dances and you play in sessions and stuff. So how is it different the competition scene? 

Joanna Clare

I much prefer sessions and performances and dances to competitions. I think that it's a setting where the music is greater than the person and competitions are very eco-centric. And then Irish music is the music of a people and it's not really. It wasn't really made to be competed with. The competitions only started because Comholtas wanted to preserve Irish music and get people excited about it, which that does happen and I was really motivated to do the Fleadh Cheoil competitions because of Eileen Ivers having won All Ireland Fleadh , I was like, oh, I want to be just like her and so, um, yeah, so I started competing. I think it's also much more important for kids to compete than adults. Like I don't know if I'm going to compete for very long. I'm more internally motivated than I was when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I was very externally motivated, and so competitions were really good for getting me to practice. But now I care a lot more about practicing and playing music with people and less about whether I get external validation for that. 

Meg Wobus Beller

That's so interesting, thank you. Speaking of playing music with other people, I know you moved down to Baltimore for college and you play with a lot of great musicians down here. What was? It like, how did you kind of connect with them moving to a new city and getting into the new scene? 

Joanna Clare

Well, Brian Conway, my teacher, and Billy McComisky, who's the biggest of the biggest down here and the best of the best, are in a band together named Pride of New York, and so they know each other quite well. And when I moved down, I think what happened was Brian kind of said to Billy hey, Joanna's coming down, take care of her. And so I get the special treatment from Billy. He's kind of like a dad to me and he really helped me grow as a musician in many ways. I think that one of the big things was sending tunes back and forth that I had written to him during the pandemic. 

We really kept in touch and I was up in Syracuse and he was obviously down here in Baltimore but we would call all once in a while and it made me feel still connected to the music scene in Baltimore. But yeah, I mean knowing Billy and then just going out to Cafe Hon when that was the thing when there were sessions there, and going to the Trad Fest and being available for performances and stuff like that. 

Meg Wobus Beller

And those tunes that you were writing and a lot of the players that you connected with are on your album. Joanna has an album called Keep the Candle Burning, is that right? 

Joanna Clare

Yeah, To Keep the Candle Burning. Yeah. So I included a bunch of musicians, a few of which are from the Baltimore area. So we have Billy McComisky, Sean McComisky, Myron Bretholz, Matt Mulqueen, Josh Dukes, Brian Conway, Catherine O'Kelly, and Liam Presser on the album. Yeah, it was really fun to collaborate with all those musicians.

Meg Wobus Beller

Where can people go online to hear you? 

Joanna Clare

JoannaClaire.com. That's the only place where my album is currently available. It's for sale as a CD and for sale as an MP3. And it might be on digital platforms soon. But CD Baby is taking forever to send out the album, so it's been actually multiple months of me trying to get my album out on platforms. 

Meg Wobus Beller

It's so annoying and you get nothing for it. I mean, people get to hear you. We have Joanna's album. It's really good. It's one of our rotations in the car. It's one of those five desks that stays in there. I know you're doing some teaching in Baltimore and you also have a workshop you're doing. Do you want to talk about how people can learn from you, learn with you? 

Joanna Clare

So I teach at my home in Baltimore and I also teach for the Baltimore Music Company and the Baltimore Irish Music School. I teach privately. People of all ages come to me. I start kids as young as three, but kids that are three have to take in person. Older students can take online and I teach Suzuki violin as well as Irish fiddle. And then I'm also this weekend, October 1st 2023, I'm starting to teach a tune, teach workshop and low session. That should be really fun and that's at Racer's Cafe in Parkville from five to six. Anybody's welcome there. Bring any instrument, any level, although it's geared towards beginners and lower level intermediate students. 

Meg Wobus Beller

So people can go to your website, Joanna Clare, and hear your music and also maybe find you on Facebook or Instagram to get updates about your teaching. Yes, well, our tune for today is one of Joanna's tunes. Can you say the name? I know it's a hornpipe, Amédée Amédée, and this is a hornpipe in G Minor that you wrote. Can you tell us about? 

Joanna Clare

it, so I wrote this tune when I was 17. I was a senior in high school and my violin was getting seams opened all the time, and so it was one of these times where I had a loaner violin from Sullivan Violins. Were you aware of Sullivan Violins in? 

Meg Wobus Beller

Rochester. When you lived there, I got my violins from Tom Hosmer in Syracuse. I grew up in Syracuse. 

Joanna Clare

Oh yeah, I know, Tom, pretty well what a small world this is. So I had a loaner violin from Ken Sullivan and it left a like a rash on my neck. Oh no, something about the varnish I was allergic to, or something like that. I figured I would write a tune, after this silly violin that, you know, left a itchy rash on my neck. The maker of the violin was Amédée. I used that to name the tune. 

Meg Wobus Beller

A sinister story for this tune, yeah. 

Joanna Clare

Okay, and this tune actually won the newly composed tune competition in Parsippany. I was actually at my high school graduation and I had sent it over to Andrew Caden, who's from Bethesda, to learn and play at the competition. And all of a sudden I had just graduated and I get this picture of a medal on Facebook Messenger and the tune had won. So even though I wasn't at the qualifying competition, I still went over to Ireland and played in the Island. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Awesome. Joanna Clare, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We're going to share this tune and be sure to everyone. Look her up on Facebook and on Instagram and check out our website, joannaclaire.com. 

Thank you so much, Meg.

Making an album (The Home Ruler)

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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 Home Ruler from a session at the ArtHouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about making an album. I have been thinking about this a lot. This isn't really about making a big studio album where people are helping you, but this is how I made an album as an independent musician. The first thing you need for an album is a bunch of music that you play well, that is, you know, in some way unique to you, and hopefully you have a lot of music that you enjoy playing, that you want to share more than enough from an album. 

You get to pick out what you want to record on the album and start to arrange it. I would say arranging is the hardest part. It's hard to say because I hadn't made an album in a while and I kind of found it all to be the hardest part. Arranging was surprisingly challenging for me. Maybe it's easier if you don't do it with your husband. It was challenging, you know. 

