Brad Kolodner (Stony Run)

On the Fiddle Studio Podcast this week.  Listen to the Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple or on Spotify!

Hear an interview with fiddler and clawhammer banjo player Brad Kolodner. We talk a lot about the banjo, but Brad does more than just banjo. Topics include growing up as the children of folk musicians, the commercialization of Old-Time music, and the lack of women on bills at Old-Time Festivals. Hear all about Brad's upcoming projects, links below.

Features the tune Stony Run by Brad Kolodner from the album Stony Run from Ken and Brad Kolodner.

Brad's website: https://www.bradkolodner.com/
Charm City Junction: https://www.charmcityjunction.com/
The Baltimore Old-Time Festival: https://www.baltimoreoldtimefest.com/

Tilting the Bow (Half Past Four)

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Welcome to the Fiddles Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller. Today I'll be bringing you a setting of Half Past Four 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 tilting the bow. We are really getting into the nitty-gritty here. I love these topics. I am by now you probably know who I am. I'm a fiddler and a fiddle teacher and a Suzuki teacher. And yeah, violin teachers talk about tilting the bow. 

Have you ever thought about whether your bow tilts, whether you wanted to tilt? Did you know the bow can tilt? I don't think I thought at all about the tilt of my bow until I was in college. I mean not seriously. So I'd been playing yeah, I don't know over 10 years. Hadn't thought about it. All of a sudden, my college teacher is saying what are you doing with your bow? Why isn't your hair flat? What's going on with the tilt of your bow? 

It can have a big effect on your tone if your bow is tilting, for two reasons. One is the amount of horse hair touching your string. More hair on the string is going to be pulling the string, making it ring more. Also, more hair on the string can make more bow noise. Add more of that sound of that scraping hair on string to your tone and then sort of the third thing that can happen is that if your bow is tilted one way or the other, it can start to slide in that direction. The sliding can also affect a number of different things, including your tone. Yeah, where your bow is kind of on the highway, the tilt of your bow comes from your hand. So we're talking about your bow grip here and you can play around with it. You know, get your bow out, put it on the string and try kind of sliding. It'll feel like you're sliding your thumb forward or back. So you're I mean your thumb's on your bow, but you're pushing your thumb out away from you a little bit and tilt your bow and now you're going to have less hair touching the string. Or you can pull your thumb in closer to you, tilt your bow away from you. Now there's less hair touching the string. 

I hope I said that right. You can tilt out or you can tilt in. So which one do you think the classical players like if you said tilt out ding, ding, ding. You are right. So for classical they want your stick kind of tilting away from you a little bit so you're playing on the farther away part of the horsehair. 

Part of the reason for that is that classical players really need to hug the bridge, get as big a sound as they can. I mean there's a reason there's so many violins in an orchestra and only three or four trumpets. Violins are not that loud and especially if you're a soloist playing trying to be heard over an entire orchestra, you want to get as much sound as humanly possible. And the closer you get to the bridge you get more and more sound. Of course, if you get too close, uh-oh, you're going to be scratchy. So they will tilt the bow away and that keeps the bow moving up towards the bridge. So you have to control what's happening. But if you tilt the stick towards you and you're using the bow hair closest to you, well now your bow is going to skid in the other direction, skid away from you, down towards the fingerboard. That's not going to have the best effect on your tone. So people classical players will tilt that stick away and keep their bow up hugging the bridge. So the tilt is kind of pushing the bow towards the bridge, but of course it's uphill. The strings are coming up to the bridge, so the the bow wants to go away from the bridge because of the hill coming up to the bridge. But in those two things combine to kind of keep it close to the bridge, but not too close, if that makes sense. So to get more sound, people will still try to use more of their horsehair on the string. This is keeping your bow very, very flat using all the hair. 

I mean it can get more sound, or you can just get more sound with less effort. You'll see this if you get your bow re-haired and then all of a sudden your sound is bigger and you're not working as hard. Or if you realize you need to put rosin on and all of a sudden your sound is bigger and you're not working as hard. The sound isn't coming from the hairs on the bow, remember. The sound is the vibration of the string and then the wood and air also vibrating and magnifying that. You could get the same decibel level of sound using a lot less bow hair tilted, but maybe you're like pressing really hard into the string or you're using all the bow hair. You could get less sound because you're just not putting a lot of weight into the string. It's gonna have an effect on your tone and what's happening and you do kinda wanna you don't wanna use a lot more effort than you need to. 

Let's say, playing the fiddle is not the easiest thing on your body, so let's not work harder than we have to work. You can try using more of your bow hair. If your bow is usually tilted, that might help. And I would say it's common for fiddling to play with more of the bow hair, probably for that reason. Just more sound, less effort. People will tilt for an effect, especially if they have a little bit of a jazz bent. In jazz and in some fiddle styles people will try to get more variety of tone. So they're not maybe just going for playing the tune very rhythmically, but they're also trying to get a lot of different tones and colors out of their violin. And you'll hear them do that sort of zzzz, getting really close to the bridge or falling really far away from the bridge, getting different tones that way, tilting the bow a lot, just using a little bit of hair. It's different things you can do. So, yeah, experiment with that, rolling your bow, grip back and forth, see if you can use more or less hair. You just wanna know what's happening. If you're not using a lot of hair on your string, try using more. Tilt your bow a little bit differently, see if that helps. It's something to be aware of. You know in your toolbox. 

Our tune for today is called Half Past Four. This is a traditional old time tune from Kentucky, West Virginia area. We played it at our jam. I looked it up on the traditional tune archive. That's a website I use a lot and they had a version from Bruce Molsky, collected from Ed Haley. Yeah, maybe I'll talk about both of them. 

If you don't know Bruce Molsky, he is a fiddle banjo teacher at Berkelee School of Music, which is the college in the US where you can study this stuff for college. He also travels around and performs and teaches. He started playing fiddle and banjo, I think, as a young adult in the 70s, and this is just my impression of Bruce. I'm barely mad at him. I'm not close to him, but he seems like the kind of person who just gets hooked into research and can't stop himself. So a lot of people got into fiddle in the 70s. They learned some tunes and then they'd play them at home or with their friends and that was great. So I think Bruce started that way and he learned some tunes and then wanted to research them and then learn more tunes and then wanted to research them and then wanted to research the fiddlers they came from and then learned their tunes and then researched those tunes and then researched those areas where they were living. And so he's the kind of person just to listen to him talk about these different fiddlers and their styles and where they traveled, where they performed, where they recorded. He has like a PhD level knowledge of these different areas and pockets of old time music where they were happening, down through from Virginia down into the Southern Appalachian mountains. Yeah, if you have a chance just to go here and play different styles and talk about him, it's really fun. So this one I guess he he got from from the playing of Ed Haley. 

Ed Haley, born 1885 in Logan County, west Virginia. His father was a fiddler and his grandfather too. So there you go, fiddlers in the family. He was really well known. Was he blind? Yes, he was a blind fiddler, that's what I thought. And he played around. He didn't record a lot. They said he didn't record because he was worried that record companies would take advantage of him because he was a blind man. A lot of research into his playing and his music came from the musician John Hartford. So that was in the 90s and Hartford collected a lot of tunes and and researched Haley's life and his music and promoting that and sort of sharing it with the world in the 90s and because of that we're playing some of these tunes from him, including this one. It is in a Half Past Four. Yeah, here we go. 

