The biggest mistake I see (The Birds hornpipe)

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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 Birds from a session at the Art House Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, happy New Year. I hope you are well. Today. Our topic is the biggest mistake I see this month. I'm working on a course for how to play the fiddle faster and this is part of it. One of the areas of the course will also be the subject of this podcast. 

00:55

When I started this podcast it was last fall I was also working on a lot of filming videos for how to learn the fiddle. Why was I filming all these videos? Well, I taught fiddle and violin Suzuki violin for 20 years and I learned a lot at that time about teaching, about violin, about fiddle and fiddling and teaching fiddle. I've recently reduced my teaching load. I don't teach a lot anymore here. I don't have my own big studio of kids anymore, but I didn't really want to walk away from all of that and that part of my life. I did do a lot of filming and I wasn't quite sure at first what to do with the videos whether to just put them on YouTube. What I ended up doing was putting them, organizing them into courses and putting them on a website so that people could take them as courses, buy them and then use them. I had intended to keep creating more courses and put one up basically every quarter. I will say last year my album and some of my writing got in the way of that. It's nice to be diving back into filming. I have a great plan for this course. I have time set aside next week to film it and it should be out in February. 

02:25

A lot of different ways to practice playing faster, and some of them you might expect and some of them you probably wouldn't. For today, the biggest mistake I see. As I said, I no longer teach full time but I can't quite lose my teacher eyes, which isn't to say that if we play together I'll be judging you, but I do notice what's happening with people's playing because I for many, many years, six hours a day, I was training myself to notice what was happening with people's playing and think about it. So this is going to be about the right hand, the bow hand. There are a lot of issues with left hands. I see all different kinds of things, usually what people could work on more is kind of unlocking and developing some softness and flexibility to move the fingers around, and that's actually going to be one of our topics later this month. But the biggest mistake I see is people using too much bow, more than they can control. It's a little bit about keeping your bow straight. It's a little bit about the grip on the string, the contact point, but it's also just about not using more bow than you can control. It's funny. 

03:52

My family has been watching Star Trek, the next generation, and of course, Data, the Android character, plays the violin, and so there's these episodes where Data plays the violin. He's doing these big long movements with his right arm. I mean it's really terrible. It doesn't look like they gave the actor any help at all to try to look realistic. In fact, sometimes they just film him from behind or someplace where you can't see quite how ridiculous the impression of violin playing looks. My kids enjoyed that because they could see how bad it was. The thing that I did notice was that he's doing these long movements with his right arm. They don't ask anyone on the street. You know what's the motion for playing the violin. They'll draw out these lines with their right hand, they'll move their arm back and forth, and that's what everyone thinks of, and those big arm movements are really the hardest thing to play with a violin. A good tone to really grab the string and keep a firm grip on it all the way while your arm moves farther and farther away from the string and then changes directions, even keeping your your hold on the string there, but not too much of a hold, or you'll crunch and then bring your arm all the way back in towards the string, and having a firm contact point the whole time Working on long bows is how you work on your tone. 

05:27

When people say to me why really want a really good, clear tone, like a classical player, or they'll give me names of fiddlers who have a really beautiful tone. Sometimes they have classical Training and I tell them it's not reels and jigs that gives you that tone. It's playing slowly, so whether it's classical waltzes, airs, it's using a lot of bow and learning to control it. But when you're playing a tune up to speed, you only want to use as much bow as you can control so that your bows staying completely straight, it's not moving around on the string, so that you're not getting that bow to string noise entering in with your tone and it also affects how rhythmically you can play. This is also something where I'll see people who's left and right hands aren't that coordinated and it makes their playing sound messy and it's usually because they're using too much bow. So you want to use really small bows trying to play a real or a jig up to speed At home. 

06:37

If you're learning bow control, which is a whole area, you can go nuts experimenting with all kinds of things. Violin players will do like 30 second bows. You know one down bow for 30 seconds. I used to do like a tiny down bow at the frog and then move my bow in the air and do a tiny up bow at the tip and come back and forth and learn to do that rapidly, which requires quite a bit of control with your right arm. Repeated down bows and up bows, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Getting that control that way. Slurring patterns are great for this, even just playing a scale with changing the amount of pressure speed you're using. Try everything at home. But when you're working on a tune, use less bow, use less and less until your contact point is very solid, your bow is very straight, the hands are coordinated and don't worry about using more until you know, until that's really really steady and really how you want it. So that's the biggest mistake I see is just people using a lot of bow who don't have that control. 

07:51

Yet Our tune for today is the birds. This is a hornpipe. I looked it up on the session wasn't the most useful set of comments. There were a lot of people just making bird jokes and then there were people complaining about the bird jokes. It was entertaining. It wasn't that informative. There was a post from Jimmy Keen who talked about recording this hornpipe with Mick Maloney. On the album there were roses and he says that Kevin Crawford learned it from that recording and a lot of other players and that he also liked to play it as a slow reel. He went on that the Galway box player, Sean McGlynn, liked playing it as a reel instead of a hornpipe. You know, some tunes are kind of flexible like that. 

08:48

The tunes for this month will be Irish tunes and I pulled them off from a session I went to over the holidays with two brothers, Connor Hearn and Brendan Hearn, who play cello and guitar. They both play guitar. Connor's a great guitar player. Brendan plays cello and guitar and all the things and Dan Isaacson was there playing bagpipe. Dan plays bagpipe flute whistle has a very long history in Irish music, played in Boston and studied there, now plays in Baltimore and does a lot of leading of sessions around here and performing. 

09:28

Charley and I were the only other folks there so we got to play and hear a lot of their tunes and lead some of our own tunes and it was fun. So the birds hornpipe is a tune I think. I think Connor played this on the banjo. It was played by Noel O'Donohue, a flute player from County Claire, also played by Hugh Healy. Somebody founded in the O'Neill's book as Jerry Dolly's and then it was recorded under that name by the Mulcahy family in their album Real and in Tradition and we're gonna do it now for you as a hornpipe. Here we go.

BEST OF: How to play in tune (The Kilmovee)

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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 the Kilmovee Jig from a session at the Art House Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today I'm going to be talking about playing in tune. Just a little topic for the fiddle. This is for you if you have recently taken your tapes off, if you had something on your fingerboard or if you notice that you play out of tune. I play out of tune sometimes. I don't usually notice when it's happening, but I will sometimes hear recording of myself, even on this podcast, and think, oh, I was playing out of tune. I hope that it's comforting to you that for me, after playing violin and fiddle for 38 years, with a degree in violin performance and 20 years of teaching, I still play out of tune. Tuning is connected to what you're hearing and what you're noticing about what you're hearing and then what's happening with your left hand on the string. There's two different issues there. It's a little easier to fix issues that are happening just with your hand. There's three parts of your hand. There's just where your hand is on the fingerboard. Then there's getting your finger spacing and finger placement correct. Finally, there's the micro adjustments. That's the one we're all still having fun with all these years later. 

Fixing your hand is easy. I call out to my kids One of my kids was just practicing and I just called out fix your hand. Because they weren't listening to what was happening on their instrument and their hand was literally just in the wrong place. They don't have tapes on. So they got their hand in the right place. Then it sounded fine. Make sure your hand's in the right place. That's an easy fix. Getting the finger spacing right this is a second year problem. Oh my goodness, people play their first year. They still have tapes on. They're playing a lot of A major, a lot of high twos, and then suddenly you're in the world of high twos and low twos and your tune needs to move around all the time. 