We had to decide exactly how many times we were going to play a tune and how we were going to start it, the introduction, and how we're going to end it or put a tag on it, how to change it. Basically, each time we played it, what we were going to add or take away, and with our album we did sets of tunes. So we also had to decide how we were going to transition into the next tune. 

But even with songs, you know, you have to decide with each verse and chorus how you're going to change the accompaniment or do things differently, and everything needs to be planned out pretty carefully beforehand. Yeah, arranging is a lot of work. We had someone to help us with us. This was the biggest job that our producer did was to help us arrange the music. 

Once you have the music all arranged the way you weren't going to play it on the album and we had all the arrangements written down, then we had to practice them. Ideally, you're practicing it under some kind of pressure, because when you're in the studio faced with the microphone, you feel a little nervous. I was surprised about that. We did a couple performances where we performed basically almost the whole album just to practice the arrangements and see what went well and what still needed work. I practiced a lot with the metronome because we used a click track when we recorded. 

When we got into the studio we were at a really nice homey kind of studio in an old church in Ithaca called Electric Wilberland and by the time we did some small talk and caught up with the sound engineer and had coffee and bagels and there was a bit of fussing with different microphones trying to get the good basic sound. And then it was like okay, you ready to do your first take and I would say it was a little nerve-wracking even for someone who you know I record for this podcast. 

We don't we just record here in our home after we practice for a day or two, so it's nothing fancy. But I also have performed a lot throughout my life but I was surprised at how nervous I was. You know that you can record it again if you make a mistake, but it does kind of rattle you and you know they ask you to keep playing through the whole thing to try to get big chunks of music that sound good that then can be stitched together later to make a whole clean track. But after you do a big screw-up can be tricky to get your mind back on track and do an awesome performance. I don't know. 

I think I got better at it. We tended to play the best the third time. We would do three takes and the third take was often the best, and so most of the time we used the third take and then, if there was a mistake, something went wrong, we would patch in from one of the other takes. Hopefully there was that spot went better One of the other times. 

A few times we tried to do a fourth or a fifth take and by that time we were so tired and cross-eyed that it didn't usually get better, started sounding worse. So there's all this patching that you do where you are listening in the studio and then you say like, uh-oh, what was that note? It was really flat there, I didn't hit that right. And then they go and look and the other takes to see if you made it sound better. And it's just a miracle how they can patch it all together when you're hearing these people's albums and everything sounds absolutely perfect. Uh-uh-uh, a lot of that has been constructed. It's impressive. 

At some point we stopped trying to make it perfect. I don't mind a little bit of a rougher sound To me a little too perfect, can make it sound a little less like a trad sort of folk music to me. I don't like it a little rougher around the edges. But yeah, takes, takes, takes and then putting them all together and if your arrangement is really solid then hopefully you did something similar so you can figure it out when you're sitting there on the couch and listening and listening, and listening. Yeah, it's a little tricky. Did that sound good? Wait, can you play the other take? Did that sound better? And you know you hear listening. 

We had to kind of figure out what kind of reverb we wanted to put on the sound, what we wanted the sound to be. I kind of hate all reverbs, so I imagine I was a little bit difficult to work with, but there's a lot of work there. Then we came home so we basically got all that done in Ithaca. We're home now and there's still some finishing up with the mastering and finishing everything and then we'll start uploading the tracks to Bandcamp and putting it out into the world. 

You know I've self-published several books and it did remind me of writing a book in that it felt like a process you could get better at. I see why my friends who have recorded on five albums or for years and years and have eight or 10 albums where they get better and better, because you can work really hard and it can still not come out exactly how you want it. But I hope I'll have a chance to make some more albums because I do think I learned a lot from this process this time and just like I felt like it got easier for me to write and publish books the more I did, I imagine it's kind of the same for working on an album. 

Yeah, so the tune for today is the Home Ruler, and this is another hornpipe, the one that pairs with Kitty's Wedding, which we did last week. It's a tune by Frank McCallum. So Frank McCallum was was a fiddle player and accordion player who, I believe, who lived in Ireland, also had a passion for gardening and bees and old clocks. He was a member of a local pipes band. 

When he got older he mostly focused on the fiddle and the accordion and the discussion about this tune is you know, people wondered if it was connected to the politics of Ireland. The Home Ruler, the story goes, is that he named it after his wife the home ruler after his wife, and it was just a little bit of a joke that it also kind of referred to this political situation in Ireland. 

Matt Malloy has a slow tempo version of this played on the B-flat flute on the Chieftain's album Boil the Breakfast Early, played as kind of a slow march, which sounds really nice, over a sort of cello drone accompaniment. Also versions recorded by Noel Hill and Tony Linnane and Sean Ryan, so you can check out this tune. We're going to play it for you right now. The Home Ruler. We'll play it as a faster hornpipe. This is how we did it at the session. Great. 

Starting after a break (Kitty's Wedding)

 Listen to the Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple or on Spotify! 

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 Kitty's Wedding from a session at the ArtHouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about starting up after a break, and I don't mean a break like a solo. Sometimes a solo is called a break, but after you take a break from playing the fiddle, some things to think about in coming back to it, returning to it. There's the mental part of this and there's the physical part. So I don't know why another person may have taken a break. 

We all take breaks for different reasons. I certainly took a long break the very first time I could, which was actually after my senior recital in college, my senior year, so I must have been 20 or 21. And that was sort of the first time in my life when my teacher didn't care if I practiced. I was already had fulfilled the requirements for graduating and I didn't have any parents telling me to practice and I took a long break. I did come back to it. 

I took breaks after I had my children having a new baby and there were a few times when I took breaks, I guess you would say due to depression or grief getting a little personal there, I guess. But often when I've had sort of sharper emotions of anger, I will play more music because it can help me process. But when I have been more in states of numbness or just vaguely sad, sometimes I will just avoid playing or almost just forget about playing music, forget that it's there. 

I had students who have taken breaks because playing the fiddle can be frustrating and challenging or because they move or their life changes. They go to college, they start another instrument or have another interest. I've even had colleagues, very accomplished players, who just went on to other things in life and stopped playing music altogether, or mostly If you are coming back to the instrument, and it's been a while. There's a few things that I have done with students who have been in this position. 