Harmonies in Fiddle Tunes (Boys Them Buzzards are Flying)

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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 Boys Them Buzzards Are Flying by Gary Harrison from a jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. We're going to talk today about harmonies in fiddle tunes. Harmonies sound so good. A good harmony, which is basically a line that matches the shape of a melody but generally sticks to the notes that are in the chords or in the scale that's happening right then, can really really add to a fiddle tune. 

Of course, you need two players usually to play harmonies, so we don't always get to practice them as much as some of the other parts of fiddling, but they are so fun to have as a tool to collaborate. People do worry a little bit about the rules for when you harmonize and when you can't harmonize. We'll get to that. Harmony is a little bit like a spice. You know, in cooking it's rarely completely unwelcome. You don't want all your food to be bland, but you have to know when to use it. Use it in reasonable doses. To prepare for this, I did ask people for their take on harmonies. Which group was that? It was the Fiddle Players group in Facebook. If you know of that group, it's pretty big group. They have a lot of great players on there who will get in touch with you, answer questions or comment on topics. And I was asking about different genres in harmonizing. You know I'm a New England fiddler and harmony is pretty welcome in New England fiddling and in contra dances. 

At a dance you don't always play harmony first. Yeah, you want to let people hear the melody, get used to the melody. If they're at a live dance they're trying to do a dance to the melody. Depending on the dancer, they may be matching up what they're doing with the music. So you don't necessarily want to make the music overly complicated while they're learning the dance. If you're jamming or you're just playing together with other people and someone's trying to pick up the tune, well harmonizing can make that harder. So definitely at a jam you always want to save harmony for when everyone seems like they've got to handle on the tune. That's just being polite. Harmonies add energy. So another reason to save it for maybe later in the song or in the set of dance tunes, because once you start adding harmonies the energy really ramps up and then if you take them away now, the energy's going back down. So it's a good thing to do later at the end. For the last big hurrah. 

Most genres and this was kind of backed up in the discussion on my Facebook post most genres welcome harmonies in those ways, not in ways that confuse players or confuse dancers, but in that use spices carefully and in reasonable doses ways. I'll just name some. Certainly, in Scottish Cape Breton, New England, where I come from, even French Canadian, you find it ubiquitous. In Scandinavian bluegrass country, tons of harmony, old time it is used, maybe a little less, but definitely find it in those ways here and there. And then there's Irish. Yeah, well, you know I play Irish music and study Irish music, but I don't necessarily identify as an Irish fiddler. But I'll give you my take and I also some words from Lexi Boatwright, who is an Irish musician, an amazing fiddler and also plays the concertina really well. The harp oh my gosh, one of these people plays everything. 

And with Irish music what's the analogy I want to draw here? You know how some forms of dance or sports or sort of physical movement are all about moving in highly synchronized and predictable ways. I feel like that's kind of Irish jamming. And then others are about moving in very improvised or unexpected ways. So musically that might be like a big sprawling old time jam where it's kind of fun. Unexpected things happen. I was jamming old time recently at Fiddler Hell with Kathy Mason, great fiddler from the band the Dead Sea Squirrels, and we were both playing a tune. We had different versions and she said afterwards she didn't change her version and I didn't change mine. She said after well, I could have just played your version, but I thought it sounded really crunchy together. I loved it. So that kind of attitude where the mess is the thing is not part of Irish. Irish sessions are more like that highly synchronized movement or music. 

So adding things like harmony is generally not completely welcome. I mean, first of all the tunes are played pretty fast and they're pretty complicated and they can be a little hard to harmonize. So many of them are modal. So people were posting this. You know, don't harmonize at Irish sessions. In the comments and Lexi put in. Lexi Boatwright that it very much depends on the context said what she has said to me before about Irish jam etiquette, which is that you want a lot of self-awareness and a lot of being observant, sensitive to the music of the group, so that what you're doing is fitting in and adding to it and you're not just like I know that one, and crashing in like an elephant. We've all done that, don't worry about it if you've done that. But she did also give a rule of thumb, which was for an Irish session no harmony unless it's a song or a slow tune like a waltz, something by O'Carolin. They were also talking about Vibrado, kind of same thing for vibrato only for long notes and slow tunes. So that's the take on Irish. But back to the genres that do use a lot of harmony. 

I've been playing harmonies for many years. I used to work them out slowly, note by note, either myself on the piano playing both notes, or with a friend asking them to slow down so you can work out what sounds good. You can figure it out yourself. Lately I use chord charts to help me harmonize. I mean once I got a little better at playing charts. What I mean is seeing a tune or a song and then above it they'll have the letters written for the chords. You know a, g, a, g chord goes with this part of the tune and now it switches to D or whatever. Because I play with singers. Especially when I play for, like church or synagogue liturgical music, I have to play a lot of harmonies with the singers and those harmonies need to fit the chords that the rhythm players are playing. So if you experiment with that, you learn to play chords. 

Follow chord charts. You can start to really harmonize. You're just looking at the melody that's printed on the page there and then you're following the shape of it, either above or below, and you're keeping half an eye on the chords so that you can make sure that your notes that you're choosing following the shape of that melody. A lot of times it's a third away or a sixth away, but then you'll get these notes where you need to adjust up or down to fit the chord. So I did get much faster at harmonizing on that. It's a good reason to get to know chords. I would encourage you to come at some point and your fiddling journey out of the melody box. We sit in that melody box a lot, but there are a lot of other things going on in music. Listen to a pop song. Someone's singing the melody, there's a lot of other stuff going on and just because you're holding the fiddle doesn't mean you just have to do melody all the time. So listen to some of those other things, experiment with those other things like harmony, and see what else could happen with your fiddle and how else you could contribute. 

Our tune is Gary Harrison tune. Gary Harrison, a very beloved old time musician who passed away about 10 years ago and in his 50s a real heartbreak for the old time community. He wrote the tune Red Prairie Dawn which was played gosh just everywhere, gorgeous tune. So this is also his tune. Boys Them Buzzards Are Flying what a great name Old time tune in A major. We played it in a cross A tuning A-E-A-E. It's got a crooked B part and a little more about Gary Harrison. 

He both fiddled and he also collected music and researched it. One of these folks lived in Indiana. Gary mostly collected music from the Midwest. Living in Indiana he collected music from older fiddlers in Illinois and kind of all around that area put together a huge collection of music called Dear Old Illinois, big collection of transcriptions and sound recordings. I don't think it's commercially available but Gary was in a band called the New Mules which continues, I believe, to still perform. His daughter is the fiddler now Genevieve, so she would be the one probably who you could look for her online and try to find out more about Gary's research, if you're interested. Also wrote great tunes. He had a collection of his music called Red Prairie Dawn which was, I believe, an album of tunes that he had written them all. So great tune and we're going to play it for you here. Boy, Them Buzzards are Flying. 

Faster Isn't Always Better (Gilsaw)

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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 Gilsaw from an old time jam at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today. I have the topic. Fast Doesn't Make it Good. It's been a month since I recorded. It's very nice to be back what happened in the last month. I almost feel like I need to catch up a little. Our album came out, my album with my husband. It's called Broke the Floor. It is on band camp if you want to buy it or you can listen to it Basically anywhere music is streamed Musically. 