It can be a big issue with tuning. You'll really want to make sure that your fingers are working independently, only one at a time. If every time you play a three, you're blocking your fingers down your two, just automatically going to that high two spot, oh, you're going to have problems. So you need your fingers to be working independently, you need to make sure you understand what you're playing, what key you're in, and I would say and this comes a little bit from my music education background I studied music learning theory in college. 

Music learning theory is really big on hearing the roots and the chords and the patterns. I think knowing the chords, which is basically hearing the chords, playing the chords or playing the bass line, is very helpful in developing the instinct to put your two in the right place. And that connects to the third level of tuning, even once your hand's in the right place and you're getting your fingers spacing. Basically right, we all put our fingers slightly in the wrong place sometimes and you're going to have to make micro adjustments. On the hearing side of this, you can work on it by practicing with a drone or in unison with someone or with accompaniment I didn't mean the wrong order, but kind of easiest to get it exactly in tune in unison. And then you can go from there to working with a drone and from there to working with accompaniment with like chords. The highest level would be playing with, with nothing else, and and that's that's tricky to stay in tune like that On the other side, out of your head out of your ears and into your hand. You need your hand to be unlocked on the string in order to make those micro adjustments. So if you're gripping the neck, if your fingers are really heavy and locked down on the string, you won't be able to to react to what you're hearing. So those are things you can work on. Stop being sliding your thumb back and forth on the neck, swinging your elbow back and forth. Make sure your arm is unlocked, shaking your hand out, trying not to grip the neck so much. That will actually help your tuning because your fingers will be able to react to what you're hearing. 

All of this is challenging and I would say possibly the most challenging is just paying attention to what you're playing and what you're hearing around you. I mean, that's when I'm playing out of tune, it's because I wasn't paying attention. I find that my students pay a lot more attention to what they're playing when they're not looking at music and reading. I mean it's one less sense that you're using. So you want to have music that you can play without reading it off the sheet. So you're playing it from memory. You're already going to be listening in a different way, listening closer, with a lot more awareness of your tuning. 

This one's maybe not as common, but when I work on improvisation with kids and adults, I find that their tuning improves. I got this from Alice Kanack when you're making up your music, you're listening to it in a different way. You're not just recreating something that someone's given you. You're listening to it as it's being created and you're kind of evaluating whether you like it or not. Well, that goes for the tune, but it also goes for the tuning. So when my students are improvising, their tuning tends to be a lot better. I'll do a podcast on how I ease people into improvising and composing. I think it's really useful. But even if you're just messing around on your fiddle, making up some stuff that you think sounds good, you may find that that has a beneficial effect for your tuning and playing in tune. Good luck, it's a big project Moving on. Our tune today is The Kilmovee. 

This is a jig that was popularized by a player named Dermot Grogan. Dermot Grogan was a flute player and button accordion player from County Mayo in Ireland, and so some people call this tune Dermot Grogan's, but it is, I believe, a traditional Irish tune. Dermot was born and raised in the town Derry Tavrain in Kilkenny in County Mayo and learned whistle and flute from his father, who was a musician. He also played the accordion. He was a button accordion player and as an adult he moved to England and then in New York and he was very well respected musician. Sadly, in the early aughts he had a very serious cancer diagnosis but was actually able to move back to Ireland, reconnect with some friends and play music there in the last couple years of his life. He passed away at the age of 48. 

This tune I found on the session. You can look for it there. I will put my transcription on my website, my blog, and it's also recorded on Brendan Callahan CD where I am, so you can check it out there. Okay, here we go. Hey, thanks for listening. You can head over to fiddlestudio.com to find sheet music for this tune and more information about becoming a member of Fiddle Studio. I'll be back next time with another tune for you. Have a wonderful day. 

Starting fiddle from scratch (Flat Water Fran)

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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 Flat Water Fran by Phil Cunningham from a session at the Arthouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone. Hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about starting fiddle from scratch. So the questions that I usually get about starting from scratch, people ask, you know, am I too old, too young, musical enough, or I can't read music or I have arthritis in my hands? 

So people will wonder if it's okay for them to play fiddle if they feel like they can't do it at a high level. Which, you know, I think, I always say, nonsense, anyone can play. The only good reason to not play is if you don't want to play. And if you want to play, I don't see any reason why not to. 

But people also ask, do I need a teacher? Is it okay to learn fiddle from a classical violin teacher? What do I do about my technique? Is it bad to have bad habits? What tunes should I start with? A lot of questions, which makes sense, when you're starting something new, that you'd have a lot of questions about it. I'll get into the nitty gritty. 

But first, started thinking about the philosophy of starting new things, I think it's like getting into water, going swimming, and some people dive in. And some people go in very, very slowly.

As I was thinking about, well, what's the what would be the best way to start from scratch? I think a jump start, more of a dive in, is probably a good way to start. I would compare it to kind of riding a bike where you wouldn't want to just necessarily spend two minutes a day trying to ride a bike. 

Probably better to just spend the whole weekend working on it, and you have your balance. And then once you have it, you could get better at biking in various ways. But you've got the skill of like, balancing on a bike. You kind of had to put a bunch of work in at one point to do that, and then you've got it. 

So in terms of just basically holding the fiddle getting used to playing notes on it getting used to the bow. I would say if you have the opportunity to go to a camp or a weekend or a festival, or to have pretty frequent lessons at the beginning to just get over the hump of being able to sort of hold and play the instrument, then from there, there's a lot of different ways you can develop and learn. So that's kind of recommending the jump start.

Although Charley and I, who both learned a lot of instruments, and neither of us really learn that way. We're both, we both get in slowly. So I don't know, there's stuff to be said for the other side, trying it a little bit and then trying it more and just gaining momentum, as you slowly get more of a feel for it. 

I am working on guitar. I think I'm getting a little better at the guitar. Last year had to play it when I was teaching some general music and singing with kids playing guitar, and kids didn't seem to mind that I only know a couple of chords. And I was just a beginner. So I had the opportunity to practice it. But I wasn't really working on it on my own at all. I was just playing a little bit at school when I was there teaching.

But gradually because then I had the skill of doing it. I started working on it more and asking questions of players, sort of realizing things that didn't sound good asking people how to fix it. And now I'm at the point where I'm probably practicing about 30 minutes a day, I feel like I'm making pretty good progress. So practicing playing fiddle tunes and, and playing backup for songs. 

I didn't start with a big jump in it was a very kind of slow momentum. And now I'm practicing regularly, now that I'm better at it. So it's a little more fun for me to practice when I'm better at something. I don't think that's always the case. But that was my experience most recently of learning, learning an instrument.

In terms of just kind of nitty gritty, getting started on the violin. Very important to have a working instrument. So not a VSO a violin shaped object. You need a decent wooden instrument with tuners that work, new strings, a bow with all the hair, and rosin and your shoulder rest.

It's worth getting help, you can rent something, it's fine if you don't want to invest a lot of money. I know fiddles are expensive. So if you don't want to pay the money, rent something, but get some advice, make sure you're renting something that is good quality and tunable. So that you can learn. 

Some instruments are so bad, you can hold it in your hand, you can move the bow on the string, but you're not gonna be able to learn anything because the strings don't tune up and the bow doesn't. Yeah. It's don't buy those cheap instruments on Amazon, folks. If you rent something you can rent from Shar Music or any of the major string shops now will ship instruments out. Yeah, look for look for a violin specific, I wouldn't even run from like Music and Arts. I'm being a little snobby.

