Shoulder Rests (Candy Girl)

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 Candy Girl from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about shoulder rests, different kinds of shoulder rests, not using a shoulder rest. I guess I won't talk about chin rests. Save that for another podcast, you need a lot of topics when you do it every single week. 

There's two big schools of thought about shoulder rests and then everybody has their own take their our shoulder rest enthusiasts who go for the Kun with padding, they'll even go for the Bon Musica which is bigger and kind of aims basically to sort of immobilize the violin on your shoulder. So that it's doing all of the work. 

So ideally, the way that these really big rigid shoulder rests work is that they build up all the structure underneath your violin so that your violin is held right under your jawbone there, and your shoulder isn't shrugging up and your neck is not tensing and you're not having to press down with your chin. It's sort of locking under your jawbone, and the shoulder rest is doing all of the work. So you don't have to do the work.

There are a lot of teachers who work on this, I've gone to music shops with students who were looking for a lot more support, tried out different kinds of shoulder rests and found versions of this that worked for them. 

There is another group of classical violin pedagogues and I live near the Peabody School of Music, and the teachers there, I have some interaction with them. And they do not like this kind of Great Wall of shoulder rest. And what they have their students do is use a sponge like a small foam sponge that allows you to shift and move the violin around while you're playing or between, you know, when you're not playing different angles, you're going to hold it in different ways. And they like that because they feel like it helps their students relax more the goal either way is to relax. 

If it helps you relax to have the violin glued up there on an enormous Bon Musica situation or to be with a like a little sponge. And that's more relaxing for you. Basically use what keeps your tension to a minimum. Some people use these straps so that it's on a strap that kind of comes around your to the other shoulder. And it it holds it there. 

One of the issues that you can get with a shoulder rest, I use a KUN shoulder rest, I'm basically in the middle, my KUN doesn't take up all of the space between my jawbone and my shoulder, but I don't really like it too, because I will hold my violin in different places. So for classical, I hold it classically. For Irish, I might actually hold it on my shoulder in a very traditional way. But I might lift my head right off the chin rest. 

So in there, I'm, I'm using my left hand to hold up the fiddle more, taking more weight into my left hand. You know, you maybe have a little bit of drawback with that, but it doesn't really bother my left hand or I haven't had a problem with it. And it allows me to have absolutely no tension in my neck. 

So sometimes I even go back and forth and I'll, I'll hold it with my head for a little while so I can really relax my left hand, then I'll hold it with my left hand for a while so I can move my head around, lift my head, just totally off the chin rest and relax it but it's still got the shoulder rest sort of holding it there partway.

When I play old time, I will even move the fiddle down kind of rested against my collarbone or my chest. And I like enjoy playing in those lower fiddle positions. Especially if I'm playing for a long time. I mean, if I don't have another instrument to switch to, I really need to move the fiddle around on my body to to cut down on the repetitive motion, the stress from it. 

So some people don't like to use a shoulder rest because they find it gets in the way of that. Oh my KUN doesn't really bother me. I guess if I had a if I had a bigger situation, maybe it would. The strap if you're interested in trying the strap out look it up. It's sometimes called the Vio strap a violin strap. I saw people using them at Fiddle Hell. It looked pretty comfortable, basically did all of the work of holding up. So, you know, I just described transferring the weight between my head and my left hand.

It looked like the strap actually did all of the holding so that your head and your left hand could both be relaxed. Something honestly I should probably try. But it's hard to try something different with the way that your with your technique and your instrument when you're I'm used to the way I do things. And if I changed, it would be annoying. So I haven't changed it. 

Sometimes people will get into the weeds a little bit about how heavy and tight their shoulder rest is. People feel like if it's really big and tight and cuts down on the vibration of their fiddle, that their fiddle doesn't sound as good. 

So someone might not use a shoulder rest for that reason, or they might use sort of a very fancy I think Piestro has a super high end hundreds of dollars shoulder rest that's supposed to vibrate along with the violin. I've not tried this, but it's interesting. If you've tried that one, let me know how did it work? 

I mean, if you're just starting out, I would get a KUN, K U N, shoulder rest and try that. And then after you feel comfortable playing the instrument, go to a string shop, try some different things. Maybe bring along a teacher or a friend who already plays to help help you figure it out. But a KUN is enough to get started unless your neck is really short. In which case just maybe just a little sponge or a pad so it doesn't slip as much. 

Our tune for today is Candy Girl. Oh my gosh, great tune from the playing of John Stephens. This is tuned from the Cumberland Plateau, Kentucky Tennessee border area. It's often played on standard tuning or a cross tune. So John Stephens was also known as Uncle Bunt Stephens. I love these uncle, fiddle players. He played for the radio. He recorded some tunes for Columbia Records in 1926. This was one of them so you can look up Candy Girl, Uncle Bunt and find his recording of this sounded great. 

Apparently in 1926, he defeated a different Uncle, Jimmy Thompson, who I covered in a different podcast right? Could fiddle the bugs off a tater vine. So he defeated Jimmy Thompson in a big regional fiddle contest, and was crowned by by Henry Ford, who was apparently very into fiddling, crowned him national fiddle champion. 

Although it sounds like this guy was kind of creative with his life story. So the articles I read said he had this whole list of fiddle contests that he had won from Henry Ford and the maybe some of them either didn't exist or only had one contestant. 

According to legend, he said Ford presented him with a new car, a big pile of money, a new suit, and also paid to have Uncle Bunt's teeth fixed. We're not sure that that was a fact or just John's exaggerating. Look at the dental records or something. 

He was a fiddler out of Tennessee. Started on the harmonica I guess as a boy he claimed that he bought his his fiddle from off of like a bum. Well, I guess a lot of fiddlers were, were given the name Uncle. We're not really sure where where he picked that up. Or how the where the Bunt came from. There's no evidence he played baseball.

Passed away in 1951 at the age of 72. And recorded this tune I believe in 1926. You can also look up recordings of this. Britney has recorded it Mike Seeger. Lots of people love this tune Candy Girl. Really interesting tune. we're going to do the Baltimore take on this tune for you. Okay, here we go.

High and low 2s (Farewell to Princeton)

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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 Farewell to Princeton, from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well, today we're going to be talking about high and low 2s. But before we start, I don't know if you caught it. But I used a different name at the beginning of the podcast, I'm still the same person. I just am using a slightly different name. Meg Wobus this was my name when I was younger. And after I got married, and I got older, I went more by Megan Beller. But I am transitioning back to Meg Wobus. So at the moment, we're going with Meg Wobus Beller. 

What is the deal with high and low twos? And why are we always talking about them, at least for beginners? This is a great question. by twos I mean the middle finger on the left hand. Now, some people use the letters to talk about the notes on fiddle, and some people use numbers. And there can be times when it feels interchangeable. Like 1 is a B, and a B is a 1. But it's good to remember, they're not interchangeable. 

It's easy to remember this like on the piano where you can use your pointer finger to play any note. So a C can be well on the piano, the pointer fingers, the 2. But you could play a C with a 2 or a D with a 2 or an E with a 2. Sometimes my children play the piano just like this, everything just with their 2.