I've been focused a lot on the concertina. I've been playing my concertina all the time, mostly learning Irish repertoire. On the English concertina I need to get an Anglo. I'd like to learn both of them. Charlie, my husband has been practicing tenor banjo. There are a lot of things. I just came home from Fiddle Hell. There's a lot of things I would like to learn to do on different instruments and on the Fiddle. I'm trying to keep my focus to one thing at a time. Set the goal to be able to play Irish tunes at a medium session speed on the English concertina. Then I'm going to move on. I don't know. See what's next. 

This topic Fast Doesn't Make it Good. When my oldest child was little we got them a book called Complicated Doesn't Make it Better, which was a book about design. Getting the hang of speed and how to use speed in traditional music is. I think it takes a little while. I see people go through different phases. In my early 20s I started this Fiddle camp and taught a lot of kids to fiddle. They'd come in, they'd be playing things, learning them very slow, and they would get faster and faster and faster. Basically keep playing the tunes. If they could play it faster they would keep playing it faster. It didn't always sound the best at tap speeds. The kids had to grow up and mature a little bit to be able to see that. I feel like if you look around to other kinds of music, other genres, you right away see that really, really fast music is like it's not the norm. It's not the norm in pop music, it's not the norm in classical or really a lot of kinds of music. I will say my kids listen to one kind of music called Speedcore. It is the norm in Speedcore, but I don't know why people would want to listen to that. It's like when I say please put your headphones on. 

I was thinking about speed because I was walking around when I was at Fiddle Hell to hear all the different jams. I think the fastest jams were the intermediate fiddlers. They were the ones they had gone through this process. That I saw with the kids when I taught at camp, where they'd play slow and then, as soon as they could play faster, they would play faster and keep going, going, going and get to this intermediate stage where they're playing everything as fast as they can and start to pick a variety of tempos, play things a little slower and enjoy different speeds. And I'm not saying you should play everything slow. That can also be a phase I've seen artists go through. 

You know I grew up in the same area as the Van Nordstrand brothers, Andrew and Noah. Noah was on the podcast a couple months ago and I remember when they played fast. And then I remember when they played slow and all of a sudden everything they wanted to do was very slow. It was like, ooh, the slower we go, the deeper and more meaningful the music will be. I mean, the really interesting thing about that was that Andrew came to camp that year and he got the kids to slow their tunes down. You know, all the kids had been playing a while who were getting really good playing really fast. He was like we're going to take some simple tunes and play them slow and the kids were like, well, this sounds boring, aha, well, what can you do to make it sound more interesting? He was really making them pay attention to the rhythm of their bowing and shuffles and adding double stops and making the tune sound very rhythmic and getting the beat in there. And I was impressed because I was like, oh, I don't want to be the one making these kids play slow. But yeah, andrew, he brought that to them. I think it made a lot of them better. 

So if just playing fast doesn't make your fiddling better, what does make it better? That phase beyond everything fast and beyond everything slow, where you're enjoying a variety of tempos. Whatever tempo you are going, you want to have your spot on the beat, whether you're playing at the front of the beat maybe a contradance, kind of syncopated, pushing French-Canadian style whether you're playing right in the middle of the beat or kind of behind the beat, which Judy Hyman and some of the old-time fiddlers talk about playing on the back of the beat. You see that in jazz too. So you're not just rushing but you're really focused on where you are in the beat and kind of sticking right there wherever the beat is. 

I don't know if I'm playing too fast, if I'm moving around on the beat, not hitting it in the right place every time. Also, if I can't improvise, if I want to take a little break or I want to play something a little differently, add in some ornaments that I don't usually do and I can't get them in there. My brain kind of short circuits and my hands won't do it. Usually it means I'm just playing too fast, I'm trying to play it too fast. What I would suggest food for thought is noticing music at different speeds. People think about fiddling as always being this fast thing. Notice the different speeds that professional musicians will play tunes at and how that can sound good, what you like. Go ahead and notice how most music is done at a variety of speeds that are not super, super fast, and then go ahead and try playing at those different speeds. Experiment with trying to make your tunes sound really awesome, really rhythmic at every speed and let your tunes breathe. Basically, when I talk about not playing it so fast that I can't improvise on it, I can't spice it up, add new stuff, I'm playing it slow enough that the tune can breathe and I can breathe while I play the tune. Yeah, breathe, that's another thing. A little bit about playing fast. 

Our tune for today is called Gilsaw. Sometimes I see it G-I-L-S-A-W Because it's like two words. Gill Saw, it's an old time tune from Missouri. This is a D major tune, usually done in standard tuning. This tune comes from the playing of Pete McMahan, who is a Missouri fiddler in central Missouri. You'll find it on. Charlie Walden has a list of a hundred essential Missouri fiddle tunes. It's on that one, Gilsaw. And of course Howard Marshall, a Missouri fiddler researcher, writes about it. He said about this tune that there was a fiddler playing it while busking at the Wabash Railroad Depot in Montgomery City, Missouri, and someone, either McMahon or his uncle, heard it and learned it from that fiddler who was busking with the tune and, you know, asked the name of it and he said it was Gilsaw. But he thought maybe that was the guy's name, was Gilsaw, or maybe that was the name of the tune. Who knows? This tune goes by Gilsaw. It is featured. 

I don't know if you guys know about this collection. Gene Silberberg has two collections. One's called Fiddle Tunes I Learned at Tractor Tavern and the other collection's called 93 Tunes I Didn't Learn at Tractor Tavern. This guy has a sense of humor. So Tractor Tavern was an old time jam in the Seattle area. So these are old time tunes from the Appalachian Mountains originally, and some sort of Midwestern tunes. But they were collected in the far Northwest, which is where Gene Silberberg was playing and collecting tunes. And this book is still around. Sometimes you can find them both as a collection, or you can find one or the other Tunes I Learned at Tractor Tavern, Tunes I Didn't Learn at Tractor Tavern. This one is in the Didn't Learn, yeah. So that book is an interesting resource, yep, and now we're going to play the tune Gilsaw. 

Casey Murray (Caribou Party)

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Today we're going to be talking to the cellist and folk musician, Casey Murray. Casey Murray fiddles on the cello. Very exciting, our first guest to do this. Casey plays the cello. They also play guitar, mandolin, banjo, probably other instruments too. They write tunes and teach and perform in the Boston area and far beyond that. They went to the Berkelee School of Music where you can study cello and American roots music. We'll be hearing more about that and they perform with Molly Tucker and with Corner House, Calico. Lots of other bands I won't name them all. So, Casey, welcome. It's really great to have you here. Thanks for having me. 

I guess we'll start with a little bit about your journey just getting into music. All cards on the table. I know a little bit of this story because Casey and I go way back. How did you first get introduced to kind of string instruments and music when you were little? 

It wasn't really anything that was an impetus of my own. It kind of mostly sprung from my dad. Way back when I was, I think, probably about three, going on four, our local town had, I think, an advertisement column called the Penny Saver and there was an ad for introductory pre-twinkle violin classes to do parent-child kind of thing. And my dad signed us up and we did 10 weeks of classes together learning the open strings, how to hold a box cracker, jack violin with a little dowel stick. So that was my first instance of trying an instrument. 