Get a decent instrument. And another thing is just to find a way to immerse yourself in the sound of fiddling, I've made this analogy a lot, but it doesn't get old. learning an instrument is like learning a language. And you want to just go to France to learn French, like as much as you can. You want to be hearing the sound, the accent, all the kinds of intricacies of the genre that you're interested in.

Look up my my playlists. So I have, I have YouTube playlists, and Spotify. If you look under Megan Beller for some different fiddle genres, so find you know some time in your life to put the music on and listen to it. Also go to live shows, it's a great way to hear it. If you don't like to listen to music, not everybody does, then get some live shows on your schedule or go listen to a jam or a session in a bar.

Another thing to think about is just having an easy collection of music to work on both tunes that are easy, and also easy for you to access. So having a collection of tunes in a book or or binder if you just print them off the internet, or a YouTube playlist that you're working through. But make it easy for yourself, to know what to work on and to have new stuff to work on when you're in the mood for something new. And to be able to go back and access the things you've already learned. When you are in the mood to play something you already know. 

Have your your kind of music in one place, you don't want to be searching all over. Where's that tune my teacher gave me can't find anything to play, oh, well, I give up. Have your book or your binder or whatever's on your computer, easy to access. I would start with some tunes in a major you know, I love to start with the high 2, get used to playing. And then find your genre build your ability to play in that genre.

 The more that you learn, the more you'll kind of find out what you like, and try to go towards that. Zoom in on it. And of course, find people to play with very inspiring. I have, if you're looking for support starting from scratch, I do have a book. It's called Fiddle Studio, Book One Fiddle for the Complete Beginner. So it's a lot of information about if you just have no previous experience.

Information getting you started playing with little tunes, but also about the instrument, about the gear, all the kinds of different things to think about and consider. If you want a deep dive, you can get that book. Or I also have a course if you're more of a visual kind of video, like to see it person. So if you go to fiddlestudio.com the course one is Fiddle from Scratch, and it's basically just, you know, the video version of that book. 

But there's a lot of great resources out there. And yeah, if you have questions email me, meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.

We are going to do a waltz today. This is Flatwater Fran, and it's a waltz by Phil Cunningham. I guess it was named for someone who like to paddle on flat water. That's what I saw somewhere. 

Phil Cunningham is a composer and musician, still live. It's born in 1960 in Edinburgh, Scotland. And so he's Scottish folk musician, composer. He grew up I think in the US and started on a toy accordion. Somebody got him a toy accordion that sort of inspired his his love of traditional Irish and Scottish music. 

When he was a little older, I think he got an album by Planxty. And so that really got him got him into Irish music and it actually dropped out of school at 16 to join a band. The band Silly Wizard, tour around playing traditional music singing. He wrote a lot of songs for it. That was his life for a little while. 

Now. He's, He's older. He is still performing in the United Kingdom with Aly Balan. They have nine albums together. They have a version of this. You want to listen to them play it. He writes a lot of different kinds of music. Now he writes classical music, scores for video and TV and still of course performs traditional music and sings really interesting funny guy. Yeah look them up Phil Cunningham. So we're gonna play this waltz of his Flat Water Fran. Ready?

Composing Fiddle Tunes (In Memory of Coleman)

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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 In Memory of Coleman by Ed Reavy from a session at the Arthouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about composing fiddle tunes, or writing your own tunes. I have been on a writing spree, you could say, I like to write tunes when I'm very alone.

Where I'm not, I'm not going to be interrupted, of course, I have three kids. So when I'm at home, the chances of me not being interrupted are very low. So I tend to write tunes. Other places, I've been going camping, to write tunes, or riding them away from home when I have some free time, doesn't have to be away from my home, but sort of requires that everyone else be gone. And that doesn't happen that much.

I have really been enjoying writing the tunes. And I was going to tell you a little bit about, we'll talk about some aspects of composing for fiddle tunes. We'll talk about either starting from a melody, or starting from chords, and writing intentionally versus just having something stuck in your head. And a little bit about how I capture the music that I compose.

I n terms of where to start and composing new music. I mean, I grew up playing the violin. And my other instrument was the flute. And I sang soprano. So I was very melody driven person. And when I started composing fiddle tunes, I always started from the melody, I never kind of had a progression of chords in mind. I was always starting melodic lines that I liked, kind of fitting them together into a fiddle tune.

Another thing about the way that I compose tunes is that I usually do so very intentionally, like I sit down, and I'm gonna write a tune. Oftentimes, I'll I'll be trying to write a tune that goes into another tune that already exists, or comes out of a tune. So like I have this traditional tune, I think, oh, it'd be great to have a really driving D Major reel after this. So I try to, to write that, I'd see a need for a tune, and I'll write a tune to fit that need. 

My father who, who writes a lot of fiddle tunes, when I've talked to him about it, he's kind of said, he'll be driving, and he'll get a tune stuck in his head. And oftentimes, he'll go and try to find the tune, and he can't find it. And sometimes he figures that he just wrote that. So it's a little different. 

Some people write tunes, from chords. I was talking a little bit to a pianist who I work with. His name is Marc Irwin. And he writes a lot of music, and a lot of different genres. And it sounds like he does a lot of writing from the chords or even when he's writing melodies, he's kind of hearing the chords along with it. Which he said, Well, you know, you're always, anytime there's a melody, there's also chords.

Well, you know, when you play the violin, and you don't play rhythm, you don't, you know, know the chords, and you don't necessarily hear the chords along with everything. So he was talking a little bit about starting with the chords. And the other place that I heard about this was two different places where I recently read or watched more about the professional music, business, pop music, and how they write and create songs. 

One was, I think, the Taylor Swift documentary, and one was a book by Rick Rubin. And both of them talked about a music producer, or somebody who was sort of supporting a songwriter, coming up with a chord progression, and kind of a groove to go along with it. And then giving that to a songwriter and having them come up with a little melody with words on top of that.

In the documentary about Taylor Swift, there were examples of that. So she had her producers giving her this progression with a groove, or even just a track with already drums on it. And then she's writing melodies to go with that. And Rick Rubin talked about the same thing, and he worked with a lot of different kinds of bands. 

I never thought about this. I think I'm gonna have to try it. Come up with a progression I like and then try writing a tune over it, just to understand it better. If you haven't really ever composed a tune, you can try playing questions and answers. If you go back to the improvisation podcast, I talked a little bit about how to dip your toe in the water making up music, and that's exactly how I do it with children and adult fiddle students to get them used to making up music and start to start to compose. 

You'll want to when you write a tune, you want to capture it. Do not assume that if it's good, you'll remember it. Yeah, I don't think there's any professional artist who creates music, who would say, Oh, sure, don't, don't write it down. If it's really good, you'll remember it. 

Never assume you'll remember anything, even if it's genius. So you can capture it. Most people just turn their phone on and they go to voice memos, and they do a voice memo of it. I actually sketch it with a pencil, I just have a tiny little staff and I write out the a part and the B part really quick, with a pencil. And then I have to make sure I don't lose the sketch on like the back of an envelope or something. 

I do put my tunes into music notation software, I use MuseScore it's cheap, it's really easy. I love it. You know, just be aware that your tunes will often sound like other tunes, or like each other. You know, lately, I've been writing tunes, and some of them just sound very similar. It's like, oh, this jig is just the reel I wrote the other day, but in a different key. And the notes are basically the same, the chord progressions the same, it happens. 