Some people like to play very familiar music. So whether it's really old if you grew up playing Suzuki, getting out the old Suzuki books and playing really simple tunes that you remember really well from there. Some people like to play out of the hymnal play hymns that they grew up hearing in church, or even just very easy fiddle tunes that they knew and they played when they first started out. It could be that you do something different that you've never explored, whether it's something you're drawn to musically, or new music that's related to something that's going on with you right now. 

You live in a new place, exploring the music from that region or, if you're falling in love or falling out of love, looking for music related to that, you could try writing your own music always an option, and some people, when they come back to the instrument, want to try tackling a new skill. It's like this is the time I'm going to really learn to read music or get my vibrato down or learn to do chops or just a new tune or a piece to work on. 

I did ask this question on Facebook and, in terms of the mental side, a lot of the advice was to not expect too much of yourself at first. Yeah, just to be gentle with yourself. And forgiving the fiddle can be challenging, because when you're first starting out at something, you're so focused on how to do it that you're maybe not listening as carefully to the sound that comes out, and in some ways that can be kind of a blessing. But if you're coming back to it and you played a lot when you were younger, you probably know what it used to sound like and so you want to be forgiving of yourself if it doesn't sound like that when you first start out. 

I find one of the things that goes for me pretty quickly. My right arm stays okay, but my left hand will go out of tune If I take a couple weeks, a couple months off. The longer I take, the more my tuning suffers. I have to force myself to pay attention to it and to work on it, but also just trust that it's going to get better the more I play and I'm gonna get my my tuning back to how I like it to sound In terms of physically starting up the instrument again. 

Whatever you could do to manage pain or tension not all of us have this, but many of us do Stretching I roll my back on a foam roller. Gosh, if you don't do this and you have pain in your back, I would check it out. It has been a game changer for me. If I could afford to go and get a professional massage every day or every week, I would, but I can't. 

I'm a folk musician, but I have my cheapo foam roller and I lie on the floor and my kids laugh at me and I roll back and forth and make little noises when I find a part that hurts and then I kind of wiggle on that part for a little while. I get a lot of release from that and it really, really helps my back in that I do so much hunching over the laptop and playing violin and driving children around Stuff that puts a strain on my back. 

You want to stop. If you're feeling tension and pain in terms of your wrists, your elbows, your fingertips, building up your calluses slowly. Try to be aware of when you're hitting the edge of pain that's not just a little discomfort but something starting to hurt and make sure you stop. Then Come back to it on another day. 

I build my hand strength with double stops. This might just be a classical thing, but I'll tell you what Double stops playing two fingers at once, two different strings will make your hand stronger. They're very challenging and they will improve your tuning because they're hard to get in tune. So that is one of the things that I play a lot of when I'm trying to bring my technique back from a lower level to a higher level, I'll play a lot of scales and double stops. 

If you're working on your tuning, just go slow and careful. You can use a drone if you want. If you're working on your bow, if you're hitting other strings and kind of squeaking a lot, try using less bow and going a little slower. And if you can play something that you know you don't have to read music for and just watch your bow, see what's going on with it. 

Take a look at it, either right from where you are, from your eyes, or in the mirror, where you can see what's going on. Don't be afraid to experiment. If you had a teacher a long time ago and you don't now, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Now there's no one to tell you oh, you have to do it this way, you have to do it that way you really can experiment and try to see what feels good in your body. 

There's a lot of different ways to hold and play the fiddle and, even though I talk a lot about how I think the best ways are, there's no right way of doing things. I think the best thing you can do for your body is to try to develop the awareness to feel when something feels good and isn't placing a lot of tension on your body, that's going to help a lot. 

Our tune for today is a hornpipe Kitty's Wedding. I guess there's a jig the Ships in Full Sail which is also called Kitty's Wedding. It's not the jig, this is the hornpipe. It's Irish, played in County Claire, also played in West Virginia and all the way up to Cape Breton in Canada. 

Wow, it just gives you kind of a scope of the reach of the music from Irish immigrants in North America. It was published in O'Neill's recorded in Off to Dublin album in 1966. In County Claire this tune is normally played third in the set after Sonny Murray's and the Home Ruler. We played it in the middle of the set. We did Home Ruler first, then Kitty's Wedding and ended with Harp and Shamrock. 

This isn't really a thing in old time but for Irish musicians and I'm of course still feel like I'm kind of an advanced beginner at Irish music, but there are these sets that people know. A lot of times it was a traditional set of tunes, three tunes normally that were played in a certain area and musicians learned them there and traveled around, and so people just got used to playing these three tunes always in the same order or these days. 

A lot of times it was maybe on a famous album for a musician and everybody loved the way the tunes sound on that album and so then they will still play the tunes that way. Sometimes I play one of these tunes in a set and then everyone will just run into another tune that I didn't even know was coming and it takes me by surprise, but it's because that's a tune that everyone always plays after the tune that I was playing. 

There are these well-known sets and I guess playing this hornpipe after Home Ruler, which we're gonna do next week, is a really traditional way to play this. Right now we'll just do it on its own. You ready?

 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. 

Flexible Right Wrist (Tighe's Rare)

 Listen to the Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple or on Spotify!
 

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 Tighe's Rare from a session at the ArtHouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about the flexible right wrist. 

I don't know if I sound funny. I have unfortunately been sick for several weeks. I am getting better. I kept putting off recording until my voice was back to its usual, but it's been slow going. So we're moving ahead with the voice we have and the horn practicing next door and the drilling outside. I just need to record. Here we go. Does your wrist need to be flexible and why? And we're going to talk about how to work on getting a looser wrist or a looser bow grip. 

First, let's just establish having a loose right wrist for your bow arm is about getting your bow straight, assuming we all agree that it's useful to have a straight bow. I did talk a lot about the straight bow and how that affects your tone in episode 31, the podcast called how to Improve your Tone. 