On the violin, I mean, it's true that we most often are playing on the A string, a B with our 1. So we start to think 1 means B, most of us for most of the time, that is what it means. But we do play other notes with that 1, for instance, B flat or in positions, all kinds of other notes. 

So in general, we have fewer options. But that can mean because most of the time 1 plays B and 3 plays D on the A string, that when we talk about the 2 beginners get confused, because they're like, whoa, the 2, the C sharp is the 2. And we have to say, well, the C natural is also the 2. And they're not just variations on the same note, they are two different notes. 

Can you tell that I've given this lecture before? The high 2, and the low 2 are ways to play the C sharp and the C natural, and they are two completely different notes. And your second finger, your middle finger on the fiddle is going to move around more than the other fingers. So you could play for years and not have to deal too much with low 1s or high 3s. 

But your first year playing fiddle, you're going to have to learn how to move back and forth between the what we call the high 2, which is the 2 right next to the 3 in the C sharp position, or on the E string, it would be the G sharp. And the low 2, which is the 2 right next to the index finger right next to your 1, that would be the C natural or on the E string, the G natural.

They are two different notes. It's not a C whatever, there's no middle 2 or medium 2, it has to be high or low, whatever you call it, whether you call it by a number or a note or just the sound of it. It's either high or low. And those are the notes and there's not a note in between. If we're talking about Western music.

You don't have to understand that theory, if you're like 'a sharps key is like I can't even think about that'. You don't have to think about it, you can basically just go by high or low 2 or if you can hear the difference between the notes, you know, put your your middle finger in the place that sounds like the right note on that string for that tune. 

The reason I talk about high and low to so much is that it's a great shortcut for my students, you know, I can tell them for Old Joe Clark, it's a low 2 on the E string and a high 2 on the A string. And that way if they start playing the whole tune with high 2 with a whole tune with low 2 and doesn't sound right. That's a way to let them know like this is the position and it's different on one string or the other string. So you're going to have to keep adjusting the position of that finger.

If you just prefer to listen and kind of match up your hand with what you're hearing what it sounds good to you. That works too. High and low 2s. Something to think about. 

Our tune for today is Farewell to Princeton. This is a tune by Clyde Davenport. Born in 1921. He was an old time fiddler and banjo player out of Kentucky, Monticello, Kentucky. He played fiddle many, many years. In 1992, he was awarded the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. So they have a great article on him. You can look it up.

And died in 2020 at the age of 98. Oh my goodness, we should all live so long, and play the fiddle so much. He, when he was nine,  he made his own fiddle from barn boards, oh my goodness, using hair from his family's mule for bow strings. And he just started basically learning tunes that he heard his father play. I relate to that. 

He also became interested in the banjo, an instrument his father also played at 11 he made his own banjo with an iron band off of a wagon wheel and. I'm gonna just read this because I don't understand it 'trimmed out a green hickory hoop, bolted the ends together with a slat and set it up to season. He paid a dime for a groundhog hide. attached to the frame with carpet tacks carved a hickory neck and had his first banjo'. 

Holy cow. This is dedication. If any of you are are having trouble getting your instrument out of the case, just think about little 11 year old Clyde Davenport one year older than my youngest making himself This banjo. Oh my gosh. 

There's a collection of tunes from his playing from the recordings of Ray Alden. Definitely look these up. It's a beautiful set of tunes. I saw a great video of Emily Shaad playing this at Clifftop. It's another one of those Clifftop tunes, and we're gonna we're gonna take a crack at it here. Farewell to Princeton. Princeton, West Virginia, I think. Yeah, here we go.

What is the difference between a violin and a fiddle? (Five Miles of Ellum Wood)

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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 Five Miles of Ellum Wood from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about the old classic question, what is the difference between a violin and a fiddle? I have been asked this question many times. I did Google it. 

Which of course, you know, when you start typing, they give you the popular questions. And I'm sort of fascinated to see that. A lot of what is the difference? Questions are on scientific topics like right up there. What is the difference between weather and climate? mass and weight? speed and velocity? I kids like that. Gross pay and net pay. Yeah. There's a bunch of them. 

But what is the difference between a violin and a fiddle? Dictionary.com says the words fiddle and violin are two names for the same stringed instrument. Fiddle is just an informal way of referring to the violin. In the context of classical music, it's typically called the violin in a bluegrass band, it's more likely to be called a fiddle. It was from dictionary.com. 

So there you go. Our tune for today... No, that was a joke. Just kidding. We'll talk about it more. I don't know what else I have to say. I get asked this question, mostly by people who don't play music. And I think it's made me it's just an easy way to make conversation after I've brought up fiddling or they've asked me, you know, what do I do? And I say, Well, I'm a fiddle teacher, they're not sure what I mean, or what that is. So they'll, they'll say, Well, what's the difference between violin and fiddle? 

Some people when they're asked this make a joke. We'll get to that in a minute. Have got one of the jokes. A go to, I usually say something like, they're same names for the same instrument. It's just a different kind of music. So Fiddling is a kind of music when you play that you call it a fiddle. Variations on that is how I usually answer the question. 

I did look into it a little bit kind of the etymology of this word. Or some theories that fiddle came from roots that were dramatic and violin came from other words from the Romance languages. So they may have just been different names for the same type of instrument, but from different areas. In Europe, there's Icelandic words, Old English words that seem to be related. 

There's a Latin word fidula, which was, I guess an early word for violin? In medieval times, I guess fiddle referred to a predecessor of a violin. Actually, I've played that instrument. Yeah, funny story. I played in a medieval band, cover band, I don't know, for a minute. And I was playing this sort of early medieval violin. It was crazy. 

It seems that as soon as people started using violin, they would use fiddle kind of more colloquially, or it right away meant something. Something kind of off-key, off-color. So all of the colloquial uses of the word like fiddle sticks or fiddle DD or Fiddle Faddle saying something was ridiculous. So that fiddle fiddling was ridiculous. I don't know. I wouldn't say that. These days. It's funny. Fiddler's will call it a violin or fiddle. Most violin players call it a violin. 

Although then you have like Itzhak Perlman calls it a fiddle, but it is maybe a little rude to just call it a fiddle in the classical world. Is that rude? I wouldn't do it if I was talking to someone about their instrument. And they were a classical player. And I didn't know that if they played any folk music or traditional music. I would call their instrument a violin. I wouldn't call it a fiddle. There you go. 

Oh, wait, one more thing. So here's the joke. What's the difference between a violin and a fiddle? The violin has strings and the fiddle has strangs. Oh, wait, did I say them  differently enough? We've got my northern accent, strings and strangs was well, we'll see if we include that. 

Our tune for today is five miles of Ellum Wood. This is an interesting tune, and I'm so glad that they played it at the jam and that I pulled it for this podcast. It comes from a CD by Bruce Greene. And the CD is actually called Five Miles of Ellum Wood. I think you can still get it Old Time Kentucky Fiddle Solos. 

So I don't, I don't personally have this CD. I guess it has liner notes. And I looked everywhere for these liner notes. I should have hit up some actually local players to see if anyone had the physical CD with the liner notes. Because I'm told that they're awesome. And that it is completely worth buying the CD from Bruce Green's website, old time Kentucky fiddle solos, a lot of really interesting tunes. You can find it online.