I try not to get down about that because then every now and then I will write a tune that's very unique from the others. So just keep writing a lot of tunes and you'll find the good ones. Yeah, I have a friend recently told me that their new album of mostly composed fiddle tunes came from writing just A Tune a Day in which they did during lockdown. Just write a tune every day and they said there was lots of garbage and there was good stuff in there. 

So that might be the best way to do it. You know, don't wait to be inspired by some magical fiddle tune that pops into your head while driving. Just just write it, write a tune every day or tune every week and see what you get. Yeah. Oh, let me know how it goes. 

The tune today is In Memory of Coleman. This is a real by Ed Reavy, it's a good opportunity, because I'd review wrote a lot of fiddle tunes. So I did look up a little bit about his process for composition, but Coleman refers to Michael Coleman, who was an Irish fiddler and dancer, and the Sligo style, lived in New York City recorded in his 20s as a fiddler, played a lot with piano. I love that. I should look up those recordings, always curious about the Irish piano. 

So Ed Reavy wrote this, this tune in, in memory of Michael Coleman. Ed Reavy was, of course, a fiddler, also born in Ireland, but lived in Philadelphia, one of the most popular composers of Irish Dance tunes of fiddle tunes, I would say, I don't think many people would argue with that. 

I looked it up. And it said, it said that his tunes came to him in moments of reflections, and that he had to be in a certain mood before he could start writing tunes. But the moods can kind of come on anytime, day or night, but most likely to occur when he was making music with other people. That would kind of get him in the mood to write a tune. 

And his son said that he would, he would think about Ireland, when he was writing music, he would think about his childhood there. Or even think about the problems that, that Ireland was having. This is the quote, "the trials and tribulations that the Irish people went through for the past 750 years. All that enters into music and naturally shows up in places". Went on talking about how his memories of Ireland and his thinking about the Irish people and what they've been through, enters into the Irish tunes that he is composing.

In terms of capturing his compositions, a lot of them were not written down immediately. It took Ed's son Joe, who started to collect his father's tunes, write them down, a lot of them would be recorded on homemade 78 records, Ed had a way to record them and his friend Tommy Caulfield recorded a bunch.

Joe would write them down and try to collect them that way. And many of them had been unnamed, too. They were just called Reavy's tunes. So when Joe and Ed started to collect them all, write them down, make recordings of them, that was when they named them as well. Always named my tunes right after I write them.

Okay, well, so we're gonna play this In Memory of Coleman. It's really interesting tune.

All About Bowgrips (Forget Me Not)

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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 Forget Me Not by Larry Redican from a session at the Arthouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about bowgrips. A fun topic. So is it a bow grip? Or is it a bow hold, it's usually called a bow grip. There was kind of a movement in the violin pedagogy world, I would say over the last 30 or 40 years to call it a bow hold. And teachers felt like saying grip might be encouraging students to grip or squeeze their bow too much, we could call it a bow hold. I mean, I don't think it makes a difference. I'm gonna call it a bow grip. 

Is there a correct way to hold the bow? Now, there are a lot of self taught fiddlers who hold the bow all different ways. So you see their thumb, all different places, different things they're doing with their pinky. I've seen people you know, holding the bow in different places on the stick, or even holding it on the frog and not really in the traditional place on the stick. 

As long as you're relaxed, and you're getting a good sound, you're kind of relaxing into the string and you've got a good contact point, you're getting the tone that you want out of the fiddle. It doesn't matter how you hold the bow, you're not hurting yourself, and you're getting the sound you want. There's no reason if your bow grip is comfortable, and it's working, that you would want to change it. 

So So what am I even going to talk about? Well, I'll talk about the classical bow grip, what it is, and why it is the way it is. And we'll talk a little bit about fiddling in many things with classical violin, the bow grip developed in order to be able to play very difficult and complicated music. So what violinists need to be able to do at high levels are these advanced bow strokes such as spiccato, or sautielle, or less common like ricochet. 

These are all bow strokes where you balance and you're looking to lifting your bow on and off the string, and you need it to be able to bounce. And in order for that you really need counter balance on your bow grip. Again, just be holding the bow and letting it move back and forth on the string because you're going to have to be lifting it and bouncing it and balancing it. 

So what you've got in the classical bow grip is the thumb is bent, it's inside the frog. And it's bent. This is a pretty big difference between a lot of beginning players and fiddlers and the advanced classical violinists, because no part of your hand should be straight and locked in that includes your thumb, so your thumb is bent into the bow, so that it's curved, and it's not locked out, you know, the way you would standing, you could like lock your knees out, is very different from having them a little bit bent or just soft.

The pinkie is on top of the bow. So for fiddlers again, this doesn't make a huge difference. But for violin your first, second and third finger are wrapped around the bow and you kind of need them for the weight that you put in the string. But your pinkie is on top of the boat, it's counterbalancing between your thumb and your pinky. You can you have the balance and the control of the boat.

Another thing about classical bow grips is just that the hand is highly malleable, you work really hard to get the tension out of the hands so that you can be very, very gooey on the string and get all the crunches out.

The way we talked about a little bit in the tone podcast for classical players. They really don't want any bone noise or any of the noise of changing directions of the boat. So their hand is very relaxed, very malleable on their bow to get the sound that they want, which is basically the most ringing out of the instruments they could get with the least amount of bow noise and crunch.

So for fiddle, we don't need to do a lot of bouncing. I mean, maybe if you're Jean Carignon, and you're doing some kind of ninja bouncing in French Canadian stuff, but for most of fiddling, we may lift sometimes the ball off the string. But we don't have a need for that counterbalance. And we don't even necessarily have a need to be fully malleable and gooey on the string and not have any bone noise. So you don't necessarily need parts of your fingers or your hand to be all curved and bend and supple, things can be more locked. 

In general, the less tense you are, I think you'll have less pain, you'll have a more kind of resilient bow grip for the long run. So I teach people all different ages. And you know, a young person may be tense and a part of their body and it might not be hurting them. But because I teach older folks, I know that having tension and doing repetitive motions can lead to limiting amounts of pain, a lack of motion. And so I'll always try to guide people towards having less tension in their bow grip in their bow arm. Some people are tense first and then they release it over time as they get more comfortable, as with many things.

Our tune today is Forget Me Not by Larry Redican. So Larry Redican was a fiddler born in Dublin. Although his parents were both flute players from county Sligo. He didn't go into the flute. He chose the fiddle and studied studied in Dublin with Frank O'Higgins and emigrated to the US in 1928. So in the United States, he was a member of the New York Ceidli band, and a member of the all Ireland senior championship trio with Jack Cohen on flute and Patty O'Brien on the box. 

He was known for having very good time. What I read about this was that in the 1950s, there were some new dance teachers that came from Belfast, Peter and Cyril McNiff, and that they had a new style of dancing, that slowed the tempo up to put in more fancy footwork. And to play for that kind of dancing. You had to be very, very solid with your tempo, which is always the case for dancing but especially if you're playing slow and then the dancer is trying to fit in a lot of footwork, a lot of fancy stuff. 

So Larry Redican was a fiddler who was very sought after for the style because he could play at different tempos and play very very solidly and steadily I don't have I didn't come across an explanation for the name of this tune, Forget Me Not maybe it's the flower maybe it's just the sentiment. But here we go, you can decide for yourself?