But when a beginner starts playing violin or fiddle, their elbow is bent and they're often swinging their entire right arm back and forth and their violin is holding steady in one place but their whole bow arm is swinging, so the bow is not staying straight and you get all the problems that come along with that. So first we get them to open up from their elbow. So now their forearm is coming back and forth, they're opening from their elbow, but if their wrist is still very straight and locked, they're still going to be some swinging back and forth, some change in the angle of the bow that will affect your tone, because the bow won't be staying very straight and stuck onto the string. 

Now if you're just playing in the middle of the bow, it might not make much of a difference, because you see the effects a lot more at the tip or the frog. Eventually you're going to want to play something that uses long bows and you're going to need some flexibility in your wrist and your hand to accommodate those long bows. And I would say that a lot of speed and dexterity in your bowing on the fiddle does come from being loose. So if you can feel that your wrist is tense, if you watch a video, this happens to a lot of people and you say, oh wow, my right arm looks really tense. Then we'll talk about some ways to address some of that. 

The classical approach and I had some teachers when I was younger who worked on my wrist this way with me. They would say to lead with your wrist. So if you think about doing an up bow, you know you're down there at the tip, you're going to do an up bow and then you think about your wrist kind of coming before everything else and they would have me play scales and play like a long down bow and then a couple little notes back and forth, just using my wrist at the tip, and then a long up bow and a couple more little notes just using my wrist at the frog, back and forth. Like that it can be a little too much wrist flopping around. 

My college professor, who was a very talented violinist and teacher, Lynn Blakeslee she hated this. You could get roasted in studio class for getting up and playing with here leaning with your wrist. She had some very stern words for us if we were playing like this. She felt like your power comes from a unified arm and that you should focus on unlocking your fingers in your right hand, your bow grip and letting your wrist respond. Always You're leading, but always having the wrist just respond to the movement in your bow grip, in your bow hold. So basically the movement in your hand instead of your wrist. So if we're thinking about that and thinking about ways to unlock your fingers in your right hand and then try to use that to loosen up your wrist, you can do finger taps. 

I did a little video about finger taps but it's basically putting your bow in your right hand and getting a little stack of books or something. You immobilize your arm and then you use your fingers to just grunge your bow up and then push it down taps on the table. So you're going tap, tap, tap and your fingers are going in and out, and in and out and in and out in your bow grip. If you can't picture it, just look up the video. It's on YouTube. I think it's just called finger taps. 

I've had other teachers talk about the same motion. It's kind of your fingers going from straight to scrunched up to straight and the way that it works in your bowing that when you're doing an up bow your fingers are straighter and your knuckles are kind of sticking out and they would call that mountain. You make the mountain with your knuckles. And now you're doing your down bow and your fingers have scrunched up and your knuckles have flattened out and you're doing the planes with your knuckles. 

So you're doing your up bow, you're making mountains, fingers straight, and you're doing your down bow, making the planes with your knuckles, fingers scrunched, and it's this kind of people will call it the octopus, because the motion looks a little bit like the octopus. There's a long discussion about it in my Fiddle Studio, Book 3. 

And I can, even I'll try to make a video with just an explanation of this motion. But this is the motion that I would recommend working on, in addition to trying to loosen up your wrist. But I think that unlocking your hand is going to go pretty far towards loosening up your wrist and making your bow arm look more like you wanted to look less stiff. I wouldn't go with leading with your wrist, not, I mean. You know there are people who do that and they sound great, but that's not what I was taught. So a little bit about the right wrist. 

Our tune for today is Tighe's Reel. This is a single reel. I call these 16 bar reels, half length reels, but the Irish players call them a single reel. Kind of an uncertain key. It's got two sharps but the tonality is kind of up for grabs. I got this tune from the playing of a banjo player who lives around here named Brendan Coyne. Brendan's from the DC Baltimore area. 

He's a great fiddler. I haven't actually heard him play fiddle in person. I talked to him a little bit about this once and he told me that there were a lot of really good fiddlers in DC and at some point he decided he would switch to the tenor banjo so that he could be one of one instead of one of many. 

Apparently it's fingered the same way the tenor banjo, as the fingering is further apart and there are frets, but the basic fingering is the same. That made me want to try it. Just what we need is another instrument around here On the session. The source for the tune is named as Alan MorrisRowe, who is a Melodion player in New Jersey who grew up in a musical household in County Mayo and collected tunes and songs from family and community there. 

If you're wondering what a Melodion is, I was wondering that. I guess it's just a smaller accordion with just one or two rows of treble buttons. So a tune coming to us from a Melodion player and played for me on the tenor banjo, but we're going to play it on fiddle. 

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. 

How to Practice Scales (The Hunter's Purse)

Listen to the Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple or on Spotify!

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 Hunter's Purse from a session at Fergie's Pub in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today we're going to be talking about how to practice scales.

Here's my final Kickstarter announcement. And then we'll be done. We'll be done with this Kickstarter business. This is our last week. It's the last big push. If you can share this information that would be amazing. If you'd like some help with that some visual files or links or more information about what to share, just email me Megan Beller at fiddle studio.com. 

We have been practicing with our producer Talya Raitzyk, who is a former student of mine who is now an amazing arranger of fiddle tunes and fiddle music. Everything is sounding amazing. We're getting ready. Our final weeks to go and record in August. I'm really excited. So last week, Kickstarter, check it out. If you haven't, we need your help. Thanks. 

So the big question how to practice scales. I did a podcast on why to practice scales. So you can check that out. I'll try not to dwell on the why but I'll just skip straight to the how I am working on a scale course as part of a little studio that will be done. Well, we got the album too. So it's in progress. I'll let you know when it's done. 

I'm going to talk about the beginner approach to scales and the advanced and at the end, I'll tell you my exact scale routine. 

A wise person told me this about scales: first you go up, then you go down. That was one of my kids actually told them I'm gonna put that in the podcast, they were like No, you're not.

Violin or fiddle, you start with open strings, scales, A, D, G, one octave scales. You can go from that to the minor versions, learning the minor scale, and add things like E minor and the two octave G major scale. And this kind of covers it for fiddle. I mean, if you play the fiddle, keep listening. But learn those scales, folks, A, D, G, minor versions, E minor, two octave, G major. 

