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/

Not All Notes Are Equal (La Moquine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next week is right around the Christmas holiday and I am going to be taking a week off, my first week. I think I've done 66 or 67 episodes in a row. I am going to replay a popular episode from about a year ago that I did about playing in tune. So next week will be a replay and I should be back in January with an interview with fiddler and banjo player Brad Kolodner that I'm very excited about and more topics. Thanks everyone. Thank you for listening. You can find the music for today's tune at fiddlestudio.com, along with my books, courses and membership for learning to fiddle. I'll be back next week with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day. 

Jamming vs. Practicing (Sleeping on the Floor)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Sleeping on the Floor from a workshop by Genticorum by at Fiddle Hell. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lissa Schneckenburger (for Grada)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of the tune For Grada by Lissa Schneckenburger from her album Falling Forward. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking to fiddler and folk singer Lissa Schneckenburger. 

00:27

Lissa grew up in Maine, played the fiddle and violin, I believe, from an early age, Studying through college, went to New England Conservatory I'm curious about that and has been a professional musician now in Vermont playing and doing all kinds of amazing things Traditional New England fiddle, writing music for fiddle and songs and performing really all over the world, and also has a wonderful online teaching fiddle presence that I'm sure we'll talk about. Lissa, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me Awesome. I like to start with kind of your story of how you got involved with the fiddle and with folk music, because not everyone who starts playing the violin dives into the fiddle part of it. So what was that like in Maine when you were a kid? 

Lissa Schneckenburger

Yeah, so when I was a kid I was really really interested in fiddle music, probably because I guess when I was five years old, some of our neighbors played. They were a little older than me and I just thought they were super cool kids. And one sister played the violin, one played the cello. So I started begging my mother for an instrument and she didn't quite believe me, that she didn't know if I was really serious, and so she kind of put it off and I think it's possible. My family was a little bit broke and so we. So she got me a recorder and was like here, play this, it's free, and if you practice every day then we'll get you a fiddle eventually. And so I actually did. 

02:07

I practiced, I played the recorder for a year and then when I was six, the summer that I was six, my mom's best friend from college is a fiddle player and she was up visiting our family for a week on vacation and that week we went to rent me a little fiddle and she gave me my first couple of lessons my mom's friend, Carol Thomas Downing, and I don't know. It was really fun. I was just. I remember the day we went to the rental place and got my fiddle. I was so excited about it and I really, really wanted to be the one to carry my fiddle out of the store into the car. I did not want anybody else to touch it. It was like it was a big deal. It was really fun. So that's how I got started with the instrument and pretty, pretty near the beginning, my mom and I were both super excited about fiddling specifically, and so we found a fiddle teacher from when I was pretty young. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, so were you studying both? 

Lissa Schneckenburger

Sort of. So I studied with Greg Boardman, who's still teaching in Maine. He he teaches in the school system now and when I was a kid we did private lessons and he would do we did some of the Suzuki books, but it wasn't super serious. I'm not, I'm not a classical musician at all. I just was super, super focused on fiddling and I kind of treated especially like I only did up to like book four and Suzuki and all of those. All of that repertoire is folk music generally, anyway, up until, like you get to the Vivaldi stuff and I just treated all the Suzuki tunes as if they were fiddle tunes. So I I'm not a great note reader and I just like listened to the recordings and like played the tunes and then and then every week Greg would also record a bunch of fiddle repertoire for me to learn and I had like this rotation of new tunes coming in every week all the time. That I was super excited about. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Wow, that's thank you. That's so cool to hear about. Did you connect with with other kids at all? 