So that was the Suzuki method. Yeah, you're not the only one we've talked to who started that way. What about after that? 

After that it kind of felt like a pretty natural progression of I really enjoyed it. It didn't feel like anything that I had to crumble about practicing or going to lessons or it was something that was enjoyable and I looked forward to doing whenever it was time to do it. So I think it was kind of almost like a positive snowball effect of rolling with going through the Suzuki method on violin and going to group classes and doing improv and fiddle classes and seeing different people in different ages of their own musical journeys, seeing other instruments and learning about how other instruments worked and being curious about them myself. The school of where we were at at the time kind of had this environment of curiosity and I think I was just very curious musically and I think that was a very positive setting for me to get my first bit of footing with music. 

Yeah, that curiosity makes sense, considering how many instruments and kind of styles you've explored since then. When I knew you back at the Kanack School, you were playing violin, like you're describing, but at some point you switched to cello. Mm-hmm, what was that? 

I think I was about six or seven, my younger brother played the cello and I was always mildly jealous about the fact that he could sit and play and also had a C string. 

It's always the sitting. 

I know yeah. 

Like relax. 

I pitched this idea to my parents of playing the cello and they were pretty hesitant about well, what about the violin? You've worked so hard, we don't want to put all of those years of practice to the side. So I was like well, I will make a deal, I'll practice both and work equally as hard at both, if I can start cell lessons. So I did that for about six years and then eventually decided that playing the violin was not exactly the thing I wanted to do long term. So let that one fall to the side a little bit. 

Do you still have a fiddle? 

I do Yep. 

I've seen you play it, so a lot of people might not be familiar with cello as an instrument in folk music. So you said you were doing improv and fiddle already in the school where you were learning. Did you dive into that with cello right away also? 

Yeah, I think the part of learning to play the cello in that kind of context was knowing the comfort I had on the fiddle with being able to fiddle and improvise and things like that. I kind of gave the cello another lens that felt more approachable and that it was okay to explore and kind of figure out what it was the sound I was looking for to come from the cello. So it didn't feel like a prescribed classical Suzuki square feeling of cello sound. I kind of had a way of exploring what I wanted the cello to sound like. 

So that curiosity what did cellos do when they play fiddle tunes in folk music? Do you play the tune? How does it fit on there? And if not, what else do you do? 

There are so many things you can do with the cello. 

Mostly a lot of melodies unfortunately don't fit super well on the cello. 

The lack of an E string makes that a little bit tricky, but there's some melodies that sit really nicely on the cello and switching octaves also works Some B parts or A parts depending on the tune. Swapping the octave can not be a nice arrangement choice too, even though we have to do it out of necessity and something that I love doing with the cellos. Backing up the tune as a guitarist might. There isn't like a ton of, I guess, background or history of cello and folk music. So my approach to what figuring out what to do with the fiddle tune on the cello is listening to a lot of what a guitar might do, or a bazookie, sometimes even a mandolin, and also listening to percussionists or drummers, kind of figuring out how they're supporting melodic ideas and figuring out how I can incorporate those sounds onto the cello to really as a backup player or not at all trying to distract or take away from a melody, but we're trying to uplift it and support it and highlight moments in them through how we're backing it up. 

Thank you for that. It's really interesting to think about listening to how other instruments are accompanying and then how you can do that with the instrument you have. But I know you also play some of those other instruments. When did you feel like I turned around and all of a sudden played a bunch of things, whereas before I only knew you as a fiddle and cello player, and did you get into the banjo and guitar and those other? 

guitar was, I think, something more. In high school I was starting to look at figuring out a way to play for a contra dance a little bit more and I started playing some cello for some dances and then soon very quickly figured out how physically exhausting it is to play for a contra dance, backing it up completely on the cello. There are thick strings and you can really only play two of them at the same time and it's quite physically taxing. So I was trying to find a way to approach playing for dance music that I wouldn't end the night in pain or exhausted completely. So I got my first little dinky e-bay guitar to start teaching myself a little bit on, just getting familiar with how the bottom two strings work because that's usually what I'm working with on the cello when I'm backing up a fiddle tune and kind of started there on the guitar. The banjo came a bit later. I started playing the banjo more seriously in college. I started taking lessons with Bruce Molsky and learning some old-time clawhammer banjo. 

You had such a unique college experience. I don't think I went to college in 1999, and Berkeley was just jazz. I think they hadn't started their roots music. It's so amazing to have that available now. How did you decide I mean such a commitment to spend your college years diving so deeply into the world of folk music? How did you decide to do that? And I don't know Then, what was it like? Was it what you expected? 

Yeah, I was applying to college was kind of a I didn't. It wasn't quite necessarily kicking and screaming because I didn't want to go, it was more of a concession to my parents who were like wondering if it was possible to have a successful music career without going to college. So I reached out to a couple mentors and got some opinions and advice. And at the time high school Casey was a little bit kind of shooting for the stars and figuring out what it is I wanted a little bit. So I sent an email to Natalie Haas asking for some advice on what she would recommend someone in my position who was gigging already, teaching a little bit already, and what kind of my options were looking forward to a career in music. And she responded and that was quite over the moon at the time, so exciting. And she she gave me some details on the Berklee American Roots Music Program. I decided to go for it. Berkelee was the only place I applied. I figured if there was one school that worked for me, this was probably it, and if I didn't get in, that's fine too. Hmm. 

So my Berkelee, my Berkelee time was quite special. I feel like I learned a lot and grew a lot as a as a cellist and a musician. I Got to study with a lot of cool people. I was quite likely in the fact that Natalie was teaching at Berkelee the exact four years I was there, so I got to study with her the whole time, which was quite special, getting to study from musicians who weren't chalice too. And that's something that I really valued a lot at Berkelee was I had my weekly lessons with Natalie, but I could also have extra lessons with mandolin players, harpists, banjo players, little players, things like that. So it's very, very apt to the kind of music learning that I like to do. Which was curious about how a harpist might play a tuner, backup a tune and Incorporate their melodic sense of chords to back in fiddle tune and things like that. 

Yeah, so many ways to satisfy that curiosity we were talking about when you're going to college for a fiddling. Is it like you have a class in like old time from the Appalachian Mountains and then a class in like Irish from Donegal, like You're just learning all the things, or I'm just so curious because I never got to do it? 

Yeah, I think it varied from. It was always so dependent on what, like my schedule, was that semester. There is some, depending on the teachers. So I think my first year I did Greg List's 21st century string band, which was essentially an ensemble of a bunch of people who learned punch brother tunes or crooked still tunes and figured out how to incorporate those tunes from those recordings to the instrumentation of the ensemble. That was that class. And then the next semester I was in Celtic ensemble. We learned a bunch of Celtic tunes. And then there's old-time ensemble and what else was there? There is contemporary string quartet where we dove into like some Turtle Island string quartet stuff, and another 21st century string band that kind of more focused on playing things like Mike Marshall and Dawg and Daryl Anger and stuff like that. So there's kind of a whole world of things and that's just like the folk music side of it that doesn't even dive into the world, music from Greece or India or anything like that. 