I guess it's also maybe in a book called Tunes I Learned at Tractor Tavern. But the CD anyway is 22 fiddle solos that Bruce learned to play from some of the last living fiddler's of Kentucky, music that was passed down from the 1800s when the playing of unaccompanied fiddle tunes was still pretty common. I saw that description and it made me think that gets mostly unaccompanied. I listened to the version that he played and I thought it was amazing. I loved his playing. I loved the version. I am not going to really do it justice now, but we're certainly going to do our best. So this is Five Miles of Ellum Wood, here we go.

Shifting and Positions Part 2 (Money Musk)

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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 Money Musk, from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today we are going to talk about shifting. This is the second part of a two part series on shifting and positions. But I did positions first. So if you go back last week, we talked about positions and what positions are on the violin or fiddle. And now we're going to talk about shifting, which is how to get into positions.

First position, most people play in it several years before they start to learn about shifting, and it definitely becomes a comfort zone. Besides the fact that you have the open strings there to kind of ground you, there isn't specifically a reason that first position would be wildly easier than the other positions. Because most of the mechanics are the same, you're pressing a finger down on the strings, and you know, there's a certain amount of space and then you've got your next finger and you're going up in a scale or you're going down or you're skipping or you're stepping a lot of it is the same. 

And I'm working with people who are trying to improve their shifting, I feel a little bit like a motivational speaker a little bit. Because I try to help them reframe in their mind, people will feel like the higher they get on the violin that the scarier and the more difficult it is, and they'll get very tense. And they'll have a very hard time. And it's almost like they're, they're straining to get up to those really high notes. You know, these are for advanced classical players. 

In fact, the higher you play on the violin, the closer your hand is coming to your wall to your face, really to the front of the violin where your head is, and having your arm closer into your body, it gives you if anything more control than trying to control something when your arm is way stretched out away from your body, I'll often take the violin out of the hands of students and say, Okay, now do your your shift. And they just, they just see that it's not, they don't have to think of it as way, way, way high up there, they can just think about it as I'm just bringing my hand closer to my nose. Easy peasy. 

So that's just a way to think about shifting and leaving your comfort zone. But many things are gonna stay the same. And you're just coming home, you know, you're just coming up to your nose there.

The mechanics of shifting, here's a rule for you. There's always a finger down when you shift. If you're I'm sitting in front of a desk right now. And if I have two spots on my desk, and I know where one spot is, and I want to touch the other spot. And it has to be exact, I can learn to get to that other spot by dragging my finger across the desk. And I can sort of teach my finger how far it is in what direction and practice getting to that spot. 

But if I'm just randomly touching my finger down in random spots on the desk, it's going to be very hard to measure and get to a specific place. I hope that made sense. I'll show a student I could play in first position. Now let go of the violin, nothing's touching it. Now try to find third position or try to find fifth position. Even a pretty advanced player will have a lot of trouble with that just finding fifth from nothing from note from not touching the violin at all. You want to have your finger on the string because feeling this string under your finger. You will learn how far and how long it takes to get to the position.

So which finger is it, it can be the finger that you start with from the note before the shift, or it can be the finger that you're going to finish with for the note. After the shift. A shift goes between two notes.

Most of the time, it's the finger that you start with. Okay, shifting up on the finger that you're going to finish with is a little bit of a special effect. I use it a lot in klezmer or playing something very romantic or schmaltzy. But normally we're going to shift on the finger that we're kind of leaving from if you're just going from like a one to a one, if it's the same finger, that's great. In fact, that's where most people start, is they start learning shifts that are just one in first position, up to one and third position.

And then back down to one, and then you try your to two to two, three to three. How do you know where you're going? Well, you know, check with your three, you don't just slide and pray that you're going to get there, you go very slow. So you can hear when you get to the note and stop at the right time. If you're going super fast, you're going to overshoot. And basically you'll just be practicing overshooting, which isn't a good way to get better at shifting. 

So you go, you go very slow, and you stop when you get there. And at first, you're just really kind of dragging your finger. So it sounds like this very thick glissando. Then when you get better at that, you'll practice in order to get some speed into your shifting, you need to release the pressure on your finger. So you're kind of pressing down on the string playing your note. And then you'll release the pressure, but not release the string, fingers still touching the string, very lightly, do the shift with a very light pressure on the string and then come back down into the string.

A classical player, when they're learning to shift will plan, every shift, I write into my students music, all the information, what position they're in, where the shift is, what finger it's using. And they'll practice that shift. Once you get really comfortable, for instance, shifting to third position, I don't necessarily write in every shift, just a third position in my music. But really any other position, I'll put a little fingering in there that will in my brain translate to, oh, that's a shift to fourth position. 

But for a student Oh, you know, I might literally write the words shift to fourth position for someone who's just starting out. So they don't, you know, practice and and just make something up. If you're constantly just moving your hand around wherever trying to, you know what it's supposed to sound like trying to find the notes way up there. I mean, I'm not saying you can't do that. But for someone who is trying to learn to be really precise with their shifts, you want to plan it, write it down, and practice that. 

There's books full of like, every conceivable combination of finger positions string. Hence, as I said, last week, you'll walk through the practice halls of Eastman or Juilliard and you you hear these D. D, people practicing their their shifts on string instruments. Oh, my, that was a lot about shifting. I will be at some point, working on a shifting course. That's gonna be fun. It'll be good for me actually. 

Our tune today is Money Musk. Money Musk is a really old and well known tune, you might say 'How appropriate then Megan's doing Money Musk'. As a New England Fiddler who grew up playing New England music. This is actually pulled from an old time jam. They were playing an old time version of Money Musk, fiddler's who are friends of mine actually right on my street named Brenna and Shane, and they have this great version of Money Musk. I love it. 

The song was played in Scotland originally, but definitely spread to Ireland and then different parts of North America. So I think it was a Scottish pipes tune. There was a country dance that went with it. So came to America. And I think the old time version we're playing was kind of in the mountains. But it went other places went to New England and together with the Money Musk dance was a very popular for hundreds of years dance and tune. And now people don't play it as much. Apparently it was a dance that people would do right after the break. It's considered like an old chestnut now. I grew up hearing it.

Also played out west. I heard it was used in Texas and Missouri for like fiddle competitions. It's a real kind of show off tune if you want to hear people show off with it. I mean, check out Rodney Miller's version that would be the New England or if you look up Jean Carignon. He was playing this on YouTube. There's a video of him playing it. Astonishing is sort of the word I always think of when I see his playing. It was awesome. I saw him playing it in G and in A.

There is a story that Paul Gifford when he was in Montreal, asked Jean to play Money Musk and Carignon said, Do you want the French, the Scottish or the Irish version and he could apparently play all three. Oh my gosh. So the version that we play is from what I can tell and Brad Kolodner who helps run the jam also helped me with this. It's from the Highwoods String Band. They have a version of Money Musk that you can find on Slippery Hill look up Money Musk. There'll be a bunch of different recordings there. 