Lissa Schneckenburger

Yeah, connection part. I think the social part is probably one of the big reasons that I was so focused on fiddle music, because there wasn't a community around classical music and I just wanted to be with friends. So as a young kid I was homeschooled and there was like a homeschool group that we went to with a couple of other musicians. We did lots of singing together at this group and lots of rounds and harmony singing and making up songs together and there was one other fiddler who was part of that group and we kind of influenced each other when we were little. And then once I started going to fiddle contests, there were a bunch of fiddle contests in Maine. When I was a kid Every single county fair would have a fiddle contest. That's not as much the case anymore but there was like it felt like there was one every weekend from like July through October and that was a really great way to meet people and I met so many people through that circuit and it was pretty generally not super competitive, it wasn't very stressful, it was usually pretty fun. You were usually like in the grandstand at the horse track and people would be standing around behind the stage playing tunes before it was their turn to go up on stage and you would show up and you'd be like, okay, who am I going to play with? Who's available to play guitar and who else? Like what are you playing? Okay, I'll play this jig instead and like everyone would sort of like I don't know, you just hang out until it was your time to go on stage. So that was one way I met other kids and I met Ed Howe, who's an amazing fiddle player. His family was also doing that same circuit. And then there was also the contraint scene. 

05:59

My fiddle teacher, Greg, was part of several dance bands and one of which was called the Maine Country Dance Orchestra. They would play once a month near where I lived in Bowdoinham, maine, and it was a very large loose band that was inspired by Dudley Loftman and the Canterbury Dance Orchestra and all of the hippie New England dance musicians. So we had our own little branch of that up in Bowdoin Maine and it was super loose, like you could just show up and play in the back of the stage and play along with everybody. Or you could dance or, you know, I was a kid, so you could also just like run around and play tag outside or play hide and seek or something, and so that was also super social. We met lots of families that way. A lot of the Maine Country Dance Orchestra musicians also had kids and we were all just kind of like going to dances and having a good time. So lots of music and lots of socializing through fiddle for sure. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Wow, I never knew that you did contests. 

Lissa Schneckenburger

Yeah, I don't tell people that much because I think in other parts of the country contests mean something different, like I have friends who do the say the Texas style fiddle competitions, and that's like that's next level. 

07:24

Yeah, it's very, very competitive, it's very strict and regimented and even like I did eventually do some Scottish competitions, like I did the I used to go to the Highland Games at Loon Mountain in New Hampshire and even the Scottish stuff those competitions were way more formal and made me incredibly anxious. It was like a very intense experience. It was like oh quiet and like the judges were very serious and like writing things, scribbling things furiously and you're like, and that was less social, it wasn't as much hanging out amongst the competitors, it was like everybody was just practicing by themselves beforehand. I did those because I love Scottish music, but I didn't find it as much of a social outlet. So that's, I think, what most people think of when they're like thinking of competition or like think of like all of the classical competitions, like they're very intense and more about technical proficiency and actually evaluating who's the best. 

Meg Wobus Beller

It's interesting to hear you talk about meeting so many people. I so I graduated college in 2003. And I think that was around when you're. I think the first city I got of yours was Fiddle and Piano. My dad plays piano and we play together, so we got that CD. We were like whoa, other people doing this because in Central New York there wasn't a community like that. But then I got your first CD, which was not just Fiddle and Piano and it had a whole bunch of you know who I now know are like amazing names and musicians. So I mean it's really kind of a who's who of New England musicians on that. That first CD Is it was it different game? So the the one with violin and piano is Phantom Power, Phantom Power. And then your first CD was different game where you sing the song. I remember I remember hearing it in the car. So you talk about connecting with kids. How did you get to connect with all of those amazing musicians and kind of make your first project? 

Lissa Schneckenburger

In the same way that I was just describing, like connecting through just lots of social events going to dances, going to concerts, going to festivals, going to fiddle camps. 

I got really excited about fiddle camps in high school and went to as many I just. I love traveling, I love music and I love meeting people. 

09:59

So I just did it as much as I possibly could and, as I said, I was homeschooled, or I went to public school for a little bit in the middle but then went back to homeschooling in high school because, primarily because I wanted to play music all the time and that allowed me to like I could work part time and then save money, so then I could go travel to fiddle camps and festivals and go as many places as possible where there was music happening, and so that's really a very vague answer of how I met everybody. 