How do you play them? Start with just one bowl per note long bows, make sure they're in tune, have your tuner on or play along with a recording. Know your half steps. Did you know this there is a pattern of whole and half steps for every scale. And for every major scale, it's the exact same pattern. When I'm saying whole step I'm talking about when there's a space between your fingers, for instance, from one to high to B to C sharp on the A string, that's a whole step. If you're going from C sharp to D, high two to three, those fingers are like touching or close to touching. That's a half step. 

So here is the pattern for every major scale ever: W, W, H, W, W, W, H. If you want write that down, write w w, h w w, w h, it's whole with a W not cool with an H. Just try it on some different fingers. Just try placing your fingers, Okay, this one's a whole step, whole step. Okay, now half those two fingers are closed, close together. Whole step whole step, whole step half. And you can start from any finger or any spot on the violin and play a major scale using that pattern. So look for that, that pattern that spacing in your fingers, I think it helps.

For the minor for fiddling, I would use the Dorian. We don't need to go deep into it. But I would use the pattern, W H, W, W, W, H, W. Anyway. If you go to the blog, fiddlestudio.blogspot.com You'll get the sheet music and then the transcription of this so you can you can see those those patterns. I'll put them in there. 

Should you repeat the note at the top of the scale? Well, beginners often do and it can help them because it reinforces this is the top for advanced players not so much, I wouldn't repeat it. 

Once you've got the sense the pattern of the scale, you're playing it in long tones. Your first rhythm for fiddle could be doing a basic shuffle like sounds like strawberry, raspberry. You can punch the berry if you wanted to sound with an accent on the offbeat. To practice the jig rhythm for scales, you can just do triplet triplet, put that rhythm into the scale. It'll give you some practice playing something easier than a tune, but with the same rhythm and bow pattern that you might play in a tune. 

And then you can add your slurs. So try slurring two notes into a bow. And then three, die. And then four gets a little tricky. People will do those slurring patterns, and then also repeating notes. And in this case, they start with a lot of repeating notes. So repeating each note of the scale like eight times, I wish I had a motorcycle, wish I had a motorcycle. And you can cut that in half, motorcycle, motorcycle, motorcycle, and cut that in half, you know, cycle cycle, cycle cycle, and then one to note.

These are all these scale patterns are in my second fiddle book. I think it's called Fiddle Studio Fiddling for the Advanced Beginner, and I write out all the stuff that I'm trying to describe over a podcast right now. Different ways to play scales, it's great. 

Learn the arpeggios that'll help in terms of when you should practice scales. At first, I would play a scale right before you play a tune. And, of course, it should be the scale for that tune. So if you're about to play Angeline the Baker play a D scale first. If you're about to play, Steamboat Quickstep playing A scale first.

You can graduate from that to just doing some scales at the beginning of your practice, which is, which is what most violinists do when people who do scales, if you're getting pretty advanced for all the stuff I've been talking about, and you're looking for more scales, maybe some shifting, you can get the Barbara Barber scale books. Even her she's got a less advanced one, I think it's called Scales for Young Violinists. It's still pretty hard. 

But, but it'll have the the easier stuff and then and then it'll go up from there. So expect to see double stops and shifting even in that book. It's not three octaves, it's mostly one and two octaves. People keep going with scales until they get to three octave scales. You know, when you are a teenager and you're doing an audition, you're expected to play three active scales and all my lessons in college, I would always play three active scales and I still play them. Only really, if I have a classical performance coming up, or I'm working on a really hard piece, I will play those three active scales.

You can use the Barbara Barber, it would be the Scales for the Advanced Violinist or good old Carl Flesch. It's a classic Carl Flesch my first one was like held together in duct tape. I used it so much. And then I have a new one. And now that one's falling apart. So I don't know if I'll have to get a third Carl Flesch scale system. It's that kind of book you'd go through them gets a lot of use every every day. 

Those scales system books for advanced violinists will add the third octave, they'll add the arpeggio series, things like broken thirds, and then all the double stops in scale, playing a scale in thirds moving thirds going up the scale and down or six octaves tense. Oh my gosh, save me now. 

So there are 12 different notes. And there's all these different ways you can play and practice a scale. So you can in the classical world, you learn them systematically. So you you have your book, and you work on a certain number of things you can do with A major and then you move on and work on that number and E major and you kind of go through all 12. Then you go back and you add more stuff. 

But eventually, it's kind of the same as what I said with beginners, like work on the scale for the piece you're playing. thing that's a classical players do too. I'll just tell you, when I play scales, I'll give you my exact routine. I don't really play him for fiddle. Maybe I should. I don't.

If I'm going to haul out Carl Flesch and play scales, it's because I'm practicing something hard. So if I was practicing like the Buch Concerto G minor, I would open it up to G and play my three octave G major and octave G minor scale. Do them one note to a bow and two, both with vibrato, then 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 24 notes to a bow. Redoing things slowing down as I need to, then the whole arpeggio series broken thirds and chromatic all in three octaves. And then I would do only holding for one or two octaves. I would I would do thirds, six and octaves. 

And if I had a piece that required tenths, I think I would not play that piece. Because I'm not that old, but my hand does not like playing tenths. Oh my goodness. I am a little tired from talking about that scale routine. 

Our tune for today is The Hunters Purse. Ooh, fun reel in A minor. This is our last tune from Philadelphia. And we'll be back to old time next month old time in August. I'm excited. Originally, I think this tune was the earliest printing of it was 1865 as Headi's Wishes, but mostly it's called the Hunter's Purse recorded by Sligo Fiddler Paddy Killoran. And he called it Hunter's Purse. 

So there's a story from the biography the chieftains from John Glatt, so here's what he said. Guess this book was from 1997, bandleader and Piper, from the chieftains Paddy Maloney, hired the services of lilter Pat Kilduff, especially for the recording of the Hunters Purse on their album, chieftains three. So the recording studio was in London, but Kilduff was not a big traveler, and rarely went away from his home, which was in County Westmeath where he was born. 