And this was from the Brandywine friends of old time music festival. 1974 the Highwoods String Band was a revival String Band in the 1970s alongside bands like New Lost City Ramblers. I mean, I have these records from my dad's collection on Cranberry Lake, Delaware Water Gap. 

Do you want to read more specifically about the Highwoods String Band? There's a an excellent documentary by Larry Adelman called Dance All Night, the Highwoods String Band story you can dive into that folk revival mid 70s era. Great music coming out of there. And this is a great tune here. Money Musk.

Shifting and Positions Part 1 (Chips and Sauce)

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 Megan Beller. And today I'll be bringing you a setting of Chips and Sauce from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today I'm going to be talking about shifting and positions. This is a two part series. First time I've done that the first part will be positions. So we'll talk about positions this week, and then next week, I'll come back to you and talk about how to get to those positions. 

Before I start, I just want to say thank you. A couple of months ago, I asked for reviews and ratings on the podcast specifically from Apple podcasts. And I got some really nice reviews and ratings. So thank you very much. And I just especially wanted to call out thank yous to BJ Rhoades six. John Stinson, String Dancer, Vagabond Stan and Gabby Portu. 

So let's talk about shifting and physicians. Working on this topic made me think about when you're in music school in conservatory, there's certain sounds that are unique to different instruments. Like everyone does scales. So no matter what instrument or even vocalist, you'll hear people practicing scales, but brass and woodwind instruments will play long tones. It's kind of the only instrument you'll just hear them playing notes over and over again, as long as they can. Yeah, piano doesn't do that. You know, drummers always have their metronome on singers have their their vocal warm ups, which are very unique to singing. 

And string players have their shifting exercises, which are sort of ... and so on and so forth. For every conceivable note on the violin, or viola. Those shifting exercises are how we practice getting into positions. 

So we'll start with the basics of positions on the fiddle. When you're learning fiddle. Whether you have tapes on or you're just finding the notes on your own, you are playing in first position, open string, A string is an A, and you put your first finger down your one and you're playing a B, your hand is positioned so that your first finger your one is basically a whole step above the nut of the violin, where it's just the open string, there is kind of the up position, people will call half position where your hand is really centered around just a half step, playing in B flat, some people would call that more maybe like B flat minor, they would call that half position. 

But first position, and then if you were going to move your hand so that your one is now instead of playing a B on the A string, it's playing a C or a C sharp, that second position. So you've, you've shifted your entire hand one note up. And now you can play you know, 1234, you can play scales up and down the fiddle. But if you play your open strings, they won't be in the places you're used to them being in first position. 

And if you come up a note from there, your third position and it goes up and up and up. You know, your hand comes around the shoulder of the violin. And you can actually play in position kind of all the way up to where the rosin dust is. If you you know if you go hear a soloist play concerto on the violin, they'll be playing notes at the very top, what I think of as the top of the fingerboard, very, very close to the bow and lots of notes all over and down in first position. 

So those are the positions but for the first couple years of violin or fiddle, you're playing in first position and you don't have to worry about those other ones usually about three years in. I like to introduce people to third position if they haven't, you know asked about it, we start learning third position, and maybe working on a tune that has some third position in it, or just getting familiar with getting up there and getting back. 

For fiddle, if we're just thinking about fiddling, most of those positions are really not used very much at all, you would use third position, mostly just for a note, there are tunes that have notes above the B. So on the E string, you know, the b is your pinky. And there's tunes that have a C or even a D, or an E. I just saw John carry on playing his version of money mask and was playing that Hi eat fourth position, or an extension from third? Oh my goodness. So you would basically just use third position in attune that called for it.

The only other time I use positions in fiddling unless I'm playing something like klezmer where I play a lot in position, because you play everything down the octave and up the octave. And you're kind of competing with the clarinet and they're loud and you have to be either louder or higher, or both. Anyway, I digress. I will sometimes and this might just be a me thing. But I like to experiment with droning. I don't really cross tune at this time very often. But I'll shift up to third position just to drone different notes against an open string. That can be fun. Yeah, something I experiment with. 

Oh, I have a little list of fiddle tunes that use third position or these are just ones that I play Brilliancy, Sweet Milk and Peaches, that's an old time tune McArthur Road, Irish, Reel de mon Gibard, that was on the podcast. Naftali's Favorite. That's a term that I wrote and the Road to Erogie. Lots of students like that one. 

For classical violin. Third position is also the most used position besides first, but it's used in different ways. Classical players and fiddle players have different goals. So fiddle players love to be loud. And they don't usually mind if notes stick out. Classical players like to keep everything very even. And you don't want anything to stick out. So fiddle players will play a lot of open strings. And in fact, when you're droning, you're just adding, adding more and more open strings, all the open strings, think about cross tuning, as many as possible open strings, classical players do not like to plan open strings, they'll use their pinky. 

Or once you have third position. If you're like me, and your pinky is not that strong, you'll shift up to third, very consistently, for playing notes like you know, a ie D, where you could play it with an open string, or you could play it with a four. But instead shift up to third position and play those sort of weaker finger notes with your stronger fingers. second position is used in rare cases, sometimes there's a passage that uses just the note, sort of right above the pinky, you know, on the A string like the F sharp over and over again, or on the D string, it would be the B and it just keeps going back and forth. 

And so if you're in second position, you can do it on one string, classical players love to keep it on one string. fifth position specifically has some very useful aspects. fifth position, when you play the notes, you're using the same fingers as first position. So your play a B with a one, just like first position, but it's one string over. But if you can kind of forget about the string thing, it can feel very familiar to be playing in fifth position. So a lot of times if you have a passage that has high notes and low notes, and they're all mixed, rather than try to shift up and down, people will just hang out in fifth position, because they're pretty comfortable playing on all four strings because the fingering so similar to first and they'll just play over the strings stay in position around there. 

You will hear classical players a lot of composers sometimes will ask for something to be all on the G string. And in that case, the D string is very thick and it has a very particular quality of tone. And so they want that part to have a very dark, rich tone. So they want you to shift up and it it can sound very dramatic to play a whole opening on the G string like the opening of Csardas, or the Saint Seans Concerto Number three, something like that.

Just a little tip about positions. And we might get into this more next week with shifting but it is good to know that the way the string works. As you get higher on the fiddle, the notes get closer together. So a whole step in first position is kind of the biggest whole step on the fiddle, and a whole step in seventh position, your fingers are much closer. The higher you get, the more your fingers will creep in to be closer to each other because the string is shorter. That's kind of how much I know about that. Somebody has a great explanation of that phenomenon. I could use it because I have students ask about that a lot. 

Our tune for today is Chips and Sauce by Ira Bernstein. So Ira Bernstein is a very well known dancer. A lot of different kinds of traditional American forms of of dance. I think he does other French Canadian Irish. I think he does all different kinds of folk dancing, but he is especially known for clogging, or it's called flat foot. He grew up outside of New York City. He also lived in Vermont, in Maryland, and has now I believe, lived in Asheville for for many years and won numerous competitions in old time flatfoot and he goes to Clifftop a lot.

I have to say we at our jam in Baltimore, we play a lot of tunes from Clifftop because a lot of folks go there. So this is one of those tunes I think that kind of came via Clifftop and I referenced in wrote this he plays old time fiddle. It's played on all over kind of on fiddle and banjo. Some people will play this cross tuned. 