10:34

It's just one of those things that I love about the music community is that it's this wide, wide, intricate network of friends and relationships and so, yeah, playing, you meet somebody at a fiddle camp and then they, then you decide to do a gig together and then they bring on new musicians to the gig and then you get to rehearse and work with these new people and then you have these new friendships and then then you get to do gigs with them, and then their friends, and then their friends, and then their friends. 

Meg Wobus Beller

That's how you know it's a whole networking thing, so homeschooling was kind of part of it. 

Lissa Schneckenburger

So I actually loved school when I was going. I went to public school for sixth through ninth grade and it was awesome. I loved it. It was really fun. Like I was super interested in pop culture. I wanted to know how everybody was dressing and what they were doing with their hair and I wanted to know the music that everybody was listening to and it was worth it for that. Like I got so excited about Nirvana came out. The first Nirvana album came out when I was in middle school. They might be giants and like all this fun music that I still love today and it was really fun. But then eventually I was like hang on, I really I'm spending a lot of time on the school bus. I just want to play fiddle, and so I yeah, I figured out something else. 

Meg Wobus Beller

So then what happened with the New England Conservatory? I didn't know that you could go there and study improv. So I was at Eastman and there was one guy who came for jazz on violin and then he left after a year. He was like this is BS, basically. And it was. And of course Berkeley didn't even start to like I don't know later in the aughts. So so what are you doing? 

Lissa Schneckenburger

Not very many people know this, so it's good to ask. New England Conservatory has multiple areas of study, areas of focus, and it was actually the first conservatory to start a jazz studies program. I don't remember the date, it might have been the late 60s, early 70s. There was the head of the school was Gunther Schuller, who is this very influential musician, both the classical and jazz worlds, and was kind of like a big band leader and he had this idea. He had this concept that there was classical music and then there was jazz, and then he had this idea of like a third stream which would combine the best elements of both classical and jazz and you would have say extended classical harmony with improvisation For example. And he started at the same time as he started the jazz studies program at NEC. He also started the third stream program and that went on, for you know, for many years. 

13:22

As time went on, other conservatories also started jazz programs. Berkeley School of Music started and then when I was getting into college they had changed the name because nobody ended up knowing what third stream meant. It was an idea that kind of started and ended with Gunther Schuller and no one was like what is, what is third stream, I don't even know. So they changed the department name to contemporary improvisation and it kind of became a catchall. It was really focused on learning by ear, super focused on developing a personal style through extensive study of a range of influences or musical heroes, and because of the focus on improvisation and because of the focus on oral learning, it ended up catching. 

14:13

Over the years it's caught a lot of fiddle and folk musicians, yeah, and also, you know also it's all kinds of instruments, all kinds of different people, though there'll be classical musicians in the department that want to learn how to improvise. There'll be jazz musicians in the department that want to learn how to compose more extended harmonies, plus all of the fiddle and folk world who just want to be able to study music in a context that makes sense to them and be able to be really focused and serious about it. It was a really, really good fit for me. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Wow, that's so cool. I can't believe I never heard about it. 

Lissa Schneckenburger

It's awesome. And then at the same time so I was there, I guess I started in 1997, maybe, yeah, 1997. And at the same time there was a blossoming I guess it was the blossoming string department at Berkeley College of Music. So I had a bunch of friends from fiddle camps who all moved to Boston at the same time. So I had a couple of friends going to Berkeley, I had a friend going to Harvard, I had a friend Like we were just like all in the area all of a sudden and we had this idea. We were like we loved each other from fiddle camp and we love jamming, and so here we are at college and it was just super, super exciting to have our college experiences, our college friends, and then to get together in the fiddle world and have jam sessions in the city. And we went out to pubs, we went to concerts, we had a jam on the steps of the Christian Science Center at one point where we're just like oh my god, this is so exciting. 