So they they put him in a hotel in Dublin before his his flight to London. And they, you know, they got him a beer and a chance to meet the fiddler from Belfast, Sean McGuire, and they ended up staying up all night, lilting and drinking and lilting and drinking. And then he was like a wreck in the morning. They had to fly him to London to get them to work on this. That sounds about right. 

Kevin Burke teaches this tune. I would go look it up if you can. The hunters purse, Kevin Burke. He teaches it on a site called fiddle videos.com. Well, they have some great fiddlers on that site. I was I was scrolling through it Kevin Burke is their Hanneke, great teacher, Meghan Lynch Chowning and the fiddler from La Vent du Nord. Who is that? Andre Brenet. 

They are award winning fiddlers. I, someone asked me recently, if I had ever won, like a fiddle contest. I have never even entered a fiddle contest. I was on the dance track, you know, in in boxing and in kickboxing, which I did for many years. There's this term the journeyman. So there's these rising stars and, and then there's the the journeyman boxers. And it's sort of somebody who's been doing it a long time. They're very experienced, they're not flashy, they were never a star or prodigy. They just show up, they do the work. They're reliable. 

So I am kind of a journeyman fiddler. I play my dances, I don't enter contests. I haven't won any awards. But I do consider myself although I am by no means a master fiddler. I do consider myself after after the numbers of kids and adults I have taught over my my lifetime a master teacher and I would say that since I have so many students who are now better than me and play or teach professionally at a very high level. I tried to accept the evidence that that's true. 

So I'm not an award winning fiddler, but I'm over here doing my part teaching this amazing instrument called fiddle. Oh, it was kind of a random rant. Okay, the Hunter's Purse. That's what we were talking about. The Hunter's Purse.

Taking a lesson (Bill Malley's Barndance)

Listen to the Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple or on Spotify!

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 Bill Malley's from a session at Fergie's Pub in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about taking lessons, preparing for your lessons. Being in a lesson for students and for teachers. 

I'm going to do a quick check in on my Kickstarter, still active July of 2023. We are looking for people to contribute. Please check out the link in the description or just go to fiddlestudio.com. And I hope you'll see it right up there at the top. This album is going to contain a lot of original music. And where did these original tunes come from? From my head, I guess.

So the story is that I was going this winter and the spring to do some cabin camping because I love to hike and I love to stay in a cabin really close to a trail. The Appalachian Trail, Tuscarora, those are the ones that are in my area. And these cabins often don't have Wi Fi or even cell service. So I might hike, then come home, play my fiddle, then do some more hiking, play some more fiddle kind of conducive to composing. Because you play a little a part then you let it go around in your head while you're hiking. See if a b part occurs to you. 

Later in the spring, I actually had a foot injury that made it so I couldn't hike so ended up doing even more composing. But that's how I got these new fiddle tunes. I'm really excited about them. It's been really fun to play them. I am looking forward to recording them with Charley for this album. So yeah, go check out the Kickstarter, share it, contribute to it. Just send it good vibes, whatever works for you. 

Let's talk about lessons preparing for a lesson and taking a lesson. We'll start with students. And the first lesson. Okay, I will just say this, it is typical to be nervous for your first lesson. My adult students are much more nervous than my, my young students. I've had adults doing their asthma inhaler like because they were short of breath. I've had them cancel at the last minute. Because they're just decided they they're too worried to take a lesson. I've had them shaking from an adrenaline drop kind of so hard. It's almost hard to play or just talking from nervousness. So they almost can't talk. 

And we got through it. We got through it every time. But if you're feeling really nervous about taking a lesson, that is totally normal. Yeah, I see it a lot. I'm kind of assuming that you found a teacher that you like, and you told them about your instrument and your previous experience. Maybe we'll do another podcast on finding a teacher. 

Bring your stuff. Okay, bring your violin your bow, rosin, shoulder rest tuner, any music you have. If you can tune before you go do that, if you can warm up before you go even better. You know, sometimes half the lesson is, I don't know wasted but we're still remembering how to play and if someone had played a little before they came more of a handle on it wouldn't take so long to get them warmed up in the lesson. If you can warm up before. I know not everyone can some people come from work I get it. 

If you can come early, I would say there are a lot of cultures that have a practice of respect for teachers coming up with Suzuki, which was a Japanese school of music. They emphasize that pretty strongly. You know I also did a lot of Muay Thai, which is a martial art from Thailand. And it was the same thing show respect to your teacher come early. Like that. It's not great as a teacher to be kind of five minutes in and wondering is this person going to show up? Should I text them if you're going to be late just text that's all you got to do. 

I would bring a way to take notes or record. I'm not the biggest fan of being video recorded just without notice. But an audio recording is totally fine. Or when I'm taking lessons, I'll usually have a notepad. And I'll just quick jot down notes in between none of my teachers have ever reminded that. 

If you're feeling nervous for your first lesson, it's one of those things in life, where it's your first time doing something. But just remember, the teacher has done this a lot. So they've seen a lot of different things. I just told you, some of them, and it's not a big deal to them. If you can try to adopt that energy, just relax, because even though you haven't done it a lot, somebody has, and they're going to lead you through this. And once you do one start to get a feel for it gets easier over time. 

Playing is pretty important in a lesson. So as a student, I wouldn't spend too much time explaining things. Okay, don't don't spend so much time explaining that you don't actually get a chance to play and ask questions. 

Questions. So important. Questions are a beautiful thing. It's so much easier to teach someone who has just asked you a question. It's like, by asking the question, they've gone in their brain and made a little space for the answer. So if you just notice something about their left wrist and you say it, I don't know if that's gonna sink in. They've heard a lot of stuff today, it may go in one ear and out the other. But if they've asked you, what about my left wrist, they've made a space for that information, and they're waiting for it. So as a teacher, it's great when students ask questions, because then that's something I can tell them that they're ready to receive, and to focus on and hopefully to remember.

Be flexible, about timing. You know, I try to go over in lessons if I can, unless I'm on a tight schedule. But I occasionally run into a student who's worried about being shortchanged, and only getting, you know, 59 minutes instead of 60. I mean, here's what I'll say about that. You're not paying for 60 minutes of my time, you're paying for 21 years of weekly lessons, some of them at you know, the Eastman School of Music, one of the top conservatories, you're paying for the cost of my instruments all the way coming up to my now professional fiddle, you're paying for practice, you know, if it's not 10,000 hours, it's, it's probably eight. 