Playing Backup on Fiddle (Tatter Jack Walsh)

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 Tatter Jack Walsh from a session at the Arthouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today I'm going to be talking about playing backup on the fiddle. So a lot of what we talk about when we talk about playing backup involves knowing chords. So knowing about the music theory of chords, or sometimes you'll hear people call it rhythm. They'll say rhythm guitar, or playing rhythm on the piano. And they don't actually mean the rhythm, like the drums, they mean playing the chords, the backup notes that go with the melody, being able to play rhythm on an instrument, sort of.

Understanding chords and how they work is very, very useful. For playing backup, I'm going to talk about the different ways that I play backup for singers and for other instruments. But initially, if you don't have experience with chords, learning that learning about chords, either on the fiddle the music theory of chords on the fiddle, or on an instrument like piano or guitar, so that you know, you know, if somebody wrote out on a page, it's a G chord, and then an F chord, and then a C chord. Or even if they told you, you know, it's one and then two, and five, having an understanding of what that means and what those notes are, will make playing backup much easier. 

Can you play backup, if you don't know music theory, you don't know chords at all? You totally can. If you listen to what you're playing, and you can hear if it lines up and sounds good. With the other musicians, then you're playing backup, it is a little harder, it's a little more confusing to play for me to play backup with music that's completely unfamiliar. If I don't have any idea if somebody can't tell me the chords, or I don't have them written down, and I'm just constantly listening for what they are, and trying to adjust what I'm doing to that you have to, there's a lot more things you have to do at once. 

So knowing the chords, being able to read them off a chord chart, that's going to make it easier. Let's back up and talk about backup. So there's kind of two ways that you might end up playing backup, one would be behind a singer. And I'll talk about that first. And the other one would be behind other instruments, you might play in a band where you do both. In terms of playing for singers, this would be if you play in a band, country or bluegrass band. I actually haven't ever played in a in a band like that I've sat in a lot with bands. 

Also the kind of playing you might do at a group singing event or campfire singing, where people are singing, but there's some instruments, and you might play along with their singing. And then you might have the opportunity to play a solo like between verses. This also goes for services for services at church or synagogue. And I do a lot of that. 

As I said before, having the chords written out. It's one less thing to think about. And it can be very useful because it gives you a little roadmap for what groups of notes are going to sound good to choose from. And at first, you know, when I first started reading off chord charts, which would just be the melody maybe the words and the notes written up for the melody and then above it, the A minor than E minor, back and forth and it tells you were in the song, the chords change. 

And I would have to be thinking like oh, it's an an A minor chord, what's in an E minor chord. But as I practice those, you know, those arpeggios, and I got better at knowing right away because there aren't that many different chords, especially in you know, fiddle tunes where it's just, there are only a few common keys. So I got much faster at just from reading the chord symbol, kind of immediately knowing what notes would sound good with that. 

So the playing that you do with a singer, you're often playing an introduction to the song so it could be just the melody of the song sometimes the very opening of the song and then the singer starts again with the opening. Sometimes you play the end end of the song, and then the singer starts from the beginning, those both work as introductions, some people will play a lick or, you know, a little groove to get the song going before the singer comes in. 

And then a lot of times, the first thing I do, when playing with a singer is a stop. The very first verse, the very first chorus, is a time for the audience to really focus on the singer on the words and the melody, and getting a sense of what the song is about, following along, getting used to the melody. And I often don't play any fills or if I do, it's very, very minimal at the beginning. 

That's pretty common, a lot of times in a band, people will will actually direct me and say, don't, don't play at all, on the first verse, the first chorus come in after that. So when you do come in, what do you come in doing? Well, we're normally not playing the melody of the song, along with the singer, I would be playing some very minimal things that don't cover up. While the singer is kind of singing through notes that are moving, that might be something like long tones, and fits a G chord, just a G, I might just play the chords if there isn't a bass player, or if there is a bass player, I'll be picking other notes from the chords not playing the root. 

If I'm comfortable, I can put in some passing notes between the chords, put in some rhythm that kind of matches up with the song. And the other thing you'll be doing is playing fills. So a lot of times in a song, there'll be a sentence and then kind of a musical phrase. And then the last note will be long, or it'll stop and they'll be a little bit of a few beats before the next phrase starts. And that's where you normally hear musician put in a little doodle doo doo doo doo doo.

Something they'll put in a fill to fill up that space. You know, if you listen to some bluegrass, if you listen to some country, you'll hear the fiddle, doing the fills in the fills are just kind of an up or a down a little lick that stays within the chord of that spot. And sometimes has kind of a relationship to the melody that the singer was just singing. But it's mostly just to bridge, you know, bridge over to the next phrase that they're gonna sing. So you've got very minimal playing while they're singing. And then you can put in the little fills in between the phrases. 

And then there's the solo. And the solo is basically a long film that would go either over the entire verse, Through the chords of the verse, or the entire chorus, or sometimes both. Solos are a time of, of kind of uncertainty, I would say, in music. And so to do a great job on a solo, you know, you have to really be in communication before it starts. 

Sometimes, the singer might say fiddle, okay, now it's really clear you're taking a solo, or people from the band are looking at you in a way that you understand you should take a solo or you're looking at them in a way that indicates I'm going to take the solo, or you might even say, I'm going to take a solo. And they're understanding that so you want it to be very clear. And another way you can make it clear is by jumping into the solo quickly playing that last little fill into the solo in a way that kind of shows you here a go, it's me, now it's my turn, I'm gonna take a solo and and then ending your solo appropriately at the appropriate time. 

So you want your timing of your solo, to be good and finished cleanly to leave a spot for the next person to jump into their solo or for the song to start back up again. Now, if we switch gears to talking about playing behind instruments, a lot of it is the same. But instead of a singer, another instrument would be playing the melody. So you can just not play. That's always an option. You don't always have to think of things to play, you can stop and it can be a nice change in texture, to not have that very, you know the fiddle sound, especially when you're just doing long tones after long tones after long tones. It really fills the space so then if you drop out, there's a change in the texture and it sounds good. 

Long tones are great behind other instruments with put in your passing notes. For fiddling in a lot of times we do the shuffles, people will do chops, if you're familiar with that. I think that harmonizing I do harmonize with singers, but even more so with have other instrumentalists playing a harmony. 

When I, when I was first learning harmonies I, I would either learn a set harmony almost like learning a tune to go with a melody. Or I would have someone else play the melody very, very slowly so that I could work out each note. And I might even write it down for myself, I know that I read chord charts, I'm generally just the easiest way for me to harmonize. If I know the tune well, or I, I'm reading it off the page, and I've got the chords there. I'm just taking notes from the chords that are near the melody, you know, I'm either above the melody or below the melody, and I'm kind of picking the notes from the chords that follow along with the melody. 

And it should sound good. I mean, that's what a harmony is. The one other thing you can do, if you it's a little bit more, I would say showing off and just harmonizing but I think of a desk can as a little different from harmonizing, it might not follow the exact rhythmic structure of the melody. But it would normally be up higher than the melody maybe even, you know, higher than that sort of big, long, broad notes above soaring. People like to hear this little soar above. Yeah, maybe for slower stuff. It's not really something you do on a fiddle tune when it's specifically another fiddle. Yeah, I it's different playing with another fiddle. I tend to harmonize when I can or give them some rhythm. I might not fill as much with a fiddle. 