15:44

It's like fiddle camp all the time. It was a good time to be in Boston. I think it is always a good time to be in Boston if you're a fiddle player. There's a lot going on. 

Meg Wobus Beller

For sure. So I know that the tune today that we're going to do comes from an album. It's your most recent album, right, and it's all female musicians, which I love. Yeah, I don't know. Do you want to just share what that album came out of? 

Lissa Schneckenburger

Yeah yeah. So my latest album is called Falling Forward. It's almost all original fiddle tunes. I included two traditional songs on there just because I do love doing that too, but it's mostly original tunes, and I was writing a lot of music the first year and a half of the pandemic. I just I guess it was my reaction to all the stress what a weird, insane, crazy time period for everybody, and I was very privileged. I had a home and a family and we were all there stuck together all the time, and so I did start writing tons of music. I was writing just oodles of tunes and also songs, and I wrote so much repertoire that I ended up with enough material for several albums, and the fiddle album just happens to be the first one I put together. 

17:16

I'm also simultaneously working on an original song album. That's been a slower process because I'm doing it Each track is with a different producer and so it's taking a little bit longer because each track requires a little bit more organization and research and I start. It's really cool. It's a really fun way to get kind of a buffet experience, getting to try out working with all these different people that I've always wanted to work with, but it's been taking a little bit longer. It'll be out soon, I hope, but in the meantime, yes, this fiddle album was really fun to work on. 

17:55

I invited my friend, Katie McNally to produce it. She's an amazing fiddle player who lives up in Portland, maine, and she's a wonderful Scottish and Cape Breton style fiddler and she's just also a great human. It was an awesome fit. I just loved working with her and she had great ideas for the music. She was super organized, really calm in the studio. It felt really wonderful to be supported in that way and just be able to be creative and focus on fiddling and playing well, and we hired some awesome other musicians. I'm really excited about it. 

Meg Wobus Beller

What's the best place to go online to hear the album? 

Lissa Schneckenburger

Folks can find everything, including this new album, at lisaafiddle.com. So I have all kinds of goodies at lissafiddle.com, including videos, and people can purchase my new album. I have LPs. I want to stay trendy. Lps are back in fashion. I actually manufactured LPs this time for the new fiddle album if there's any audio file fiddlers out there and there's a bunch of other stuff too For musicians that are listening. I have a free five day practice challenge that you can sign up on through my website, and I have a learning by ear video course that people can check out, plus tons of just fun music videos and lots of albums. So all of that fun stuff is at lissafiddle.com. 

Meg Wobus Beller

There's a ton of stuff there. I was looking around while I was getting ready for the podcast, since I teach fiddle and you teach fiddle folks. I met Lyssa a year ago at Fiddle Hell and the thing that really blew me away about your teaching was that you know, people teach by ear a lot in the folk music world and a lot of times it's like here's what the tune sounds like, here's the first chunk. And I can get frustrated with that because people need to hear a tune so many times. And I remember you were just like, should we just play this tune a lot? And then you played me music or a strict. 

But you just played it and played it like slow and faster and it was like eight or ten times and you kind of stopped in the middle like, is this okay? Everyone was like yes, thank you, this is what we've wanted, this is what we've been craving, just to keep doing it over and over. So I just thought you were kind of a genius about playing by ear and and then now I know that you like studied it I mean like a servant or even doing it your whole life. What is your? Just a podcast today about playing by ear. Some people are so intimidated by it, so can you just give us a little bit about it? 

Lissa Schneckenburger

Oh boy, oh, it's a big take. I have a lot to say. So, yeah, so learning by ear it can be very intimidating. It was not that way for me. I had the opposite experience, where I learned I have a more natural ability to learn by ear. It's a preference, and I find it extremely challenging to read music. I'm not a natural sight reader. In fact, I pretended to read music my entire life until I got to conservatory and then had to like pass a site reading class my first semester and was just like oh my god. 

