How to play faster (Hollow Poplar)

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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 Hollow Poplar from a Square Dance at the Mobtown Ballroom in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about how to play fast, but before we get to my tips for playing fast, let me just address the question do you have to play fast? I don't think so. No, you don't have to play fast. Look, you don't have to play fast tunes. You can play all kinds of things on the fiddle and never play a real or fast jig. 

And you don't have to play reels that are meant to be played fast. You don't have to play them fast, you can just play them slow. The exception to that is for dancing. You have to play fast. So if you're just playing at home alone or with a friend or family member, there's no need to play fast. But if you're playing for dancing, stepping beat is between about 100 and 120, so you got to play fast for that. 

So, assuming you can play some reels but you play them slowly and you don't feel like you can play them fast, or they don't feel or sound settled at a fast tempo. How do you get there? How do you get from playing reels slowly to playing reels quickly? 

This is not a short project. In my experience it's about four years from starting from scratch to all the way up to tempo and be settled there For somebody who's playing a few hours a week and also in challenging environments. So by either taking lessons, playing in groups, going to camps, playing places where you'll be challenged to play faster, so you can just take your four years, see where you are. 

If it's been a lot longer than four years and you don't feel settled up to tempo, I've got some tips for you. Or if you're just in a big hurry Some of us are in a big hurry to get up to speed as fast as they can . 

When I say fast and settled, the settled is an important part of it, because people can be playing fast according to the metronome, but the music can sound how do I put this? Panicky or messy or both. And it's not really your fault. You just haven't gotten it up to speed and then you're not going to like this above the speed In order to play at 120 and sound settled and comfortable and not in a rush. You actually need to be able to play that tune at 130 or faster. 

In classical when we have these really fast runs, we bring them all the way up with the metronome to the tempo where we're going to perform it. But if you only ever practice it at that tempo and then you take your concerto in front of judges for competition or something, it's going to fall apart. You need to be able to play it even faster for it to run smooth every time.

This may have happened to you. If you play something fast at home and it sounds pretty good and you're like, oh, I've got this, it's fast, that's great. And then you go someplace, try to play with someone else or play for your teacher or perform, you get a little nervous and then it falls apart. That is because it's not settled. You haven't gotten it fast enough for it to be settled at a good fast playing speed. 

Beats per minute. Just in case we don't know beats per minute, that's a BPM beats per minute. The easiest one to know is just 60, because there are 60 seconds in a minute. So 60 beats per minute is an exact second and the classic dance tempo is 120, which is, of course, twice as fast as a second. That's used a lot because it's just a comfortable stepping tempo for square dancing, contra dancing, the way that I.

Right before I start a dance and I don't always play at 120, a lot of times it's more like 110, unless it's a community I know that likes to dance really fast. But somebody told me that 120 is like a Sousa March. So I'll think in my head dun dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun dun, and that gives me one, two, three, four. That gives me 120. And then I play it at that speed for the dance. So if you've been to a dance where I'm playing, I'm constantly hearing in my head Sousa Marches right before I start playing. 

Here let's get into some of the tips, okay. First tip for getting faster Use less bow. How much bow are you using? Is it six inches, four inches, three inches, three inches? It should be like one or one and a half inches Really really small bows for going fast. Practice that. 

If you're not slurring at all. That's gonna make it harder. Learn some slurring patterns, because when you slur, only one of your hands has to go fast and you don't have to coordinate them moving together. Your bow is just going a little slower and your left hand is moving fast. So once you have the trick of slurs, they will help you go fast. You can't just slur all your notes in a fiddle tune. That would make it much easier to go 120. You can only slur some of them. Look up my, I have a course for slurs and shuffle patterns, so learn some of those and they will help you go faster. 

Third tip simplify the tune. So you might not be used to simplifying tunes. Go through a couple and see where you can take notes out. You'll hear this a lot. When a professional fiddler plays a really fast tune, I mean maybe they just go for all the notes and it's like show off city. But a lot of times they'll take a lot of notes out and simplify it, especially if they're playing the tune really, really fast. So learn how to simplify tunes and take all those little passing notes out of there. 