If you want to check out some solos. If you want to hear some fiddle solos. I just was at a house concert the other night and I heard Noah VanNordstrand play with his band, the Faux Pas with some other amazing musicians, but Noah was playing fiddle. And he does little solos that are unique. They're astonishing in their technical ability. I said to my husband afterwards that's like Mendelssohn concerto level stuff that he's doing there was so fun for me to hear because I've known Noah for a really long time actually since before he played the fiddle. And now he was doing some of the most astonishing work taking a solo on the fiddle that I've that I've seen, and I've heard a lot of fiddle solo so yeah, look them up, go and see them if you can the faux pas or, or look them up online and watch note. Take some solos, blow my mind. 

Okay, let's talk about our tune. A tune today is Tatter Jack Walsh, a very well known popular Irish jig. And Tatter is like Father, like the priest. Although it's not clear to me that it was actually about a priest. This is what I found about this tune. Tatter Jack Walsh was John McWalter, son of Walter Walsh, lived in Castle hollow, and was a poet and he was married to this was back in like 1630. They really keep records in Ireland, I tell you, he was married to Johanna Strong or Johanna Strange, who was a member of an old Irish family and although John McWalter was not Irish he took on and was the quote I saw was more Irish than the Irishman. I'm not really sure what that meant. 

But he became a very well known poet and very distinguished and was known as Tatter Jack Walsh. The funny thing about this tune is that, I guess it's people put words to it because I kept finding songs to the tune of Tatter Jack Walsh. There's a song called The Woman who Robbed me the Price of My Pig. Another song, the Dean's Pamphlet, which was all about different kinds of fabric for some reason, and another song called King Lear. So you can look up a lot of different songs or you can just play the tune as a dance tune with no words, which is what we're going to do. Okay, here we go.

Up and Down bows on the fiddle (The Coming of Spring)

Sheet music for The Coming of Spring by Paddy O'Brien. Hear the tune and discussion on the Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple Music 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 The Coming of Spring by Paddy O'Brien from a session at the Arthouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about up and down bows. This is an insider topic if there ever was one, but I like to overthink things I like to get in the weeds. I'm that kind of fiddle teacher. So let's talk about up bows and down bows, it's going to be great. 

This is a discussion more for beginners, it's a very common beginner question. If you're not a beginner, well, there may be an opportunity for you to help explain this to beginners, at some point, I hope this can be helpful with that. 

What is an up bow and a down bow. Um, the E string. It's exactly what it sounds like. You're playing on the E string and you're playing an up bow, the bow is normally going up, the tip is getting closer to the ceiling or the sky. And if you're playing a down bow, the frog is getting closer to the floor, your bow is going down. 

If you're not on the E string, it's a little more of a side to side motion. So it's not super intuitive which way is up or down. But it's always the same. If you're going towards the tip that's a down bow. If you're going towards the frog, that's an up bow on any string, E string, A string, any of them towards the tip down towards the frog up. 

It is pretty widespread to play down on the downbeat. And it's not just because they have the same name down down. Start near the frog and the frog is a heavier part of the bow and makes basically the bow near the frog is heavier and will make of heavier sound down bows on the downbeat. Give the beat that heavy sound with the beginning of the note being louder, fuller.

The up bow has a lighter start to it because you're starting from just that part of the bow weighs less. And it's a little further away from your point of control. So it's going to be a little lighter. So I have a personal take on this, which is that down bows are a little more intuitive. If you think about the difference between hammering down on a nail or like trying to hammer up to hammer a nail into the ceiling. I just think we're more practiced with that downward motion. 

And so that might be another reason that downvotes tend to be a little stronger, a little more in control. And they're generally being played on the downbeat. Because a lot of music is organized that the downbeat is the important strong beat. So if you think about starting down on a downbeat, Old Joe Clark da da dum bum bum ba starts on the downbeat, you'd start on a down bow.

With a tune like the march Meeting of the Waters, it has a pickup note kind of a pre note before the downbeat dun da dum bump. So the pickup would be up bow so that you're playing down bow on the downbeat. 

Now, this all goes out the window when we start talking about shuffles and backbeat, emphasizing the two and the four. When I'm playing reels, and I'm hitting that two and four hard. I'm adding in slurs and it's just what you would expect. I'm using my down bow on those beats because I want to have those be heavier, louder, bring them out more. 

So slurring up, up bow, and the less important notes but on the two and the four the back beats and playing a down bow to kind of bring it out heavy, spit it out. Some people do it backwards from that there's not a wrong way to do your own personal bowing that you're comfortable with. Not in fiddling.

Now for classical music. The bowing is basically part of the composition so there's a right and wrong way to do it. And classical violin players do worry a lot of About if their bows are in sync, you know, like, the way dancers would try to make their legs or their arms and sink them in the orchestra, they want all your bows to be in sync.

With Fiddler's it's all can almost be a problem if it's too in sync because you lose some of the variety, the improvised feel. It can look good, but I don't know. Personal opinion. I don't think it's really fiddling if the bowing is exactly the same all the time, never changing. 

I improvise my bowings, there's a lot of bowings, I do the same or the same patterns. But if I'm playing a tune more than once, I don't want to use the same bowings because I want to bring out different rhythmic aspects of the tune, make it smoother, make it bouncier.

I mean the outcome of that is that I wouldn't worry too much about getting the bowing exactly right. Or if you're bowing tends to be a little different from other people's what you're comfortable with. Because for fiddling, there's not really a wrong way to do it. Don't worry about it too much. But you know, down on the downbeat.

Our tune today is another Paddy O'Brien tune. This is the jig Coming of Spring and appropriate tune to be playing in March. It is from a session at the Arthouse bar in Baltimore. This is a three part jig. I love these three part jigs actually, Paddy, I guess, played this tune with another jig called Black Lough. 

And Seana Davey and Stephen Doherty played it on the Esdee sessions. You can look that up and Liosa Murphy also plays it on her album Skylark. So pretty well known Patty O'Brien tune. There are so many great Paddy O'Brien tunes, you can you know, if you want a collection of them for yourself, you can look up Eileen O'Brien Paddy's daughter get a collection of tunes composed by Paddy O'Brien. 

So there was a player on the session writing about this tune and using it for a certain Irish ornament. They called it smearing. This is kind of sliding up into a note. You hear it a lot in Old Time. Certainly bluegrass is certainly here in klezmer, which is another style that I play. But it's not always as well known, especially in an Irish jig. 

It has a has kind of a lonesome sound. I think it has a lonesome sound in Old Time, or an Irish. So some of these high notes, all these quarter notes, the high G's in the in the third part, you can slide up into them. And if you want to experiment, you can try sliding and not quite getting to them. That's that Liz Carroll technique I've been experimenting with. 

But this is the Coming of Spring. And yeah, I'm learning all these and learning all these accordion tunes to get to know them all. You ready? Okay.

Why read music for fiddling? (Trip to Birmingham)

Sheet music for Trip to Birmingham by Josie McDermott as played in Baltimore. Hear the tune and discussion on the Fiddle Studio podcast on Apple Music or on Spotify! Here is my music reading course.

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 Trip to Birmingham by Josie McDermott from a session at the Arthouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to address the topic, why read music? I, I've been working on a course for learning to read music. Boy, there's a lot you can teach in the realm of music theory. I'm having to kind of restrain myself and limit myself to trying to identify the best way to teach basically functional music reading that would be helpful for fiddlers because the goal is just to take you from not being able to read music or having very little comfort to having it be helpful for you picking out tunes learning tunes, that you can do that without the numbers written in.