It's played by Earl White. You can also look for a version by the Onlies their album long before light. I guess the story that I heard about this tune, I was like searching through long discussions and Banjo Hangout and stuff. So I found this story somebody wrote that what Ira said about this tune was that he wrote it while he was staying with friends in the Northeast. And the host that was hosting him had a really good homemade salsa that they made but called it sauce they called it chips and sauce. So that's the name of this tune and we're gonna play it for you you're ready.

Why do we do repeats in fiddle tunes? (Winder Slide)

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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 Winder Slide by Joe LaRose from a session at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about repeats and fiddle tunes. I've been thinking a lot about repeats. And I did post a question about it. And the, what was it, the Facebook Fiddler's Association set off quite a discussion. So people thought it was a dumb question. That's okay. I'll take it. 

Other people may be misinterpreted the question was kind of why are there repeats and fiddle tunes. So some people were just thinking about the music printing aspect, you know, and say, well, it's just a save ink. Which wasn't my question. I was thinking about why is there so much repeated music in traditional dance music? 

So I'll talk a little bit about the discussion and the sort of philosophical questions I had around repeats. And then we'll just do some nitty gritty ins and outs of repeats. After that, you know, everybody kind of said, it's for the dancers, you know, matches the dance. But in my mind, there's a bit of a chicken and egg question like, are the dancers good at dancing to music that repeats because we play so much for them? 

Or are we playing so much music that repeats, because it helps the dancer, you know, just trying to figure out because the dance is 32 bars, so people could say, well, you have to repeat, so it fits the dance. But of course 32 bars of any music can be danced to and there were people who posted and said, Oh, I used to play this, or I used to play that. I think Donna Herbert said the different Beatles tunes or songs in the ad, she would play the the theme from all things considered. 

So you can take 32 bars, if anything, and kind of dance a 32 bar dance to it, and it will, quote, unquote, fit. But we don't do that very much. I mean, it's very seldom, the repeated a part and repeated b part are so prevailing, and the more I thought about it was like, there must be something about hearing that music again, that makes it really, really comfortable for people to dance to for people to listen to and hear. If you think about songs having a chorus that comes back or Well, somebody wrote in the discussion online. Why does the first line of the blues repeat? Okay, well, yeah, it's tradition. That's the way they do it. It's part of the form. 

I just wanted to question it. I don't know, maybe I was being devil's advocate. Sometimes in my family, we just like to ask the question, Well, why is that? And you know, why is that? Why is that? In fiddle tunes, it is just assumed that there's an a part and a B part that repeats. So that's not to say all tunes are like that. If it's not like that, someone will generally explain that if they don't explain anything about the form, that's the form A, B, B, if they say, Well, it's, you know, it's only one B part. And then there's a c part or these parts are short, or there's no repeats, for some reason, they have to explain why that's different. Because the standard form is the AABB form.

And even within an A  part before you even repeat the part, there's usually two little sections of the same melody, you know, sounds like you know, you asking a question, getting an answer, then you ask the same question again, or melody repeats, even just within the part, you get the different answer. Yeah, so maybe it's for the dancers. 

I don't feel completely settled on my understanding of why repeats are so central to dance music. But to shift gears a little bit, a repeat sign on the page is written as there's a double bar, and two dots. So that means repeat, you play twice, you know, with kids, I'm always just like two dots there, play twice. These days, you'll often see it written out with first and second endings. So there'll be a little ending marked, first ending, and then the repeat that turns you back to the beginning. And then you sort of skip over the first ending and play that different ending the second time.

And this just to touch on these endings a little bit. When you're doing a complicated dance on the floor, or contra dance, there's a thing called end effects. And, you know, with a double progression dance or something, sometimes you get to the end of the line, and people are trying to kind of start the dance over from a different perspective, and they get confused. You have to, you have to help them understand how to switch directions and start over from a different way. 

First endings and second endings are, are kind of doing that, in older tunes, the way they're written out, often they don't put in those, those little end effects. So, a lot of times a second ending will be the little bridge music that takes you to the B part, if you're a part was download your B parts up high, you're probably not going to just the second time when you repeat the A part ended down low, and then suddenly jump up high for the B part, it's probably gonna be a few notes that kind of take you up there. 

If you look at old O'Neill's and stuff, they may they may not have written that out, people just assumed it or they, you know, they had their own version of it, these days will often write it out as a first and second ending. And same thing with the B part where the first time you want the B part, it may be a little little chunk of music that gets you back into the B part for the repeat for the second time, it might be something more sort of finishing sounding or even that would send you back to the A part, if that makes sense. 

Now Becky Tracy had a name for that she called it the glue that holds the parts together that there might be a little different piece of glue between the the broader sections, you have to learn the different bits of glue. 

So you may have known this was coming. I am a fiddle teacher. So, uh, just a public service announcement at the end here. You got to do the repeats, folks, this is mostly for beginners, if you've been playing the fiddle a long time. And I said to you, oh, fiddle tune is really long, you might laugh at me, you know, it's a minute, if you play it slowly, it's 40 seconds. If you play it up to speed, it's not really long. 

But for a beginner, a fiddle tune can feel very long. And you see it in their body, you see it in their face, I see it when I teach them. And then the thought of doing all the repeats. The kids gets complain about it. The adults do sometimes, but you can't skip them. No, you can never skip the repeats. I may not know definitively why they're there. But they are part of the tune, for sure. And you're not playing the tune correctly if you're not doing the repeats.

So you will never hear a professional fiddle player, play a fiddle tune and just not do a repeat. That will be crazy. You won't hear that. If you're a beginner and it just feels really long, impossibly long to do the repeats. Just use that to build your endurance, you can do it. Do the repeats, get your endurance up. If you're having trouble playing it through with the repeats, play it twice. Once you played twice if you're only playing it once with repeats, it'll, it'll feel easier and pay attention to the kind of end effects first and second endings the glue that goes between the repeated sections. They're all about repeats.

Our tuned today is Winder Slide. This is a composed old time tune by Joe LaRose, a musician from Kent, Ohio. He wrote this tune, what's the date? I think around 1980 composed kind of recorded two different recordings of the tune. And they went in two different directions. So the first version that Joe wrote is played by Bruce Molsky. So if you look up Bruce Molsky and Winder Slide, you can kind of hear that version, I guess. 

When he wrote it, he only had the A part. And that's how Bruce recorded it. And he liked that. The way Bruce played it a lot. But later, he wrote a b part. So he kind of developed the two part version later. And that version got recorded on Rayna Gellert's album Ways of the World. She said she learned it from Bill Dollof. So what LaRose said was the he kind of likes the two part version better, but he likes the way Bruce Molsky he didn't complain about Bruce Molsky recording the first version, but he likes the way Rayna does it too, with the two parts. 

So a lot of people play it the way Rayna played it with the two parts just to note that it originally only had one so this is how we play it here in Baltimore. Yeah.