Wow, casey, I was up to correct the transcription afterwards and there's gonna be so many names for me to look up the spelling off. Okay, so I know you. You write tunes, you compose tunes. The first tunes of yours that I heard were part of your project with your partner, Molly. The album that we have a tune from today, it gets called After the Sky Weeps. I'm curious when you started writing tunes and what the process was Creating the music for that album, which is so beautiful. 

Yeah, my tune writing, I think, started probably around high school. A lot of it I did mostly with Daphne Pickins. We kind of collaborated a lot and it happened mostly when I was learning to play the guitar. And this is kind of has been my approach to new instruments, is kind of my way of figuring out how an instrument works is writing on it, and I started with like writing chord progressions on the guitar and bring them to Daphne, just playing them a bunch, and she'd improvise and write a tune over it and that was kind of how that would start. Then that kind of continued playing cello, starting to play more melody on it, figuring out how the melodic fingerings and things worked on the cello and writing tunes. That way I wrote. I wrote a lot of banjo tunes. 

In college. I learned a new tuning from Bruce and trying to have to figure out where all the chords and intervals landed and I Would write a tune in that tuning just to figure out how it worked. So a lot of the tunes that Molly and I wrote for that record stem from a lot of tunes that I wrote as, I guess, homework assignments in college. Her tune writing also came from that same time. It was kind of early pandemic. We had a lot of free time and Writing tunes was the way we spent those, those spare nights without social plans. 

Fair enough. You know that's so funny. Noah says that he taught himself fiddle just by writing tunes. He said he'd get frustrated trying to learn a tune. He just write his own. I've been trying to learn the concertina and so I've never learned an instrument by trying to write tunes on it. But after hearing Noah say that and, honestly, after hearing you talk about it today, I've been trying it out. It's a pretty cool way to get to know an instrument, just with that curious bend to it, trying to find out more, like really getting to know it, like you might get to know a person asking it. So you wrote the music in college and, like you said at the beginning of lockdown, where did you guys record that album? 

We recorded it in some of the Massachusetts because it was kind of like deep pandemic we were trying to figure out we have all this time it seems like it could be possible to have this happen, but we weren't really quite sure how. So we kind of started throwing things at the ball and seeing what stuck and we reached out to Jenna Moynihan about producing it. She had never produced an album before, so we were her first album production project. She had told us that Yann Falquet was starting to create this home studio kind of thing and he had recorded some stuff for Hanneke Castle during lockdown and it seemed like the easiest solution that was right around the corner and make a little bubble and not have to go anywhere. And it was cold, cozy January and we could just pull up for a weekend track a record. 

Yeah, oh, it's a beautiful record, but where can people find it online if they want to check it out? 

You can buy it from us directly on Bandcamp. It's also on all the streaming services Spotify, apple Music, tidal, et cetera. 

So when you came to Baltimore I heard you play with a different band, with the band Corner House, at a house concert at Brad Kolodner's. It was so fun and I think you're on the road a lot with Corner House. Can you tell us about that band? 

Yeah, Corner House is a super fun project and I really enjoy playing with this band because it feels like it's such a wild melting pot of musicians. I haven't found another band that sounds quite like us, I think, because of the individuality of each person is so different. It's quite fun to explore the possibilities of that band, but they started out as a trio without me way back in 2017. And they went on tour in Scotland and realized that they wanted to chill us in the band full time and asked me to join. So we started digging around Boston a little bit, getting our footing, building some material together. Yeah, really cool to just grow musically together. My background stems from Celtic and contra dance music and Louise, our fiddler, is from Scotland, so she has very Scottish fiddle roots. And then Ethan and Ethan they're two of them have both like a more of an old-time bluegrass background and a little bit of jazz. So it's kind of cool to melt all of those things together and have this one crazy old-time bluegrass Celtic sound. 

It's a really unique sound. Any fun things you've guys have been up to lately. 

Recently we've been doing a lot of touring around the Northeast playing for some festivals. We had a really fun time at the Rochester Jazz Festival this past year Our first time we played two back-to-back completely sold-out shows. It was really. We haven't played to a room that full and not excited before. It was quite fun for us to be a part of. 

Casey, we're going to talk about ways that people can connect to you, but you teach in the Boston area, is that right? Yeah, you teach online also A little bit, yeah. 

Kind of have a few different ways in which I teach. I teach at a community music school in Wayland, teach a little bit at home and some on Zoom and if people want to find out more, how can they get in touch with you? 

Best way is through my website Caseymurraymusic.com.

My email is also Caseymurraymusic.gmail.com to get in touch and reach out. 

Cool. Well, so everyone definitely check out Corner House and look for Casey's album with Molly. Our tune for today is called Caribou Party and we're going to hear Casey play it on the cello from the album After the Sky Weeps. This is I guess I quizzed Casey before we started it's Crooked Old Time Tune in C Minor. Is it your tune or is it traditional? Can you tell us about this tune? 

Yeah, it's one of mine. My last spring college, where everything went to Zoom, I was in a class called. It was an ensemble tune writing, and every week everybody wrote a tune. We played through everybody's tune. We all had so much fun during the semester and after we all graduated we decided to keep doing it throughout the summer. So we kept meeting every couple weeks on Zoom and sharing tunes through writing. This is, you know, deep summer 2020. This was a tune. Usually we had a prompt. I don't think I had a prompt for this tune, but I had never written a minor banjo tune before, so I decided to give it a go and this is the tune that fell out, and it also sits nicely on the cello because of the nice low C string the tune name came from, I think I was trying to remember or figure out what you refer to as a group of plural caribou, and so I came up with just probably just called the caribou party. 

I love that. Well, Casey Murray, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Thanks for having me. 

It's been quite a pleasure. Be sure to look at Casey's website, caseymurraymusic.com. Look Casey up on Instagram, where their kind of latest updates will be. I enjoy the corner house Instagram too. Sometimes you get to see the dog. What's your dog's name? Susie? Oh Susie, she's so sweet. I mean I also like seeing your updates. But okay, thank you everyone. 

Sitting or Standing (On the Loose)

 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 On the Loose from my album Broke the Floor by Meg Wobus and Charley Beller. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about sitting vs standing for playing the fiddle what? But first a quick word about reviews. The place where you can leave a review of a podcast is on Apple Podcasts that site and thank you to two lovely reviews I got recently from New Fiddler with Big Ears and Drew Reynolds. Thank you so much for those reviews. 

If you listen on a different platform, you can often leave a rating, or if you want to recommend the podcast, you can always just post about it. Wherever you run into other fiddlers online, whether somewhere on Facebook or Fiddle Hangout or some other place, the reason that I'm asking for reviews and recommendations is that this podcast is an investment for me in time and it also costs money for the mixing and the hosting. 

I don't know if you noticed, but I don't do any commercials or sponsored products. So basically it helps to sell some of my fiddle studio books and my online courses, and it's how it kind of works commercially. So connecting to beginning fiddlers or fiddlers who might be interested in this content is a way to just help the podcast get out there and make it kind of viable for me to continue spending kind of a week out of every month working on it. 