I'm making on this course. It's, it's calling on everything. I mean, all my experience teaching violin and fiddle. I also taught some general music. So that was teaching kids who weren't musicians to read music. Even making me think about homeschooling my kids. Yeah. This course is I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. 

So the question is, why should we bother reading music? Look, a lot of great players don't read music, I just played a gig with a fabulous musician, Rachel Eddie. And I brought a binder of tunes to the gig. And I showed it to them. And they were like, those dots don't help me. And basically, Rachel didn't need the music. I mean, they knew everything so well and could pick things up so quickly, that they were right that the dots didn't help them. 

I mean, talk about a player to give you a complex know, Rachel and I are both 41. And I've had this long career and on the fiddle. And then Rachel plays the fiddle really well, I mean, professionally, but also plays the banjo really well, professionally, and the mandolin and the guitar kind of made me feel like what have I been doing with my life? Why don't I know all these instruments? 

I don't know. Some folks are just, you know, they really get into it. It's good. It inspires me to work on my guitar playing. I'm trying to learn guitar right now. 

Music reading didn't even become widespread to try to teach people to read music until kind of the latter half of the 20th century. And at the same time, they started teaching it, you know, in schools and studying the effects. Right? So it was pretty obvious to researchers, that if you were only treating music as a visual exercise, you know, show a kid this thing on the page, have them press this button and blow into the clarinet. You could sometimes do that bypassing the sound part, you know, see this do that people call it typing. Like you're just typing on the piano. 

And then taking a look at the children and the adults who learn that way. It definitely felt like something was missing. That learning music experiencing music as an aural, a sound experience when you're learning is really, really important. And in terms of Suzuki, or Gordon's Music Learning Theory. You know, they went in the other direction. They said, Well, we shouldn't really show people anything on the page. It just messes them up, it distracts them from the sound that they should be focusing completely on the sound without a visual reference. 

You know, they point to amazing players in all different genres, who don't read music and create spectacular music without, you know, reading the dots without reading sheet music. I agree that there should always be music you're playing without a visual reference. As a fiddle teacher, with my little teacher hat on. It does mean If you're not reading music that you can look at your bow, see if your bow is straight on the string, you tend to listen to your tuning your tone a lot more. If you're not reading you, you focus more on the listening side. You'll also just look and listen at other people that you're playing with and be more responsive to them. 

So you want to have easy tunes, tunes you've memorized tunes, you're picking out working out by ear, as part of your practice part of your playing. I don't think you ever want your entire practice session, just reading stuff off the page. I mean, you know, go back and listen to the thing about improvising, improvise, and play by ear. 

But let's get to the question, should we bother reading music? What the heck. Last year I worked on the Tchaikovsky Concerto for a little while. I wasn't really good enough to play it in college. But I figured, you know, 40 years old, it's time to work on Tchaikovsky, and I spent a couple of months on it, it came along pretty well, I only kind of got halfway through the first movement.

That's an example of a piece that was pretty hard for me. And I would not have been able to work it out by ear, I needed the music. And in terms of fiddling there are tunes like that. I mean, it can be genre specific, but there are tunes that are complicated, they're a little beyond you. And having the music there to break it down and take you through step by step can be super helpful. You know, a tune like Catharsis, Gravel Walk or showy tunes bluegrass tunes. 

Yes, you could work it out by ear over the process of a really long time. But there's a little shortcut there, read the music. Reading music helps us tap on music that we can't hear. I mean, these days, it's much easier to access recordings, there were a lot of times when you might have a book of music, but not a recording to go with it. So the only way to see what the music sounded like was to read it and play it. And then you would know what it sounds like. 

Written music is a shared language, it's a way to get very specific, especially with complicated music. So that you can talk about well, you know, in the second section in the 10th bar, we're going to do this or it's this note, if it wasn't written down, it would be much harder to have that shared language. I mean, I've played an orchestra, so you really need it, you need a way to to talk, the more complicated the music, the easier it is to have a shared language to discuss it and describe it. 

Some of us are just very visual, I'm a pretty visual person, I find it helpful to have a visual reference of definitely taught a lot of students with differences in their hearing ability, their memory, their attention, their processing, some of them just have a much easier time with reading. And if it wasn't there for them, they might not play they might not enjoy their playing. 

I think reading music is a window into what other people have thought up and created and written down. Just like reading language is a window into what other people have made up and written down. So you're not just walking around with your thoughts all day. Or what people say to you, you can open up a book and and find out like, what did he think about that? What what did she? What does she have to say about that? You can read that in a book. Which if you couldn't read, you wouldn't have access to that. 

And with music. The way that we write down and read music comes out of a European tradition. So some of the window is just into that tradition that classical music but because it has become very widespread. It's used in a lot more genres now. So it it can be that that window into someone else's musical mind, their creation. 

Yeah, that's my little spiel for reading music. Take my course if you want to learn should be done sometime this month. 

Our tune for today is trip to Birmingham. This is a real in G by the flute player Josie McDermott from we played at a session at the Arthouse bar. It's a very popular flute tune. It was recorded by well known flute player Matt Malloy, and his first album, he just called it Josie McDermott's. 

But apparently, Josie called it trip to Birmingham. So when I talk about flute, I'm talking about wooden flutes, traditional Irish wooden flute that sometimes has no keys. Sometimes it has some key which helps you play in some different keys and get a few more notes. 

My husband Charlie plays this flute he started just on the kind of PVC pipe flute with holes drilled in it. Now he has a keyed wooden flute. And Josie McDermott was a very highly regarded flute player out of the Sligo tradition. Born in 1925, and counties Sligo. 

I learned a lot about Josie from an interview on YouTube. You can go on YouTube look for Josie McDermott. And there was a TV show made about Josie that was partly in the Irish language. And it had a lot of tunes including this tune. And it was fascinating. I really enjoyed it. 

Josie had very poor eyesight. And for most of his later life was completely blind, friends said he could see the difference between lighter and darker, and that was it. He was known for being a really helpful person never wanting to be a burden. And was very famous for his flute playing. 

He was also I'm told quite particular about playing the tunes correctly, and not changing the tunes. So they they had a clip of him talking about this in the show that I watched about him. And he said he's sort of talking about younger players and he says if you want to play around with tunes, compose your own tune, but don't you know, don't change this old stuff leave that or it's going to be lost if you keep changing it. 

He was he was known for being particular about getting the tune exactly right both with himself and with his, his students and the people he played with. 

The story about this tune trip to Birmingham is I guess he went to Birmingham pretty often to play with Comhaltas there. And he was on a plane on his way to a dinner and the plane was diverted because of fog had to land in London fog in England who knew and he got on a taxi to Birmingham. And while he was in the taxi, he composed this tune called it Trip to Birmingham. So it's pretty well known tune we're gonna play it for you by Josie McDermott?

Thanks for listening, you can head over to fiddlestudio.com to find sheet music for this tune and more information about becoming a member of Fiddle Studio. I'll be back next time with another tune for you have a wonderful day.

Learning to improvise (Fly in the Porter)

Sheet music for Fly in the Porter by Paddy O'Brien as played in Baltimore. Hear the tune and discussion on the Fiddle Studio podcast on Apple Music 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 Fly in the Porter by Paddy O'Brien from a session at the Arthouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about getting started with improvising. I love to improvise. I improvise a lot. But I never did any improvising growing up. I'm thinking back and trying to remember if I made up my own music, or just played music that my teacher or my dad gave me that I heard No, I never did. I didn't do any improvising. 