So, like I very I was in a lot of yeah, anyway, it was. It was, it was stressful, I did pass, but what it meant was I have, I have this experience of being really terrible at something and having to learn how to do it anyway. And I have this, I guess, proof that even if you're not naturally gifted at something, you can learn how to do it and there are steps that will help, there are exercises that you can do and daily practice is necessary. It really really helps. And so I've taken that my my own experience and kind of brought that into a lot of my teaching around learning by ear, because some folks have that experience with with oral learning, and they might be really really fast at learning from the page but not quite know what's going on when they're just hearing something. So I feel like every individual is different and even within the scope of, let's say, you have 10 people who say I just can't learn by ear, it's impossible, I can't do it. Amongst those 10 people, each of them may have a slightly different learning style and a slightly different reason that they're getting stuck, and I just find that so fascinating. It's really interesting and I just enjoy Finding out about people and learning how each brain works and learning about each learning style. 

So, for example, somebody might be getting hung up because they're not able to hear what is happening, like it might actually just be a hearing issue, right. Maybe it means like they need to use earbuds when they're listening to music, or they need to turn the volume up really loud, or they need to go to the doctor and get their ears checked. Like there's like legitimate hearing Possible issue, right. And then there's someone else might say, okay, I can hear it, but I'm having a hard time remembering it. I can't contain it in my mind, like I hear it and then it's gone and I don't know how to keep it right. So that's more of a memory retention Thing, which would require specific memory exercises, right, to build up your short and long term memory, whereas someone else might say I can hear it, I can remember it, but I am having the worst time, like figuring out what it means, right. So that's like a translation to your instrument Issue. So that means learning some more technical exercises, figuring out where typical intervals sit on your instrument, or just doing a lot of practicing where you have to duplicate things on your instrument over and, over and over again and then it can go on from there. 

Like, each person has like a slightly different little thing like, or another common thing is people say I can't do this, and it's actually just a confidence issue, where they actually probably are doing it fine and they just don't believe in themselves yet. And so there's lots of folks that will say I can't do XYZ. And then it turns out that they, that they just have very high expectations and that, especially especially with adult learners, adults are really interesting because they tend to have many things that they already do really well. Like you know, being an adult requires everyone listening to this knows how to dress themselves very well and they know how to tie their shoes and they know how to brush their teeth, like all these things that you're just like I can just do that. I don't think about it, I just do it. I totally rock it getting dressed in the morning. 

But if you were a kid, you would get a lot of positive affirmation If you were learning to do one of those things and you would get a lot of support around those things, and it might have taken you a long time to originally learn to tie your shoes and adults forget that, they blank it out. And so if you're at that, tying your shoes part of learning by ear, right where you're just having to break it down into tiny steps and learn and practice and then relearn and keep practicing and adults can get down on themselves where they're like why don't I do this? I need to do this already, why don't I have it? Why aren't? Why aren't I awesome at this? I'm awesome at everything else. So I think confidence can be another stumbling block for, or expectations right, people are like forget. If you're like a six year old on the fiddle, you could be a 55 year old, but musically you're six. People forget to appreciate themselves musically as a six year old. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Folks, you can tell that Lisa has thought about this so much. If you have any interest in hearing more about this, getting the exercises, you should definitely sign up for the workshop. Go to Lisa fiddlecom. Look for the playing by ear workshop Before we go. Do you want to just quick tell us about the tune that we're sharing? It's called grata. It's a for grata. It's a real in E flat and yeah, but when did you write this? What was this tune? 