I think scales, arpeggios, broken thirds, chromatic. Look, fiddlers don't like these. But I also play jazz occasionally and I know jazz players and they practice this stuff like crazy. Their scales their arpeggios broken thirds ba da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da da and chromatic scales, because it's the building blocks of what they're doing. And then when you hear like a really fast bebop solo and you're like how in the world are they playing that and making it up? And it's so fast, it was shedding those scales that did it. 

Yeah, shedding. You guys know what shedding is? Practicing. So at music school the classical players called it practicing but the jazz players called it shedding. Because you're like out in the woodshed I mean, yeah, that's my understanding. Anyway, I wasn't really either. Right, I'm a fiddler. 

I do have some tricks I run my students through to get them up to speed. One is rhythms. I might have gone over this in another podcast, but you take a reel where you've got groups of four notes, something like Fisher's hornpipe Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun Lots of, lots and lots of running notes. Hard to play that up to speed. It's got string crossings and everything, and you first you can play it slow fast. So bum ba dum ba dum, ba dum ba dum. It sounds like slow, fast, slow, fast, slow, fast, slow. Then you can flop it and do it fast, slow, fast, slow, fast, slow, ba dum ba dum, ba dum ba dum, ba dum, ba, dum, ba dum. Like that. 

Classical players will even take this to kind of the next step. Instead of just doing slow, fast and fast, slow, they'll take a group of four notes and make just one of them slow. So how would we do this? Fisher's Hornpipe you can take the first note and make that long. So I'm saying slow, but maybe I mean long, I don't know. They kind of come out to the same thing when you're using this practice technique. So it would be like bum ba dum, ba dum, ba, dum, ba dum, ba, dum ba dum. Then you can take the next note and make that the long note, this one's harder Ba dum ba, dum, ba dum, ba dum, ba, dum, ba, dum ba dum. 

Okay, I lost you all, but these are practicing in rhythms and they are like magic for making things faster. It's very hard to practice tunes that way, and that is part of the whole. Trick is not only are you practicing some of the notes fast, but you're also just learning the tune really really well because you're having to kind of translate it into these different rhythms. 

So part of playing fast is just learning really really well. If you wanna use a metronome, that's a classic way to get faster. You can start at 60, play your tune super slow at 60, one note per second, that's really slow. Then crank it up. You can go up in tens, try it at 70, try it at 80, try it at 90, go up in 20s. You can do 60 for two notes. Yeah, find a tempo that's really slow, where you feel really really comfortable, and then work up from there, playing fast. Yeah, it's not necessary, but it is fun. I think it's fun. 

Our tune today is Hollow Poplar. Oh, this is another tune from the square dance. So square dances you have to play fast. It's a little different from a contradance. In a contradance the dance fits the music exactly and it doesn't change. So the caller will teach the dancers what to do and kind of call the dance moves out while you're playing the tune. But then after a few times through, the dancers kind of know what to do and the caller will stop calling the moves out if the dancers seem like they have it and at that point a lot of times will change into a different tune. Sometimes we've changed tunes twice in a contradance because as long as the tune is 32 bars it's still gonna fit that dance and there's more variety that way, since they're just doing the same exact dance over and over again. 

Square dance is a little bit different because the moves some of them, are set and some of them the caller's just coming up with it on the spot. Well, they have some tricks in their bag, but the beginning and the end, and sometimes in the middle, they're deciding what they want the dancers to do and trying to fit it in with the music. And it doesn't always fit the music exactly, so they'll let the swing go on a little longer to get them back to where they need to be for the next set of moves to start in the square. 

So it's usually just one tune in a square dance and it goes very fast. So don't pick your complicated notey tunes for a square dance. Use your simple tunes for that, or simplify the tunes like we talked about, and be prepared to play them for a very long time. Yeah, it's nice if you have some rhythm players who can switch it up under the tune. 