I think this is a real shame. The way kids are educated in music is so different from how they're educated in other creative arts like art, or writing, where it's a balance between looking at what other people have made and created. And then creating your own stuff. I mean, even in language, we don't just say all the things other people say we're constantly making up our own things to say, in art, people make up their own art and in writing, people write their own writing. 

And then somehow in music, it's different. And in the classical world, and in the traditional music world has a lot of imitation. I don't know, maybe that sounds kind of harsh. Well, I started thinking about this a lot when I went to work for Alice Kanack. Alice connect was a Suzuki teacher, and she trained me. She had been teaching in New York. And she was a creative person. I think she had a degree in composition.

But she was she was teaching violin lessons spent some of her time working on improvising. Basically, I think at first it was just a way to make it fun for kids. Teach them musical concepts. You know, there's a lot that improvising can work on that's not specifically creative, like it can help your tuning, it can help your tone. 

But she does tell a story about working with a student who was having a very hard time learning and memorizing classical repertoire. But when she would improvise with him, he was just amazing off the charts, improviser creative creator of music, she began to see that, you know, not everybody was strong, and both that, that there were a lot of kids that weren't being served, because they were just expected to learn and imitate, and not being coached in creating their own music. But because of the way their brains were wired, or, you know, just as a personal thing, they would get a lot more out of the violin, or music, if they were encouraged to and taught how to make their own. 

So we would do a lot of improvising with the kids. And I, I love it. A little group of fiddlers at my kids school, and we started improv games in the fall. And they could not do them at all. There was fear and total lack of rhythm and creative ideas. And oh my gosh, I hope they don't listen to this. But there's been a ton of progress, just playing games with them, getting them into improvising. It's a completely different story. 

Now when we, when we improvise together, they're really on top of it and they make things up, they fit it together rhythmically. They play backup to each other. They play in the right key just instinctively. It's so cool. So that's what improvising can do. Some of the best musicians that I have met. 

You know, I think it's common with jazz musicians that you'll learn that part of their musical upbringing. exploration was a lot of time by themselves kind of making things up that they thought sounded good. But I've met a lot of really incredible classical musicians who also describe that. I mean, Alice Kanack was one of them. 

But my Professor Lynn Blakeslee, she wants just told me off the cuff. Oh, yeah, I used to just, she improvised this thing for me. And I was like, what was that? And she said, I was just making that up. That's how I used to work. up, I would just spend hours making up things that I thought sounded beautiful on the violin. I don't think that was a coincidence that she got so good at violin that she was a professor at Eastman. 

Here's one of the things I got from learning to improvise. I just learned a lot more about how to create the kind of music that I really enjoy. And love is learning that certain chord progressions, certain kinds of melodies, were the ones that I really responded to, you know that there was a recipe for it. 

It's like knowing your favorite movie director, you don't have to just watch random movies, and hope that one of them really speaks to you, you know that if you watch this particular person's movie, that it's probably going to be made in a way that you really like. So when you dabble in music, and you're creating with it, and you're experimenting with it, you get to know what you like. I think it's really good. Not even really talking about playing over chord changes. That's a different thing. It's great to do that. 

I'm just talking about being creative with music. If you get out your fiddle, and you feel a little silly, and you're like, where do I start? How do I try to make something up? A lot of kids will start with making up riffs making up just a little pattern that repeats that they liked the sound of my oldest child used to do that all the time, just pick up the violin, pick up a little riff a little repeating melody, played a few times. Play around with that. 

I play a game called questions and answers. And you can even play this with yourself or with somebody else. One person plays a few notes. Bom bom, bom, bom, bom. And the other person makes up a little answer bom bom, bom, bom, bom. And you can go back and forth. And I'll play that a call it questions and answers with adults and with kids, just musically going back and forth. And eventually, as we get to longer phrases, and we do more styles, like do it in a jig style in a six, eight rhythm, then I'll have them start making up their own tunes. I mean, an a part is just a question and an answer. And the second half is like the same question with a different answer. It's kind of a way into that. Questions and Answers. 

So try some improvising. It's just exploring. You can close the door. Nobody has to hear. Try it out. 

Our tune for today is a setting of Fly in the Porter. This is a jig from an Irish session at the Arthouse bar in Baltimore, Maryland. It's a jig by Paddy O'Brien. I did another Paddy O'Brien tune. O'Brian was a BC accordion player. Oh, yeah, Paddy had written the tune, Dinny O'Brien's for his father. 

We play a lot of Paddy O'Brien tunes at this session, because there's an accordion player, Billy McComiskey who comes to the session. He lives in Baltimore. He's pretty famous Irish accordion player, and a really nice friendly guy. And pretty often he will come by the session and play and when he does, we play a lot of Yeah, accordion centric Irish tunes. 

So I'm trying to learn them. So I can, I can keep up with that. Billy McComiskey was taught by Sean McGlinn, who played in the East Galway style, and won all Ireland competitions all through the 70s and 80s. 

His sons will come to and they play accordion. And it's funny to see Billy and his sons and they all have kind of similar accordions with a similar strap, and they hold it like at the same angle. So if they're all sitting next to each other, it's like all these strap an angled accordion, and then they play you know the body language of their playing and the rhythm is so similar because they played together for so many years. 

I could just sort of sit there and watch Billy play accordion with his sons all day. Billy is pretty funny if he if he sees me. I'm trying to learn these tunes so I can play with him. If he sees me just sitting and I don't know a tune in. I'm spacing out. I'm not trying to learn it here like pick up his phone and wave it at me because he wants me to record it and go home and learn it. Of course Charley always records the session. 

So this might just be in my head. But I think it can be good manners to take your phone out if it's an unfamiliar tune. And you know, you open voice memo, you put it on the table and you record it. 

It's nice if you're playing a tune. When you're like, Oh, this is a good tune. I'm sounding good on this, but not many people know it, but if they're recording it, you're like, oh, but they really like, they like the way I'm playing it and they want to go home and learn it. So it's kind of a compliment. 

So maybe I'm offending Billy, when I'm doing that. He's like, You need to work on these tunes. So here I am with a podcast working on these tunes, Paddy O'Brien tune, I think there's another Paddy O'Brien tune I'm going to do in March. Also, because they're all pulled from the same accordion Irish session. 

Anyway, if you go look at Fly in the Porter on the Session, there's some discussion about permission, I guess somebody recorded it and called it traditional. This stuff is a little tricky in the folk music world a lot of times, I guess it's because none of us really make a lot of money in folk music. We don't necessarily pay royalties, you know, just informal permission is usually all you need to record somebody's tune. 

Unless it's a real moneymaker. I think. Certainly, Ashokan Farewell was a whole different kettle of fish for Jay Ungar, who I think wanted it to be more like most of folk music where it's just freely distributed for education purposes, or it's nice if somebody asks permission to record it. But you don't necessarily sell that right but he was kind of tied up with a company trying to control the rights to Ashokan Farewell because it was so famous. 

There's so there's a little bit of a back and forth I think the person who recorded it and didn't attribute it, like wrote an apology and posted it on the session. All this stuff. I was reading through it, but we're gonna play Fly in the Porter Yeah, this jig in D.