Lissa Schneckenburger

Okay, I wrote this a long time ago. There's a couple, there's two little pieces of this. First of all, I was at the time I was going through this exercise, a daily practice routine for myself, or I would just. I was going around the circle of fifths, one key per day, and I would do an extended scale warm up and then like a little exercise in that key and then I would write a new tune every single day in that key. So I like I, just I did it. I went around the circle of fifths major and minor and I did it and some of the tunes are terrible, but it was a really good way. It was just a routine I needed at that time in my practice routine. I needed a regular routine and it was providing that structure for me, and I actually ended up writing several tunes in E flat that I really loved. 

This one was written for the band grata, the Irish band, because they're wonderful, sweet people, I love their music. When they were touring more extensively think I don't even know how I met them. We probably met at a festival or a conference or something, and then we stayed in touch as we were traveling around on tour. At one point when I was living in Brooklyn. This was years ago. Grada was on tour, they were playing in New York and then they had a night off and they were just like bumming around Manhattan. My boyfriend at the time had a gig that night and I was at that gig in Brooklyn. It was his birthday and so grata decided for his birthday they were going to commandeer a limo and convince this limo driver to drive to Brooklyn and pick us up at the end of the gig and just take us out on the town. And it was amazing because they did it. I don't even think they I'm not even sure if they actually paid for the limo. They like they were walking around outside, outside of a club in Manhattan where there's like a bunch of limos just parked there waiting for people to come out of the club. They just sweet talked some guy who was just standing around. They were like listen, you're not doing anything, let's go to Brooklyn, let's hang out. They like convinced him to throw in a bottle of champagne. It was amazing. And so they showed up in a limo as my boyfriend's gig was just finishing up and they were like hey, it's your birthday, getting the limo, let's go. And we actually, because it was the end of a gig, all of a sudden the band that had just been playing, like they all, piled into the limo. We had a huge array of instruments. We have the double bass in the limo, we have the champagne going and we like totally just went for a limo ride. It was really, really fun. I think that might, it's possible that's actually my only limo ride of my life, but it was like a commandeered, unplanned surprise birthday limo. It was really fun. 

So I wrote the tune as a thank you. So I wrote this tune to thank the band for being so fun and so sweet and, and just for you know, thank you for their friendship. And I kind of was hoping that the flute, like that the whistle player, would get into playing it on the b flat whistle. He never did, but I'm still hoping maybe it's not over he could still learn it. It's, it is a bit of a, it's a bit of a beast on the fiddle. I still really enjoy the tune and I really enjoyed making the music video for it which just came out this past spring. We did all this beautiful footage of the area where I live in southern Vermont, which is, it's so pretty, just to accompany the track, to accompany the music. We have gorgeous footage of waterfalls and mountains and lakes it's just and woods. It's like very southern Vermont. I hope people will go check that out and find it and either enjoy the tune or even maybe attempt to learn it. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, yeah, she pairs it with a, with an E flat jig, which I just I love, I love. When you play with piano and accordion, you can play in all the fun keys. 

Lissa Schneckenburger

I believe that the keys are for everyone. 

Meg Wobus Beller

Absolutely Well listen, it has been so fun to have you here and to hear you talk about all these things. I know there's so many more things we could talk about, but do you have anything coming up in? I guess it's December that you want to let people know about? 

Lissa Schneckenburger

Yes, it's December. Best thing to do is to go to list of fiddle calm and check my tour schedule, which is what I do when I'm trying to figure out where I'm supposed to be. I know I'm going to have some workshops coming up. Obviously, there's the learning by your video course, which is just videos. You can take it at any time, but I've started doing some live zoom workshops where people that have already taken the course and want more like if they want more support or more help with some of the exercises or they want like the next level up for your training I've started doing some live workshops on zoom every month for that, so people can find that on my website and eventually I'll have a new album out, so people should definitely sign up for my mailing list to find out about that. 

Meg Wobus Beller

And we should have in the show notes link to the mailing list and practice challenge and especially all this playing by ear, workshop and opportunities. Thank you again. 

Lissa Schneckenburger

It's great to have you. Thank you so much for having me. 

Tilting the Bow (Half Past Four)

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

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)

    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 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.