Anyway, let's talk about this topic. Gosh, I haven't been playing a lot of fiddle. I've just been playing the concertina lately and having a lot of fun with that and our guitar, my father's Martin guitar, has been in the shop for six or seven weeks and it's coming back next week. So in my house there'll be a little bit of fighting over who gets to play the guitar between me and my husband when it comes back. 

Should you sit or stand to play the fiddle? This is a silly topic. I like the silly topics the best. You can do anything. You can sit, you can stand, you can lie on the floor. Have you tried lying on the floor? It's kind of crazy. All the angles are different. The gravity works very differently when you're trying to play and you're lying on the floor. But I thought I'd tell you some of my thoughts about it. 

People stand a lot for classical music. In fact it's kind of an issue with kids when I'm trying to teach kids because you're trying to get them to stand a lot, and then they see the cellists and there's always some kids who want to switch to cello just because they can sit. In fact, I have an interview in November coming out with Casey Murray who said that they switched when they were a kid from fiddle to cello partly because of the sitting. 

But the reason that classical players stand so much and this is not an orchestra, but they usually stand to practice and to perform, you know, as a solo is because when you stand up, your body is very aligned. Your back is just naturally straight. You're using your lower body to hold your weight up, your shoulders and your head are more upright and loose and your arms are longer and straight. So you have already set yourself up to be playing the fiddle in a more relaxed and aligned way and you've got your angles a certain way. 

When you're standing up, because your back is straight, it's pretty different from sitting. Even when classical players sit, they try to sit with their back really straight. I will often sit with my back, not touching the back of my chair, if I'm, if I'm sitting to perform in a string quartet or in an orchestra, trying to mimic standing as much as possible, have my feet on the floor and all my weight in my feet the way that I would if I was standing. 

If you're sitting on a couch it's a completely different story. Or kind of slumped in a chair, you've got that curve in your back. Things are collapsing and basically when you're sitting and you're playing the fiddle, you're using your arms, neck, shoulders, head just that very top part of your body to do the work. So you're not standing in a way that your whole body is supported and that maybe your head is just holding the fiddle up and your shoulder and your arm are relaxed and not working so hard to hold. 

I hope I'm explaining this well. Of course I'm not. I'm not a medical professional and I don't know that much about bodies, but I have played standing and sitting up and when you're standing it's easier on your arms and your shoulders and your neck and when you're sitting it's going to put a lot more strain on those. They're going to be working harder. 

You can be more likely to have some pain, some tension, to kind of wear yourself out sitting. Of course, if you're standing, your feet are going to, you know, get tired, you're going to wear yourself out in a different way. So if we just think about sitting and fiddlers sit a lot more than they stand. Okay, so those, those classical players practicing you know, when I was in conservatory practicing two, three hours a day, I was standing that whole time. 

But when I fiddle I usually sit down and partly that's because I don't need perfect alignment and to be completely holding with my head. When I'm playing the fiddle I'm usually playing in first position. I can hold the fiddle with my hand. More it doesn't really matter and I'm not playing things that are so difficult that I'm going to have trouble getting around. Like, if you're trying to shift and you're slumped in a chair, you're going to elbow yourself right in the ribs. 

If you're standing, you're going to have a lot more space and openness to shift around, get around the fiddle. But I don't need to get around the fiddle if I'm playing traditional music, just in first position. If I'm trying to play Tchaikovsky Concerto, I need to get around the violin. So if I'm just playing at home, I sit down and when I teach kids and adults and we're playing fiddle tunes, we usually sit down and then if we're going to play something hard, then I'll have them stand up. 

Or if they're having trouble with your angles, if you've only really played sitting down but you're not happy about your tone, hey, why not try standing up? You may have a change in the angles of your bow and your highway and also a change in the way you put your weight into the string. Gravity is kind of working with you or against you in terms of playing the violin and you might have more success standing up. And also, if you're just one of these people that gets kind of antsy sitting down or your back starts to hurt, try standing up. It's great. 

When I perform for like a full dance, I try to stand up because if I sit, everything just gets too heavy and starts to hurt. I'm actually more likely to kind of have cramping in my left hand playing a full dance. If I'm sitting, for that same reason, like I'm hunching a little, everything's getting heavy, my fingers are getting heavy on the string and my hands clenching too much and I'm gonna start to cramp, whereas if I stand up, I tend to use that drilled into me so many years that lighter, more floating posture and way of playing, and it's more sustainable for a three-hour dance, oh my gosh, anyway. So if you only do one, try branching out, and if you really wanna be crazy, lie down on the floor, try playing that way. 

Our tune for today is called On the Loose. This is a tune that I composed. I haven't shared one of my tunes yet. It's in kind of an old-time style. It's in G major. I wrote it so many years ago. I don't actually remember composing it so I can't tell you what was going through my head, but I do know that I wrote a lot of unusual and experimental tunes and then this was part of an effort of mine to write tunes in a more accessible style that sounded more like traditional tunes. 

I shared this tune online I don't know, maybe it was last year and I remember somebody who watched the Real on Instagram wrote, because I said you know, this is a tune that I wrote. And they said I don't really believe that it's possible you could write this tune because it's just really complicated and I don't think you composed it. I was like, huh, well, I did and it's true, this tune sounds more complicated than it is. 

I love to just take advantage of the little tricks on fiddle with. You know the way double stops work and everything and drones, where you can make it sound a little fancier than it. And it's not that hard to play. It's not as hard as it sounds. I knew you'd write it. The B part for this tune is one of those four bars that repeats, you know, and then the whole B part repeats. You end up playing these big four bar chunks four times. And in the contradance world we use those kinds of tunes for a dance that ends in Petronella, turns, contra corners, even like a tight series of four bar moves, like circles and stars or the balance and the wavy line. So I don't know If you know about contra dancing. That's what I use those repetitive B parts for. 

We are sharing tunes from our album this month, so this tune is off my new album which is called Broke the Floor. It's me playing fiddle, my husband Charley is playing guitar and we will be back next month with some old time tunes for you. I think I have an old time jam to pull tunes from, but we wanted to give you I don't know a little taste of the album. You can find it online. 

Broke the Floor should be out pretty soon and also available on my bandcamp paying for the digital or the CD. My bandcamp page is actually megwobus.bandcamp.com. Wobus is spelled W-O-B-U-S as in bus. Anyway, I won't pretend we're gonna play it now. I'm gonna put in a clip from the finally finished and mastered version of our album here for the tune On the Loose by Meg Wobus Beller. 

Instrument Horror Stories (Jaybird)

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

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. We have a fun topic. Today. We're going to be talking about instrument horror stories. A lot of these are from the Facebook Fiddlers Association. Oh my gosh. I posted and they delivered. 

Reading through the comments, my children came in to see what my husband and I were yelling about, because there were so many comments that made us just shout oh no. So this episode might need a little trigger warning. If the ideas of fiddles and bows, crunching and cracking is going to send you into a tailspin, maybe skip to the next episode. 

Anyway, I think there's some pretty funny stories. I'll tell you mine first. When I was little, my dad and I would argue and this never happened but if I fell down the stairs, should I protect myself or should I protect the instrument? You know, fall on me or fall on the violin. 

And we would joke about it. And I would say well, I should fall on the violin because I can always get a new violin. And he said no, protect the violin because you'll heal and the violin won't. Luckily, my fiddlers were all safe up until I was an adult. 