And you're paying for all of the experience I've had from teaching other students. So I mean, this is just talking about me. But whatever teacher you're using, you know, when somebody's paying me money, they might be thinking I you know, I'm paying for a certain number of minutes of her time. But really, you're paying for the investment I have put in by teaching for 25 years, playing for 39 years, taking years and years of lessons, buying a professional instrument, all of that is going into me, watching you play, sorting through the infinite number of things you could work on or songs you could learn and helping you find just the things that are going to help you right where you are. So that's what you're paying for, not that extra minute. Don't sweat it.

For teachers. Teachers, remember to be curious about your students. It's not just about what you know, it's also about what they want to learn. You I've done some teacher training, both training Suzuki teachers helping people learn to teach fiddle, I went to Peabody teaching those teachers how to do some improv, make their lessons a little more fun. 

And some teachers are not curious. And I hope that they that they get there because because of that thing that I talked about earlier, where if a student wants to learn something, that's when they will be most receptive to what you can teach them in that area. So find out what they want to learn. 

What do they hope to get out of it? Do they just want to play with you? Do they want to learn things that they can take home and practice? Do they Just want a reason to stay on track practicing, do they want to build their repertoire or do a lot of work on their technique, find out what they want. 

If you're teaching beginners have the right gear have tapes, or stickers, an extra foam pad in case they don't have a shoulder rest, you know, extra rubber band rosin music for advanced players, I would have, you know, a couple of books you normally use, like scale book Wohlfahrt, Suzuki, or Solos for strings. And that way you can take a picture and send it to a to a student out of the book. 

And check out their instrument by playing their instrument, even if it's just like, Oh, can I check your tuning or can I try your instrument, you play it and you'll get a sense of what sound you can get out of it. That will be very helpful, then when you hear them play, compare the two and think about what they can do to get a better sound out of their instrument, I always try to play my students instrument. 

Pick one technique to work on at a time. The brains not great at multitasking, they're already playing the fiddle, which is a very complicated thing to do. So if they're playing the fiddle, and trying to fix the wrist and trying to curve their fingers and getting their bows straight and make the C sharps hire too much work on one thing at a time. 

What's another suggestion? Don't be afraid of repetition. Or at least ask if they want to do it more times. A lot of people are ready to do their reps and a lesson. So I have sometimes myself I think, oh, you know, my student looks a little tired. Maybe they don't want to keep playing this. When I asked Do you want to play this five more times? 10 more times? It is most often a resounding yes. They want to get that work in under your supervision. So they can know that they had some practice doing it right. 

Explain things. But don't go on and on and on. Maybe I'm setting a terrible example for this right now. But I actually don't talk a lot in my lessons. I prioritize playing together, technique, work questions and answers. Both the improv game and then students asking questions and me giving answers. But avoid long winded explanations or stories from your youth. I might break that one sometimes.

Take the time to make sure they have what they need to practice at home and have clear directions for that. Don't assume anyone's going to remember what happened after their lesson, they may have six other things they're working on that day. So take some time at the end of the lesson to make sure they can go home. And they'll have what they need. And they know what to do to work on what you just worked on.

 So teachers remember prioritize playing in the lesson. Put your reps in, prepare them to practice at home. Hey, I'm into teaching the fiddle. You know, I am teaching some lessons. There'll be over zoom unless you're in the area in which case, have a location I'm happy to teach you in person as part of our Kickstarter campaign, if you're fiddler, and you'd like to take a lesson with me, or if you're a fiddle teacher, and you'd like to take a lesson for me anything you're having trouble teaching you how to work on. Yeah, the vibrato sequence or how I teach Boeing or any of the things you can sign up, go to the Kickstarter, get the lesson reward and we'll arrange a time to get together. Really looking forward to that. 

Our tune for today is Bill Malley's. And this is a great teaching tune by the way. This was written by Fiddler Bill Malley, from County Clare popularized by Martin Hayes. It's a barn dance. So these barn dances go a little slower, great for beginners, kind of stately, not too fast, not like a real. And it's a nice contrast to the speed at an Irish session where people will take jigs and reels sometimes very fast. 

The barn dance is a little slower. It's not it's not like an air or a waltz. But kind of a medium tempo. People online, we're calling this a Scottish tune. It's not I don't think it is. Gosh, the Irish players are playing it either way. 

We think it's written by Bill Malley in County, Clare and that Martin Hayes got the tune from him. He was a Bill was a fiddler. And a farmer from lower Glendree. His playing was, I'm gonna quote the article here, characterized by a rhythmic pulse and syncopated style, very rhythmic bowing pattern suitable for dancing. Hey, that's a that's goals for me. That's what I aspired to. 

He was a regular playing partner of concertina player John Naughton. And the flute player Joe Bane also from Glendree. They would play down in East Clare play dances play fleadhs, and he wrote this tune. Lovely little barn dance. We will play it for you now. Here we go.

Left Hand Pinky (New Mown Meadows)

Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple or on Spotify 

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 New Mown Meadows from a session at Fergie's Pub in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about the pinky on the left hand, highly specific. But if you play fiddle you, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. 

But first, I want to say a quick thank you to somebody who has been helping me with editing and post production on this podcast, you may have noticed the sound quality increased in the last couple months. So thank you, Miguel. Miguel has been helping out. And I really appreciate it. 

Let's just check in briefly with the Kickstarter. So the Kickstarter is going Why do musicians do these kick starters? If you don't know, but a Kickstarter is it's crowdfunding, it's somebody posts about their project to try to raise money. So rather than sort of putting all the money up beforehand, and then creating something and then selling it, to pay back your investment, you try to raise the investment first. And this is the whole reason we're doing Kickstarters. 

Because we used to make albums and musicians would do this, they'd put up the money, make the album, sell the CDs, and then that would pay back your investment. But now most people listen to music on streaming. I mean, what can I say? I listened to most of my music on streaming, except for CDs in the car. 

