Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller. And today I'll be bringing you a setting of Booth Shot Lincoln from a session at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hello, everybody, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about scales. Why do we play scales? Is it useful to play scales? All about scales.
People argue about scales. Some people would tell you that scales are the most important thing, and I frequently have people ask me, what scales should I be playing? How long should I be spending on my scales? How do I learn this instrument using scales? I think that you'll meet other people who say, you never have to play them just play tunes. Don't worry about scales at all.
If you look at extreme examples, very, very difficult classical or jazz music, very accomplished musicians in that genre, they're going to be playing a lot of scales. So that tells you something about the usefulness, I guess, of scales. Classical violinist, the rule of thumb is one hour a day. And I was told that when I was, by the time I was 12, they were saying one hour a day of scales.
Maybe less, if you have training from a very early age, you may have picked up a lot of the things that scales teach you. And we'll talk about what those are. Sometimes you'll you'll meet musicians who don't play as many scales, and maybe part of that is that they started really young.
If you look at jazz musicians, in music school, at least, walking by practice rooms, jazz musicians were playing more than one hour of scales a day, sometimes two hours of scales. They would play them on the saxophone and then on the flute, and then on the clarinet. All the scales, all these arpeggios, just running them different tempos, different configurations of major, minor, different modes. If you know what a mode is. So many scales.
A lot of people would complain that scales are kind of boring. Not very creative. But I would say some of the most creative musicians that I know play a lot of scales. They have really put their time in with scales and arpeggios.
I did meet in college, there was a kid in my class, and he only played skills. I don't know, he must have played a concerto to get into college. But we talked about it, he was from Russia. And his English wasn't great. So I don't know if I got the whole story. But he told me like, 'oh, yeah, a year ago, my teacher was like, you can't play any more pieces. You have to spend a whole year on scales.' So he had just been playing, you know, music school standard three hours a day, maybe four hours a day of practice, just with scales, because his his teacher said that's what he needed.
I was like, why even be a musician? What are we doing here? I don't know. There's more to life, right? I felt a little bad for him. He didn't seem to mind. So there you go.
So what do scales do for you? I'll start with what they don't help you with. I mean, everything can be argued. But I would say there's not a lot of direct help from scales with melodies, remembering melodies, which is very, very important for being a musician. With expression. They also don't kind of automatically improve your, your tone, your posture, most technique and your sort of ability to hold and play efficiently. Things that aren't directly helped by scales.
What do scales help with if they don't help with any of that? Well, they help a lot with getting the sound of the key in your ear, especially if you pair them with arpeggios but, but even just the scale itself, and this is a huge benefit for playing in tune, for knowing your high and low fingers and developing the ability to use them automatically, without thinking about it, and being able to make up music and improvise. I think those are all really useful playing in tune, right? It's very central to the fiddle, and skills help with that a lot.
They also train your just raw ability to play the instrument. Steps, which scales are kind of note stepping up and stepping down and skips, which are the arpeggios. And those are the building blocks of music. So you're just training those movements with your hand. As you play with your hand, you're hearing the sound that it makes, I would call that like, ear to hand connection, your facility on the fingerboard. And connecting your fingers, with your ears and your memory, I really do think scales have a big benefit with that.
There's also an opportunity with scales because they are easy. I mean, I guess if you're playing easy scales that are easy for you, to practice different techniques, that scale might not automatically make you better at this, but you can practice this technique as you play the scale. Things like: different kinds of bowings, tone, vibrato, slurs. It's really classic for a classical player to do a scale with different slurring patterns, different bowing like off the string bow strokes, or to use a slow scale to work on vibrato. So they're working on all of those things, tuning, hearing the key, facility, ear to hand connection, and then also layering in other techniques that they're going to work on with the scales.
Maybe if you're advanced, you could do this, I don't think fiddlers have to worry about that. The better you are, maybe the less you need to do scales. I take them out, I'll do some arpeggios for sure if I'm working on being able to improvise, you know over a set of changes. But I don't really play scales unless I'm working on something very hard classically. If I know I'm going to have to be in fifth, seventh ninth position, I get out my Carl Flesch scale system, and I do my three octave scales. Because it trains my hand to get up there and get around the shoulder, the violin, and get those high notes. It's the easiest and quickest way for me to bring that technique back if I'm been playing up there in a while, which I'm normally not.
If you're a beginner, the more of a beginner you are, the bigger a boost scales will give you. You don't have to make them dramatic, you don't have to work on vibrato, off the string, slurs. Just get your scales, your one octave scales really solid. And then you can add another octave or a little variation, arpeggios speed, I think you'll see a really big benefit. Maybe you'll thank me. I don't know if any of my students have ever thanked me for assigning them scales. But who knows, maybe if I talk to them now.
Our tune today is Booth Shot Lincoln. This is a bit of a political tune, there's a lot of discussion about it being played differently in the Southern portion of the United States, as opposed to the North. So in the South, I'm told it's played kind of upbeat, and happy.
And in the north, a lot slower, more of a dirge. And that would of course, be connected to the thematic material of the assassination of President Lincoln and how different parts of the country felt about it. It was recorded pretty famously by Bascom Lunsford. He was born in 1882. So he was a lawyer in North Carolina and a fiddler. And he learned this, he said he learned the tune from his father when he was young, like six or 10 years old. And I think he played the up, the upbeat version.
On the recording of him, I think there's field recordings, he sings a song, a ballad that he calls, Booth Shot Lincoln, which he said he learned from his father. And then he plays the fiddle tune Booth Shot Lincoln, and sometimes he calls it just Booth and sometimes he calls it Booth Shot Lincoln. But they are the song and the fiddle tune. They're related. When you hear them, they they're similar.
A lot of modern versions of this tune are based on the version by Marcus Martin. He was recorded playing this tune in the 40s, Library of Congress, you know, recordings in the field. So the version that we do in Baltimore is, is closer to that to the version by Marcus Martin. The event that this tune is based on was, is of course, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth that was on April 14, 1865.
And the Fiddler's companion has a little blurb about it. They said 'the incident took place in Ford's Theater in Washington DC while Lincoln watched a British comedy from special box seats above the stage. During a loud and sustained outburst of laughter, Booth crept into the box and shot the President in the head. Booth then jumped to the stage shouting Sic Semper Tyrannis, Thus Always to Tyrants, and made good his escape. (Maybe that's Shakespeare). Lincoln died the next day. Booth was killed by authorities 12 days later.'
So we have this tune, I guess. I guess it's normally played kind of up up tempo down here. I live in Maryland. But you can choose your tempo and also I guess what you make of it. Are you ready?