But as a teenager I did run down the stairs in our house and there was a doorway there and my bow just stuck between the door and the door jam and tips snapped right off. And that was a nice bow I was. I was already playing professionally at that point. Oh my, my parents were not impressed by this. They said I had to buy my own bow. 

So we went down to Tom Hosmer. Tom Hosmer, great fiddler and has a violin shop in the Syracuse area, has for many years, because he sold me all my fiddles from when I was three and he's still there. He was so nice. I looked at bows and I picked out the one that I wanted. I didn't have enough money to buy it, but I had a summer job at that point. 

So I said can you give me a loaner bow and then I'll save my money for my summer job and I'll come back and buy this bow? And he said oh, meg, just take the bow and bring the money back when you have it. That was great. So I did get to practice that summer with a decent bow and worked all summer and then gave all the money to Tom for the bow. 

But I was more careful with my instruments. After that lesson learned, I did have my instruments stolen out of my car. That was very sad when that happened. Hopefully that violin and bow ended up with someone who could use them because they were nice. That was my college violin. 

My violin now the Rimmer Owen violin had a tiny crack for a long time. That was not causing any harm at all. I was just nursing it along, keeping it humid in the winter, and I bumped my violin at a gig I was sitting. It just slipped through my fingers and kind of crashed against the stage and the crack spread all the way up the front of the violin. It was horrifying. 

Still had to play the rest of the gig and then I took it to Michael Weller in Alexandria. He fixed it up. But oh my goodness. So let's talk about some of these stories from Facebook. There were a lot of car stories. I was surprised at the number of car stories. 

So I knew, when I was a teenager, a bass player who had a van and they had, like, not shut the door all the way the bass had fallen out of the back of their van into the road and gotten hit by a car. There were at least two guys on Facebook who had run over guitars with their cars. How does this happen? 

Someone else described getting a headache. They had their fiddle in their car without a case. They put it on the seat behind them and then later they had this headache and they just leaned their seat back to take a nap and crushed the fiddle. Wow, that must have been a moment and already had a headache. Wow. 

A couple of people talked about fiddles in hot cars, so the glue melting or the especially the neck falling off. So maybe that's the glue that goes first, because there were a lot of different humidity neck falling off stories. You always think about keeping your fiddle humid enough during like dry winter months, but apparently if it gets too humid the neck can fall off. 

So somebody talked about it happening at a hurricane or in a hot car or an outdoor like summer jam session. Yeah, this girl lost her fiddle at the airport. That's kind of everyone's nightmare. I've left my fiddle at restaurants and bars. Always got it back, you know. I mean they say Yo-yo Ma left St rad in a cab, got it back. Most people are pretty good natured trying to help you get your instrument back. 

I did love the stories from mishaps from the middle of gigs. I felt a little bad for the girls that she almost threw up all over her fiddle, but a lot of bow flying incidents. So someone described that they had some weakness in their hand and that their bow would fly out. But a lot of other people said that they had just, you know, accidentally thrown their bow. You know playing vigorously. I guess it happens. I've never thrown my bow while playing. 

There's other things that can go wrong. Yeah, I saw about a bridge breaking in half and the whole string quartet kind of erupted and the people jerked because it made a really loud sound and then there was like stands falling over and music flying. That sounds like quite an experience. I'll give you my two favorite stories here. 

This guy said that he had his fiddle on stage along with his guitar, his Martin D 28. I don't know what that means, but I assume that it means something if you put that in there. He says a girl who had been drinking. She fell onto the stage hitting the fiddle stand, sending it over into the dance floor. So the fiddle went flying. It landed upside down, cracked open the top and while the fiddle was in the air, the stand fell down onto the guitar and punched a hole in the upper. Bout in the rosewood. Yeah, a moment of silence for this guy. What a terrible gig. 

Oh yeah yeah. There were several sitting and stepping on fiddle stories. You gotta keep the case closed, folks. These were all open case stories. Okay, here's my last one. I'm just going to read it to you. "My newly restored vintage fiddle was resting loosely in a soft case when a gust of wind swept the case and fiddle overboard. This was on a sunset cruise on a wind-powered sailing ship with a historic band entertaining the passengers. After 20 minutes and running over the fiddle several times, we picked it up. The glue had dissolved, leaving it in pieces."

Mmm, yeah, this was inspiring me never to take my fiddle on a boat for any reason. Oh, no gig is worth that much. Ah well, take a deep breath. After those, I think we're all resolved to take good care of our instruments. 

Now Our tune for today is Jaybird. This is a tune from the Baltimore Old Time Jam. Hey, I am a sponsor of the Baltimore Old Time Jam. You can go online and find out more about it. It's at baltimoreoldtimefest.com. The old time scene around here is supported by Ken Kolodner and his son, Brad Kolodner, and they do a lot of events and they're all great. 

There's a square dance, a jam, there's a festival in April and I wanted to get the word out for my business Fiddle Studio, where I have my courses and my books and I interact with students through that site. I was looking for local places to advertise that weren't just giving more money to Google, because who needs to do that? 

Yeah, so I'm sponsoring the Old Time Jam and if you're coming through Baltimore you should definitely check it out. A big thank you to Brad and Ken for doing that jam, because I get so many tunes for the pod from them, including this one, Jaybird, also called March to the Fife or kind of Pennsylvania Fifers. Yeah, there's a few different fifing names for it, considered kind of a revival tune. 

Also has been played a lot since the 1960s, early 70s by some of the fiddlers and banjo players in that time frame. So, like Art Rosenbaum, John Burke, Joel Schimberg, it was collected from Southwestern Pennsylvania. Yeah, we're looking, mountain country played on the fiddle and the fife, and that would have been same time, mid-20th century. 

It was played both as a march and as a reel. We kind of do it as a march at the jam. Some of it sounds like Skip to my Lou. We play the high part first and then we play the low part second. If you want to hear it that way, there is a recording on Slippery Hill of John Summers playing it in 1970, basically the same way. We do it at the Baltimore Old Time Jam. 

The Fiddle tune archive had the high part second, so somebody must play it that way. This is Jaybird. Yeah, nice D tune. Here we go you. 

Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudio.com, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day.

All about the bow (New Five Cent Piece)

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 New Five Cent piece 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 bow. I've done all these podcasts for Fiddle Studio. I think this is the 50th podcast. If I release them in the right order, this will be number 50. That's a lot of podcast episodes, but I've never done an episode solely on the bow. For this one episode it will be Bow Studio podcast. The bow is very important for fiddling. It's half the battle there really. 

When you start fiddling you really want to make sure your bow can hold rosin and I'll explain what I mean by that and loosen and tighten. This is pretty important to even just the fundamentals of getting a sound when I say you need a bow that can hold rosin. Sometimes bows are made. If the horsehair is a weird synthetic material or if there's a lot of oil on it, you can take the rosin and rub it up and down the hair and it just doesn't seem to be coming off. Use the scrape, your finger down the horsehair and there's none of that white dust on your finger. That's a problem. You want the hair to be picking up the rosin dust. I've come across a few bows like that in my day. 