Vibrato and fiddling (Buck Mountain)

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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 Buck Mountain from a session at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today I'm going to be talking all about the vibrato and vibrato and fiddling we will talk about what it is, when to use it, when not to use it. And I'll give you some information about how to learn it as best as I can over you know, without you being able to see when I'm doing. There are a lot of great videos so if you're trying to learn vibrato, look it up. But I'll tell you how I teach it. 

I don't know what it is about the quality of vibrato that makes it sound good to people. I mean, the human voice does vibrato people when people sing they have a vibrato. I don't really understand the mechanism because my voice has never naturally done a vibrato and I have never learned how to how to make it happen. So I hear people do vibrato on their singing. 

And you hear it in a lot of instruments. You know, all the bowed stringed instruments will do vibrato. Even on the brass and woodwinds, I did play the flute and and the flute could do a vibrato with your with your breath, in and out. And sometimes you'll also see with Irish flute they'll be doing their finger up and down over the hole, to give it that kind of quaver that shimmery up and down sound. Something about it must sound good, people like the sound of it. 

It is, on the fiddle, it's emotion that comes from your finger, your fingers tilting back and forth as it's pushing the note down. As it tilts, it makes the pitch waver and go up and down. But it's, it's not a motion of your finger. So it's not, I've seen everything, people. You're fingers not kind of going up and down as it's pressing down. It's not sliding at all. There's no sliding of your finger in vibrato. It's nothing you're doing with your bow arm. 

It is a motion that's either done from your arm or your your kind of wrist in your hands. So people talk about arm vibrato where the arm is moving, kind of sliding back and forth, and the fingers tilting in response. And you get vibrato. Or you can just tilt, sort of flop, flap your hand back and forth, and your fingers tilting in response. So that's often called wrist vibrato.

When we use vibrato. Well, classical violinists use vibrato anywhere they can use, it every single note. Basically, it's a special effect in classical music, NOT to use vibrato. Fiddlers use vibrato for waltzes. I use it for waltzes, generally, or airs. As desired for longer notes in tunes, or songs. But we don't use it for most up tempo, dance tunes. So talking about jigs, reels, polkas, hornpipes. We're not, we're not using vibrato basically not at all. 

And that's the biggest thing I have to work on. When I work with classical players. Oh, my goodness, they have made the vibrato so automatic, that it's really hard for their hand to stop vibrating while they're playing. Of course, they can't learn the tune up to tempo. So they're playing it slow. And it just, their classical brain kicks in. And they really, their hand wants to do vibrato so bad. So if you've learned to do vibrato, and it's automatic, you've got to take the control back and learn to minimize basically eliminate vibrato for up to speed dance tunes. And you can still throw it in for the other stuff, the slower pieces. 

A lot of Fiddler's may not do any vibrato at all. But, but if you want to learn it, I'll give you my little by little method. It can be pretty you know, if you're playing Ashokan Farewell, throw vibrato in there, Actually, it's funny. I did my whole degree, violin and music education, but nobody taught me how to teach vibrato. And I didn't remember I was so young when I learned it. 

So when I was a very young teacher, just out of college, maybe 22 I was working for Alice Kanack wonderful Suzuki teacher at her school in Rochester, where I went to college. And I had a student who was trying to do vibrato. I didn't I didn't think the student could do it and I didn't really know how to teach it.

I ended up kind of sucking it up and going to Alice and saying, I don't know what to do about the student. You know, I didn't want to look like I couldn't teach. But she was trying to do vibrato, my student, and she wasn't getting it at all it was, you know, she was doing something else. One of those other things I mentioned, sliding your fingers, something.

Alice was really great about it. She said, we'll just teach her vibrato. And I said, well, she's in book one, or whatever she wasn't at the at the place in the books where we usually teach vibrato. And she said, Just break it down and teach it to her. 

That was really helpful. Not only did I learn from Alice that day, and then in future days, how to teach vibrato, her her method, which I use a variation of. But also I just love the attitude of just break it down and teach it. And that's basically how I approach a lot of aspects of fiddling, and teaching fiddle and teaching fiddle tunes, that there's nothing too hard to learn. If you want to learn it, it just break it down. And you can go through it bit by bit, master each step, and move on to the next one. 

So that's how I do vibrato. Can take some people I've seen learn vibrato in a couple of days. Most times it takes a couple months. To get all these steps down, you want to get each one down. If you're having trouble with the next one, go back, go from the beginning. Or the last step. 

I start with a knuckles. So here are the steps. Knuckles, Banjo slide, Banjo stick, fiddle slide, fiddle stick, Add the bow and Pass it. So that's my little sequence for vibrato. 

When I'm saying knuckles, I'm making a circle with my thumb and my first finger. And I'm kind of gently pressing the very first knuckle on my first finger to loosen it up. This is the knuckle that's going to need to be responsive to get you that tilting. I do it with each finger. I'll try to do a reel of this. So you can see it's a really great vibrato exercise, it's hard to describe, oh, I was gonna say over the phone. But over the podcast.

We start with that, and then we do banjo slides. So you're holding your fiddle like a banjo or sort of under your arm holding it down, or you would hold a guitar. And put your first finger on the A string lightly and you just slide it up and down your whole hand. Your thumb comes with it. And you're sliding, no bow and not really pressing on the string just lightly kind of like you're polishing your string. You do different fingers, different strings. And that's banjo slide.

And banjo stick is you speed up your slides. So if you're going whoosha whoosha. Now you're going wish, wish, wish, wish wish, just with your finger lightly touching the string, and then gently use stick that finger, your arm keeps moving back and forth. But now your fingers sticking and hopefully kind of tilting back and forth in response to your arm. 

So you've got your banjo slide, and then your banjo stick. And then fiddle slide, fiddle stick is doing the same thing. But now you're putting the fiddle on the shoulder. When people put their fiddle on their shoulder, some kind of tension can creep up. So sometimes they, their vibrato looks beautiful when their fiddle's down kind of in that banjo style on their lap. And then they put it up on their shoulder and they can't do it at all. 

So keep recycling the steps as you need them. On your shoulder you you put a finger on a string, trace it up and down, very lightly. Finger lightly on the string, thumb lightly on the side of the neck and practice that motion. This is arm vibrato. So practicing that motion with your arm. 

And then when you do fiddle stick, you make the motion smaller and faster. And you start to push that finger down ,to stick it in one place on the string while your arm keeps making that back and forth motion. And now you should have, still not using your bow, but a kind of silent vibrato. 

And the last two steps are add your bow and I when I'm doing this with students, I have them get their vibrato started. And, then kind of put the bow in their hand and have them start playing after they've already, already shaking their arm. They're already doing vibrato. Because again, just like when you put your fiddle on your shoulder and you kind of tense up a lot of students will once they're bringing their bow to their string though they'll tense up so that's another place you may have to go back and recycle old steps. 

And once you can do it with the bow now, not you just want to use a scale and practice passing it from finger to finger. That a lot of information I look. I will make a video of this so you can see it's a great little method. I've used it a lot.

Our tune today is Buck mountain. Buck Mountain is a reel in D major. So Buck Mountain is a mountain in northwestern Albermarle County, Virginia. Hmm, not sure at all if that's how you say it. And I guess it's a pretty prominent mountain in that area. 