Hollow Poplar is also called Hollow Poplar Log or Old Hollow Poplar. Yeah, this was a breakdown from Missouri, although I guess it was played first in Tennessee by Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, famous Tennessee fiddler, and his grandson, Ernest Smith, said that this tune, Hollow Poplar, was his dad's favorite. Hmm, does that mean Ernest's dad or not sure whose favorite it was? It was somebody's favorite and played on the radio at the Grand Old Opry and Smith played this tune. 

It was also played in the Midwest by Missouri fiddlers there, so maybe they got it from the radio, from Smith playing it, or they just picked it up and it came over with dance fiddlers or regional kind of traveling musicians. Definitely played in Missouri and also in Tennessee. Hollow Poplar, here we go. 

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. 

Jam drama (Walking in My Sleep)

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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 Walking in My Sleep from a Square Dance at the Mobtown Ballroom in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about jam drama. It's a little hard to say Jam drama. What do I mean by that? It's come up a few times recently. People have been talking to me about experiences they had at jams or sessions and I think it often boils down to kind of who's in the club and who's out of the club and how you feel when you're jamming with people. Do you feel like you're part of it or do you feel like you're on the outside? It's a very human thing to want to be part of the tribe, so I don't think we can quite escape from the desire to feel accepted and part of the group in a jam. 

How does this all work? I was speaking to a woman at a jam that I was at at a party at someone's house and she's a little older than I am, and she said she often feels a little self-conscious at jams because she feels like she's older than some of the folks jamming and she worries that they'll be thinking something like, oh that old lady, she can't keep up. 

I told her that I often feel self-conscious at jams, especially when I was younger, because I thought that the older folks at the jam, who had been around a long time and knew a million tunes, would think oh, that kid doesn't know what she's doing. 

So I guess the lesson there is that everybody is thinking about if they belong and if they're part of the group. How do you get to the place where you feel accepted, you feel part of a jam. Some folks are pretty outgoing and they'll come to session a few times, introduce themselves, get to know everyone, make conversation. Other people are shy, they consider themselves introverts. But by showing up repeatedly to the same kinds of events you will become a known entity. 

If you see a tight group of musicians at a camp, at Clifftop, at Fiddle Hell, at a festival, they all seem to know each other and they all seem to know the same tunes and you think, oh, I wish that I had that. I think by repeatedly showing up and getting to know people and getting to play with people you will develop it over time those are just folks that have played together a lot because they keep running into each other and making plans to play and over time they develop and the more you play with people, the more enjoyable it is to play with them, because you all start to learn the same tunes. You get a feel for how to play together. It's fun To get a crew. You have to keep showing up really is what I'm saying. 

Why do you want to be known? Why do you not want to be an unknown musician? Well, people can be adverse to unknown musicians. You just don't know what you're going to get. I always have a lot of stories from martial arts. So when I was in a Muay Thai gym, for every 10 people who would kind of come in and try the gym, five of them might be complete beginners and totally reasonable people and another four of them might have some experience but follow along with class, do a great job, have a good attitude. But there was usually one guy. 

Every now and then we'd have someone come in. I said guy, it was usually a guy, who had done martial arts before and was just doing very unexpected things, kind of off the rocker, like asking to fight people being really aggressive. Someone like brought their trainer in who was sort of arguing with the teacher during class, or just like coming to class but ignoring the class and being off, doing like push-ups and pull-ups in the corner. Strange behavior. 

So you get someone unknown. You just don't know if they're going to be one of those nine reasonable people or if they're going to be that the 10th guy. So people will be more interested in jamming with you once they know you a little, they get a feel for you. 

I read some stories from folks on Facebook complaining about being told off in jams for doing something that somebody considered to be the wrong thing. I don't know, using music, playing the wrong instrument or the wrong tune. I mean, maybe this person was being rude, but certainly if you're telling someone off in a jam, you are also being rude. 