Where does that leave a musician if an album costs 1000s of dollars, and it's not actually going to make you money, because nobody makes money on streaming from fiddle music. I don't know. Maybe Mark O'Connor. Nobody like me, makes money from streaming. So we use the Kickstarter. Anyway, I'm not going to talk about it too much more. But go check out the Kickstarter, see if you want to contribute. And even if you don't have any money for the project, if you can share the link or the information on your socials, your network. That's really useful too. 

Okay, enough of that. Let's talk about the left hand pinky, a whole podcast for one finger, no matter what the style is, whether we're talking classical or fiddle. The pinky is a problem. It short, and it's weak. Feel like I should apologize to my pinky right now. We'll talk about beginning sort of beginner problems first, and at the end, I'll talk to you about how people who are more advanced, also work on their pinky. 

I usually teach six months with no pinky, I don't even put the pinky tape or sticker on the fingerboard kids or adults, we learn with the three fingers. Then after like six months, we do the pinky. The reason for this is to let students have a chance to get comfortable holding and playing the violin before they're trying to control the pinkie and use it in that way. But it does mean that the rest of fingering on the violin has become a little less challenging. 

And then when you add the pinky in there, people can find it. Frustrating, I get it. It's frustrating. I'll write the 4. If we're reading music, I write the 4 and encourage them to do it. Sometimes they do it. Sometimes they don't, you know, we'll do little exercises like adding the pinky after the other fingers playing like a 1234. So adding the pinkie and then practicing lifting the pinkie. So 4, back to 3 or 4 back to 2. We have to lift two fingers or four back to one where you have to lift three fingers. So it's it's both putting it on there and then controlling when you take it off. 

All kinds of things to think about. in Suzuki it's perpetual motion for song with the pinky. Yeah, it's about six months, maybe a year for younger students. What is the problem with the pinky? Well, it's hard to press the string down. It's also hard to reach that E natural. And there's another issue for some people that their bow will do weird things when they're trying to play their pinky. What is this about?

The heard to press, you just do little exercises to try to strengthen it, play it a lot, have the other fingers down to give the pinky some support and engage like the whole hand, the muscles for all the fingers together, that will help so little pinky doesn't have to do it all by themselves. 

In terms of being harder to reach, while you can try a straighter pinky, that's my go to. Your other fingers, of course, should be pretty curved pretty boxy, as I say to the kids, but the pinky can be flatter, it can be a pinky pancake. If that doesn't work, you can even bring your wrist kind of a hair closer to the neck. 

My college professor of violin, her name was Lynn Blakeslee, and she would show me this and she was she was such a good violinist. And her pinky was so short. And it was kind of the worst, because I have these kind of long fingers. I'm lucky my dad is tall, I'm tall, have long fingers, and I'd be struggling to reach something and sometimes even my wrist would go back, and I wouldn't be able to get there. 

And then she just show me that she could reach it easily, you know, using this technique, bringing her her wrist kind of a hair closer to the neck, and then the long extension flat pinky. Then she would show me her hand or even make me come over and show how much shorter her pinky was. Megan if I can do it, you can do it, she would say to me.

The bow reacting thing. I just saw this the other day, I had a student. And when he put his pinky down it, it was having trouble reaching and it was having trouble pressing down the string because it's new. But at the same time that his brain was trying to make the pinky cooperate in this way, it was kind of sending up static and so his bow which was usually a nice clean tone was like crunching into the string just involuntarily. 

Because he's he's trying really hard to make something happen with one hand and the other hand is reacting. And when you react involuntarily on the violin, it sometimes crunches, so be careful of that too.

Advanced pinky lore. So when I was 12, I did this summer camp for advanced violinists. I've been working pretty hard. I was on Preludium and Allegro, that kind of thing, is past Vivaldi, past the Bach concertos. We worked with a soloist who came so wasn't a famous teacher was like a famous violin player can't remember his name. I wish I could, but I was 12. That was a while ago. 

That was the first time I heard anyone say, well, if you really want to make it, you have to practice for hours. Four hours a day, one for scales, one for etudes one for your new music and one for your other music. I was like, what? I was not practicing for hours at that time. 

He ended up just having us work on our pinky a lot. He kind of said it's a very advanced group of preteens and teenagers. He said y'all have three fingers that are advanced and one bit still a beginner. So what do you had us do for our pinkies if you're a little more advanced, you can look into this.

First two pages of Schradieck, Schradieck? I would always call it Schradieck. It's a volume of etudes. And the first two pages are the classic. You can memorize them and you can play them till the cows come home. And some of them use the pinky a lot. So you learn them and you play them. And when your pinky starts to get tired, you stop for that day. Let it recover. Do it again. It's like doing your reps for weightlifting. 

He also had us do left hand pizz, or left hand pizzicato. The pinky is the finger that does the most work because it's the farthest away from the other fingers. So it's going to be the most likely finger to do pizzicato. I mean, we're talking about you've got your 1 or your 2 down, and then your pinky on the same hand is reaching down to pluck that string. 

It is an advanced technique, but it'll make your pinky a lot stronger. So he gave us just some simple etudes left hand pizzicato etudes, same thing, play them. When you feel your pinky getting real tired, stop, don't push through, let it recover. Do it again. Pinkies. Let me know if you're having trouble with your pinky. I might be able to think of some other ideas.

Our tune for today is called New Mown Meadows. So you have your meadows, and they are newly mown. Like m o w n somebody Mowed them. I was trying to figure out what this name meant. It's a fun tune. It's played on a lot of instruments, apparently in a lot of different keys and in a lot of different places because I kept finding it everywhere. 

There were long explanations about why it's so popular with melodeon players. Who knew? The B part'ss a little similar to Silver Spear. And it's not a super old tune, apparently collected in the mid 1800s, both by PW Joyce collecting in Munster, and also by Cleric James Goodman of Cork. So it's already in a couple different places had different names but pretty quickly became New Mown Meadows. 

I think there's an Irish language named to that. I did not collect. Yeah, so here it is. This is a nice one. Ready?