Hadn't been down there. I hike a lot of mountains but haven't hiked Buck mountain. So this, this tune comes from that area. So apparently there was a fiddler from Woodbridge in that area, by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte Chisholm, who went by Uncle Nip. And they said the Uncle Nip was from his drinking habits and not a shortening of Napoleon. He was playing down there in Virginia in the 30s. This tune kind of caught on he played it.

And there was a group called the Virginia Vagabonds. 1932, who also learned it from him maybe, and played it. The Vagabonds would sometimes play this tune in G major, but yeah, we do the version that's in D major.

There's another Fiddler who played it, Armen Barnett, who was the source for this too, and I guess his tune is in the Portland Collection, which is a famous collection for contra fiddlers. So I've got that one. He was playing it in the early 1970s and sort of part of its revival. He was a fiddler who went to school down in Charlotte, North Carolina. So maybe picked up the tune down there. 

Yeah, Barnett played a lot of different things played Irish really well one, won All Ireland in 1978. Also, you know, played old time when he was in that area still plays and tours with a lot of different string bands and based in Seattle.

So here we go with Buck mountain. Are you ready?

How to improve your fiddle tone (Sadie at the Back Door)

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 Megan Beller. And today I'll be bringing you a setting of Sadie at the Back Door by Jere Canote from a session at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today I'm going to be talking about how to improve your tone on the fiddle. Kind of, what affects tone? what doesn't affect your tone? Some thoughts around that.

The part of your body that controls your tone on the fiddle, is your right arm and hand. It's not in your fingers. I frequently will teach beginners who are having trouble with their tone. And they're trying to diagnose something that their left hand fingers are doing on the strings. Basically, it's not your left hand, as long as your fingers are pressing the strings down enough, they don't even have to be pressing them all the way down to the fingerboard. But they're pressing them enough to like stop the vibration, then it's not your left hand. 

You know, you can have some funny effects from if your left hand fingers are not coordinated at the same time as your right hand. But I did do a podcast coordinating the left and right sides of the body. So look that up. If that's your trouble.

Let's get back to tone. So it's all in your right hand, your right arm, it's your bow. And basically the tone is the vibration that you're getting out of the string, you know, you pull the bow across the string, you can see the string vibrating back and forth. There's sort of the vibration coming out of the instrument into the air of the tone. 

And then there's also the noise of the bow scraping on the string, whatever's happening with the actual physical horsehair and the steel string, that's going to add some noise to your tone. There is also relevant to tone, would be your bow speed, starting and stopping, rosin, to some degree rosin, and pressure on the string. 

But when people talk about that point where your horsehair meets the string, in relation to the tone coming out of the instrument, that has a specific name, and it's the contact point. So if you haven't heard this phrase before, you can probably picture if you go to an orchestra concert, and you know, somebody is playing the Mendelssohn. And you watch their bow on the string, it's going to be doing a lot of back and forth. But it's going to be staying really stuck onto the string in one place, at least the violinist will have full control over it. If they want to play closer to the bridge closer to the fingerboard to get a different volume or a different color of their sound, they have full control over their contact point. But mostly the bows going to be just absolutely straight, usually about halfway between the bridge and the fingerboard or maybe slightly closer to the bridge. And there'll be staying right there, their contact point will not move, and they will not lose that point of contact. 

On the other hand, I was at a jam the other night. And there were tons of fiddlers there, lots of people just starting out to you know, advanced musicians who are leading the jam. And so there was a beginner and I could see because of where I was sitting, I could kind of see his bow. And his bow as he was playing was just sliding everywhere. I mean, it was a big jam, so I couldn't hear him. But I know what that sounds like. If the bow's sliding around and there's no one point of contact, you hear the sliding and you're not getting the full vibration you would get if the bow was just straight and stuck on the string. 

So the vibration, the sound of the note is quieter. And then the noise, the bow noise the scraping is louder. And that's, you know, that's what that tone sounds like. Not as great. You want to go towards getting a really strong contact point. 

Just basics for contact point. A lot of it is about keeping your bow straight. And a lot of keeping your bow straight is about opening from your elbow, making sure that your, your angles are right. And with kids, this is so hard because they keep growing so all their angles keep changing. You know their instruments bigger and their arm shorter but then their arm gets longer and then, but then they get a bigger instrument. So they're always having to adjust their angles. 

If you're an adult, you just need to find it once you need to find the path for your arm that keeps a really straight bow. And that's going to be a big part of your contact point. The other levers are kind of pressure, the amount of pressure you're putting into the string obviously affects the tone, and speed. 

All of these are things that you should have a lot of control over the speed of your bow, you may move your bow unconsciously not really thinking about it. But you can work on playing with your bone moving at different speeds. With the pressure, there can be a lot of unconscious movement, sort of affecting the pressure of your bow on the string. People who may have a lot of tension in their bow arm, or in their arm or their shoulder. 

Or maybe they're pressing down too hard. And it's really hard for them to relax enough to let off enough of that pressure to just have a good contact point, but not like a crushing contact point in the string. Or there's a lot of people who are kind of afraid of the string, you know, and I mean, the violin can make some weird noises. And so they're tense, but they're holding the bow back from the string and they're afraid to kind of relax and put their weight down into it, which would actually get more vibration, more sound from the instrument and the sound would fill out and cover up the bow noise and make their tone sound better. 

I hope this is making sense the way I'm explaining it. It's really all about getting that good contact point and keeping it as you're playing. Now, starting and stopping the bow kind of messes with this. If you have your bow straight and in control, and you're using a good pressure, good speed, and you've got it sounded good while the bow's moving, you still may have tone issues when the bow starts or stops, or changes direction. 

Classical players really work on this, they try to get all of those crunches out. Basically there's almost never a time in classical music you really want to crunch unless you're playing something very, very forceful or triple stops or something. They will work on kind of sometimes I call it smile bow, where you sink in, got your full contact point while you're both moving in the middle. But then when you're changing directions like a smile, you kind of let up the pressure.

For fiddling, I use, in my fiddling, it's a little crunchy. It's a little percussive, I love the fiddle as kind of a percussive instrument. Using my playing to also reinforce the rhythm of the dance tune. I leave a little bit of that grip, that kind of sound when I'm changing directions. But I do have control if I want to play a waltz and I don't want there to be any crunch. Now I'm playing in a different way where I'm keeping my contact point, but I do let up a little bit of pressure when I'm changing directions. 

You want to kind of work on all those different levers different aspects so that you have control over what's happening with your tone. 

Our tune today is Sadie at the Back Door. This is a tune by Jere Canote and I don't know if that's how you say his name, but that's how I'm gonna say it while I talk about this tune. Great tune,  written on the banjo I believe. Apparently Sadie is a cat. And Sadie was a cat whose habit was to always go out by the front door but would only come in by the back door. And so she got a tune, written about her called Sadie at the Back Door. 

Jere Canote plays fiddle and plays a lot with his twin brother Greg Canote, they are twins. They're based on the west coast in Seattle. They were for many years, the Canote brothers, the kind of sidekicks on Sandy Bradley's potluck, which was an NPR show. 

Playing music, they play all kinds of tunes fiddle tunes also swing novelty songs, they sing, they play all their instruments, you know, all the stringed instruments fiddle guitar, banjo, ukulele, great duets, really nice harmony. I was checking them out a little bit. 