I think the goal here is for everyone to assume that everyone is doing their best. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who would wake up and say tonight I'm going to go to a jam and ruin it. I'm going to play way too fast or way too slow or not in this style and I'm just going to ruin their jam. Yeah, they're not trying to do anything. 

It's like when a toddler spills their milk and makes a big mess they weren't trying to well, usually they weren't trying to make a big mess. So you just have to remind yourself they're trying their best and if they're doing something that's kind of insensitive, it's not necessarily going to help to tell them off. You want everyone around you as much as possible, when you're collaborating musically, to be sensitive to what's going on and also flexible. 

So when you're sensitive, you're keeping track of what's happening with other people, you're trying to fit yourself into what they're doing, and then being flexible is also just accepting oh, this isn't happening the way I expected it to, but that's okay, we can roll with it. Try not to take things too personally. 

It does come up sometime about social media. It didn't used to be so much of an issue. I know it's a big thing with, like, birthday parties. You know people say, well, you don't invite your whole Facebook, all your friends, to a birthday parties, but then you post your party and so some of your friends look on Facebook and they're like, oh, why wasn't I invited? 

Well, this happens with musicians, with jams and parties, and people have feelings about it. It's pretty tricky in the music business because in order to make money as a musician, you kind of need to constantly remind people that you're there to hire to play music, or to hire to teach a lesson or to buy some of your merch, and so a lot of musicians, just as part of their business, will post about the different musical events they do. 

I do this, too as a way to kind of drum up enough work for the profession. It's not really a high paying profession. So if you're having feelings about people posting on social media, I would maybe try to find some things to go to. There's some events and parties that are closed and you need an invitation, but there's a lot of stuff that's open concerts you can go to, and festivals and jams at bars and if you're looking at somebody else's posting and wishing that you could do something like that, I think you can try to create that for yourself. 

Like I said before, showing up becoming a known entity I mean really live music is becoming less common and I try to remind myself to view it as a gift. Now people don't play music in person as much as they did, so just the opportunity to be with other people who want to leave their houses, put their phones down, get out their instruments and play music with you isn't, some ways, a luxury? It's a gift and I try to treat it as such. Try to remember not everybody gets to do this. 

Our tune for today is Walking in My Sleep. This is a tune that I pulled from the Baltimore Square Dance. Baltimore has a really great square dance. It's run by Brad Kolodner, a great fiddler and banjo player. I think they're coming up next month August 2023, on their 10th anniversary square dance. It happens about once a month and this one was at the MobTown Ballroom in Baltimore. 

Walking in my Sleep is an Old-Time reel Breakdown, a tune from the mountains. We've got Western North Carolina and Southwest Virginia and East Kentucky played in those areas. It's in G major. Yeah, they called it a Blue Ridge area standard In Surrey County, north Carolina. It was in the repertoire of Otis Burris, a fiddler down there, and also played by Esker Hutchings in Dobson, North Carolina. 

Oh, and the other place I saw it was Fiddler Glenn Smith played the tune at the 1935 Galax Fiddlers Convention. I am not sure how do you say Galax. I looked at this Fiddler's Convention. First of all. I was trying to see where it said what this one guy played and I couldn't find that Glenn Smith. We'll just have to assume he played this tune. But they have been having a fiddler's convention in Galax apparently since 1935. 

That was the first year and some members of the Moose Lodge, number 733, needed to raise some funds. So the way they did that was by promoting a fiddling competition and publicizing it. They put it in the newspaper, lots of people came, wanted to play all different instruments and fiddle and compete on them. They had conventions in their lodge, I guess, and then they moved outside to Felts Park and it's been held there pretty much every year, one year canceled due to World War II and the other year it was canceled was in 2020 because of the pandemic, but they're still having that. It's probably coming up. I think it's in August every year. 

Here's the tune, anyway, Walking in My Sleep.

Shoulder Rests (Candy Girl)

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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 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)

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 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?