In terms of turning, check that the bow tightens and loosens and there's not something wrong with the end screw. It can get gunky in there and get hard to turn or it can just break and not work right. Why do we tighten and loosen the bow? Here's how I explain it to my students who ask me about this. The bow is carved from wood. That's how they were made traditionally and it's carved on a curve. If you take all the pressure off, it looks like a big smile. 

Then if you turn the screw on the end to the right, so righty-tidy, it's going to pull the hair. It shortens up the bow hair and that pulls the curve up. The bow gets straighter. You straighten it to not quite exactly straight, but to I call it a Mona Lisa smile just a very slight curve. Use it like that to play the fiddle. But we don't leave it tightened like that. The reason we don't leave it tight is because you've put a lot of this pressure on the bow. 

The bow is carved on a curve. But then you've pulled it to pull the wood straight and it makes it nice and bouncy and great for playing. But if you just left it, put it back in your case and didn't take the pressure off and let it loosen back to its original shape, it would start to warp so it would pull to one side or the other to relieve the pressure. Once it starts to warp it's either an expensive repair job or it could just be beyond repair. So we relieve the pressure by turning that end, screw back to the left lefty-loosey and it lets out a little hair which lets the bow bend back down and takes the pressure off. It goes back to its natural curve.

 The rosin, the other important thing, helps the hair stick to the strings. I mean hair doesn't naturally stick to steel strings, it's got oil in it. If you think about human hair, it's got oil in it. I tell the kids, you know, with their fiddles, don't touch this horse hair with your hands, because your hands have naturally have oil on them and you'll just be putting more oil on the hair and the oil is not good. You want it to be sticky so it can grab the string and make it vibrate. 

So you want to put the rosin on there and that will make it sticky, of course. I'm sure you can imagine if you make it too sticky it's also not going to work well. So if you accidentally put too much rosin on, just get a clean handkerchief and rub some of that off. If it's coming off in a cloud making you sneeze, that was too much. 

Bows do need to be re-haired, maybe every couple years. If you're playing a lot, you might need to do it every year. I play a lot and then I forget, so it's probably every other year. They can do something to fix a little bit of warping. So if you left it tight and it's sort of bending out to the side and it doesn't look right, you can ask them. I think they like soak it and set it again. Sometimes you'll also need to get part of the winding or the pad done. That happens to me because I play a lot and I actually sort of wear the pad away. It's like the part right above the frog from my finger pressure. Maybe I'm pressing too hard on the pad there. I need to get that replaced every couple of years because I wear right through it from playing so much. 

The materials they use to make bows. They have the horse hair and I guess I just read when I was researching this that they like horses from colder climates because they have thicker hair. So that's what they use for that. No horses were hurt in the making of your bow, yeah, it's just from their tail they get a haircut. I have to tell the kids that sometimes, because they're worried. 

They use this kind of wood Pernambuco wood that has been used for bows for many years but unfortunately the tree that grows mostly in Brazil it's also, I think, the national tree of Brazil is endangered so it got all used up and they were using it for bows and they're trying to replant them now and kind of get the species back up and healthy. But there are not a lot of new bows being made from Pernambuco. So more often you'll see a bow made from sandalwood or Brazilwood. 

Now Brazilwood kind of just meet. It's not an actual kind of wood. They're sort of, because Pernambuco is from Brazil, they're trying to say, oh, this is like that, and sometimes it's from like the outer areas of the same tree but it's not as good quality wood, or just from trees that are like that tree and grow in Brazil. So it can mean a lot of different things. It can be hard to know a little bit what you're getting with a wooden bow. 

If you're looking at bows, you probably also want to look at carbon fiber bows. You know they make these bows out of carbon fiber now and they do a great job. They're very resilient. You know they hold up in humid and dry temperatures. They're not going to be affected as much by the pressure and the warping and everything. I mean you still want to tighten them and loosen them, but they're just not as finicky as wooden bows. 

I still use a wooden bow. They average about 60 grams. So bows come in different weights and I use a heavy weight bow. So my bow is maybe like 63 grams, but people will use them 57, 58. It's not a huge range. If I was playing a lot of Mozart, I might have a lighter bow, but I play just a lot of really heavy styles dance, fiddle, Klezmer and I love having a heavy bow. I feel like I don't have to put as much muscle down into the string to get a really big sound, and my sound is big. I mean it might not sound that big on this podcast. If you're in the same room the kids like they cover their ears. My violin is pretty loud. 

It's hard to predict what kind of bow is going to sound best with your violin and for the way that you play your violin. So you really want to take your instrument to a shop and try a lot of different bows and if you have a couple favorites especially if they're different weights or different styles see if you can bring them home and try them for a week and then go back and try some bows again, see what feels good and what sounds good, and if you can bring a friend, listen to them play with the different bows. But really it will be up to the way that you play on your instrument. 

There's a bow out there that'll probably sound a little better than the others Bows I did do. If you're looking for bow grip information, there's an episode on bow grip. I think it's episode 35. You can go check that out. 

Our tune for today is the New Five Cent piece, also called New Five Cents or just Five Cents. This is the tune about five cents. It's a Cumberland tune, sort of the border region of Kentucky, Tennessee, so that was in the mountains and then also found in Missouri. I'll talk about that a little. In Kentucky it was played by the fiddler Isham Monday, born in 1879. And I guess, played this tune. He tuned his fiddle so low that even though it was a D major tune it sounded like it was in C. I don't know why that would be. Maybe it was really humid. 

That's a story I heard about Cajun fiddling was that it was humid and that the fiddle wouldn't stay up, so they ended up just tuning them down. That's why they'll do that. It's like a G flat, d flat, a flat and E flat, slightly torturous for someone with perfect pitch. 

Mark Wilson said this tune is called Buffalo Nickel in the Ozarks and dated it back to about 1913, although it could be older. There's also an early recording of the tune by Paul Wormack and that was 1928, recorded it as five cents. There's a lot of fiddling in Missouri. 

You know I live in Maryland and I know a lot about the old time fiddling. That was kind of done in the mountains, western Maryland and Western Southern Pennsylvania and it kind of goes all the way down through Western Virginia and down into Kentucky, Tennessee, and there's a whole genre of fiddling and different regional fiddlers there, North Carolina, but there is also a lot of fiddling out west in Missouri. They have all their own regional styles. 

I have some family that's from Missouri and also a lot of family from kind of north of there. In farm country in Iowa, all along the river there was a really big hotbed of different cultures. So they had a lot of French and German immigrants, a lot of Irish workers for the railroad, also African Americans, Indigenous Americans. There were a lot of different kinds of people and the fiddling tradition kind of reflects that. 

They had a healthy culture of dances, competitions and local radio and then they would also pick up tunes that were coming from the radio in the mountains. I talked in another podcast about Arthur Smith playing it on the radio in North Carolina and then the tune may be getting picked up in Missouri from that. 

If you're interested in learning more, I would check out Howard Marshall's books. Howard Marshall, great Missouri Fiddler, and Family live there for a long time and then later became basically like a scholar of the history of fiddling in Missouri. So I'm not sure I'm saying it right and you know, because I have family there I remember that they would say it kind of Missoura, but because I'm a Yankee girl, I can't quite say it right. I'm still working on Baltimore. Anyway, we are going to play this tune, Five Cent Piece, and this is going to be the Baltimore version. Okay. 

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.