Jere builds banjos and teaches banjos is kind of his specialty and so if you if you want to buy a banjo you could look him up. I think his studio is called Small Wonder Banjos. And I did as I was researching him find a banjo joke that he told in an interview. Here's the banjo joke before we play this tune Sadie at the back door. What do you never get the chance to say to a banjo player? Is that your Porsche out back?

Okay, Charlie is a banjo player. Here it is, Sadie at the Back Door.

What's the point of scales? (Booth Shot Lincoln)

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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 Booth Shot Lincoln from a session at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everybody, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about scales. Why do we play scales? Is it useful to play scales? All about scales. 

People argue about scales. Some people would tell you that scales are the most important thing, and I frequently have people ask me, what scales should I be playing? How long should I be spending on my scales? How do I learn this instrument using scales? I think that you'll meet other people who say, you never have to play them just play tunes. Don't worry about scales at all. 

If you look at extreme examples, very, very difficult classical or jazz music, very accomplished musicians in that genre, they're going to be playing a lot of scales. So that tells you something about the usefulness, I guess, of scales. Classical violinist, the rule of thumb is one hour a day. And I was told that when I was, by the time I was 12, they were saying one hour a day of scales. 

Maybe less, if you have training from a very early age, you may have picked up a lot of the things that scales teach you. And we'll talk about what those are. Sometimes you'll you'll meet musicians who don't play as many scales, and maybe part of that is that they started really young. 

If you look at jazz musicians, in music school, at least, walking by practice rooms, jazz musicians were playing more than one hour of scales a day, sometimes two hours of scales. They would play them on the saxophone and then on the flute, and then on the clarinet. All the scales, all these arpeggios, just running them different tempos, different configurations of major, minor, different modes. If you know what a mode is. So many scales. 

A lot of people would complain that scales are kind of boring. Not very creative. But I would say some of the most creative musicians that I know play a lot of scales. They have really put their time in with scales and arpeggios. 

I did meet in college, there was a kid in my class, and he only played skills. I don't know, he must have played a concerto to get into college. But we talked about it, he was from Russia. And his English wasn't great. So I don't know if I got the whole story. But he told me like, 'oh, yeah, a year ago, my teacher was like, you can't play any more pieces. You have to spend a whole year on scales.' So he had just been playing, you know, music school standard three hours a day, maybe four hours a day of practice, just with scales, because his his teacher said that's what he needed. 

I was like, why even be a musician? What are we doing here? I don't know. There's more to life, right? I felt a little bad for him. He didn't seem to mind. So there you go. 

So what do scales do for you? I'll start with what they don't help you with. I mean, everything can be argued. But I would say there's not a lot of direct help from scales with melodies, remembering melodies, which is very, very important for being a musician. With expression. They also don't kind of automatically improve your, your tone, your posture, most technique and your sort of ability to hold and play efficiently. Things that aren't directly helped by scales. 

What do scales help with if they don't help with any of that? Well, they help a lot with getting the sound of the key in your ear, especially if you pair them with arpeggios but, but even just the scale itself, and this is a huge benefit for playing in tune, for knowing your high and low fingers and developing the ability to use them automatically, without thinking about it, and being able to make up music and improvise. I think those are all really useful playing in tune, right? It's very central to the fiddle, and skills help with that a lot. 

They also train your just raw ability to play the instrument. Steps, which scales are kind of note stepping up and stepping down and skips, which are the arpeggios. And those are the building blocks of music. So you're just training those movements with your hand. As you play with your hand, you're hearing the sound that it makes, I would call that like, ear to hand connection, your facility on the fingerboard. And connecting your fingers, with your ears and your memory, I really do think scales have a big benefit with that. 

There's also an opportunity with scales because they are easy. I mean, I guess if you're playing easy scales that are easy for you, to practice different techniques, that scale might not automatically make you better at this, but you can practice this technique as you play the scale. Things like: different kinds of bowings, tone, vibrato, slurs. It's really classic for a classical player to do a scale with different slurring patterns, different bowing like off the string bow strokes, or to use a slow scale to work on vibrato. So they're working on all of those things, tuning, hearing the key, facility, ear to hand connection, and then also layering in other techniques that they're going to work on with the scales. 

Maybe if you're advanced, you could do this, I don't think fiddlers have to worry about that. The better you are, maybe the less you need to do scales. I take them out, I'll do some arpeggios for sure if I'm working on being able to improvise, you know over a set of changes. But I don't really play scales unless I'm working on something very hard classically. If I know I'm going to have to be in fifth, seventh ninth position, I get out my Carl Flesch scale system, and I do my three octave scales. Because it trains my hand to get up there and get around the shoulder, the violin, and get those high notes. It's the easiest and quickest way for me to bring that technique back if I'm been playing up there in a while, which I'm normally not.

If you're a beginner, the more of a beginner you are, the bigger a boost scales will give you. You don't have to make them dramatic, you don't have to work on vibrato, off the string, slurs. Just get your scales, your one octave scales really solid. And then you can add another octave or a little variation, arpeggios speed, I think you'll see a really big benefit. Maybe you'll thank me. I don't know if any of my students have ever thanked me for assigning them scales. But who knows, maybe if I talk to them now.

Our tune today is Booth Shot Lincoln. This is a bit of a political tune, there's a lot of discussion about it being played differently in the Southern portion of the United States, as opposed to the North. So in the South, I'm told it's played kind of upbeat, and happy.

And in the north, a lot slower, more of a dirge. And that would of course, be connected to the thematic material of the assassination of President Lincoln and how different parts of the country felt about it. It was recorded pretty famously by Bascom Lunsford. He was born in 1882. So he was a lawyer in North Carolina and a fiddler. And he learned this, he said he learned the tune from his father when he was young, like six or 10 years old. And I think he played the up, the upbeat version.

On the recording of him, I think there's field recordings, he sings a song, a ballad that he calls, Booth Shot Lincoln, which he said he learned from his father. And then he plays the fiddle tune Booth Shot Lincoln, and sometimes he calls it just Booth and sometimes he calls it Booth Shot Lincoln. But they are the song and the fiddle tune. They're related. When you hear them, they they're similar.

A lot of modern versions of this tune are based on the version by Marcus Martin. He was recorded playing this tune in the 40s, Library of Congress, you know, recordings in the field. So the version that we do in Baltimore is, is closer to that to the version by Marcus Martin. The event that this tune is based on was, is of course, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth that was on April 14, 1865. 

And the Fiddler's companion has a little blurb about it. They said 'the incident took place in Ford's Theater in Washington DC while Lincoln watched a British comedy from special box seats above the stage. During a loud and sustained outburst of laughter, Booth crept into the box and shot the President in the head. Booth then jumped to the stage shouting Sic Semper Tyrannis, Thus Always to Tyrants, and made good his escape. (Maybe that's Shakespeare). Lincoln died the next day. Booth was killed by authorities 12 days later.' 

So we have this tune, I guess. I guess it's normally played kind of up up tempo down here. I live in Maryland. But you can choose your tempo and also I guess what you make of it. Are you ready?