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.

Making an album (The Home Ruler)

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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 Home Ruler from a session at the ArtHouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about making an album. I have been thinking about this a lot. This isn't really about making a big studio album where people are helping you, but this is how I made an album as an independent musician. The first thing you need for an album is a bunch of music that you play well, that is, you know, in some way unique to you, and hopefully you have a lot of music that you enjoy playing, that you want to share more than enough from an album. 

You get to pick out what you want to record on the album and start to arrange it. I would say arranging is the hardest part. It's hard to say because I hadn't made an album in a while and I kind of found it all to be the hardest part. Arranging was surprisingly challenging for me. Maybe it's easier if you don't do it with your husband. It was challenging, you know. 

We had to decide exactly how many times we were going to play a tune and how we were going to start it, the introduction, and how we're going to end it or put a tag on it, how to change it. Basically, each time we played it, what we were going to add or take away, and with our album we did sets of tunes. So we also had to decide how we were going to transition into the next tune. 

But even with songs, you know, you have to decide with each verse and chorus how you're going to change the accompaniment or do things differently, and everything needs to be planned out pretty carefully beforehand. Yeah, arranging is a lot of work. We had someone to help us with us. This was the biggest job that our producer did was to help us arrange the music. 

Once you have the music all arranged the way you weren't going to play it on the album and we had all the arrangements written down, then we had to practice them. Ideally, you're practicing it under some kind of pressure, because when you're in the studio faced with the microphone, you feel a little nervous. I was surprised about that. We did a couple performances where we performed basically almost the whole album just to practice the arrangements and see what went well and what still needed work. I practiced a lot with the metronome because we used a click track when we recorded. 

When we got into the studio we were at a really nice homey kind of studio in an old church in Ithaca called Electric Wilberland and by the time we did some small talk and caught up with the sound engineer and had coffee and bagels and there was a bit of fussing with different microphones trying to get the good basic sound. And then it was like okay, you ready to do your first take and I would say it was a little nerve-wracking even for someone who you know I record for this podcast. 

We don't we just record here in our home after we practice for a day or two, so it's nothing fancy. But I also have performed a lot throughout my life but I was surprised at how nervous I was. You know that you can record it again if you make a mistake, but it does kind of rattle you and you know they ask you to keep playing through the whole thing to try to get big chunks of music that sound good that then can be stitched together later to make a whole clean track. But after you do a big screw-up can be tricky to get your mind back on track and do an awesome performance. I don't know. 

I think I got better at it. We tended to play the best the third time. We would do three takes and the third take was often the best, and so most of the time we used the third take and then, if there was a mistake, something went wrong, we would patch in from one of the other takes. Hopefully there was that spot went better One of the other times. 

A few times we tried to do a fourth or a fifth take and by that time we were so tired and cross-eyed that it didn't usually get better, started sounding worse. So there's all this patching that you do where you are listening in the studio and then you say like, uh-oh, what was that note? It was really flat there, I didn't hit that right. And then they go and look and the other takes to see if you made it sound better. And it's just a miracle how they can patch it all together when you're hearing these people's albums and everything sounds absolutely perfect. Uh-uh-uh, a lot of that has been constructed. It's impressive. 

At some point we stopped trying to make it perfect. I don't mind a little bit of a rougher sound To me a little too perfect, can make it sound a little less like a trad sort of folk music to me. I don't like it a little rougher around the edges. But yeah, takes, takes, takes and then putting them all together and if your arrangement is really solid then hopefully you did something similar so you can figure it out when you're sitting there on the couch and listening and listening, and listening. Yeah, it's a little tricky. Did that sound good? Wait, can you play the other take? Did that sound better? And you know you hear listening. 

We had to kind of figure out what kind of reverb we wanted to put on the sound, what we wanted the sound to be. I kind of hate all reverbs, so I imagine I was a little bit difficult to work with, but there's a lot of work there. Then we came home so we basically got all that done in Ithaca. We're home now and there's still some finishing up with the mastering and finishing everything and then we'll start uploading the tracks to Bandcamp and putting it out into the world. 

You know I've self-published several books and it did remind me of writing a book in that it felt like a process you could get better at. I see why my friends who have recorded on five albums or for years and years and have eight or 10 albums where they get better and better, because you can work really hard and it can still not come out exactly how you want it. But I hope I'll have a chance to make some more albums because I do think I learned a lot from this process this time and just like I felt like it got easier for me to write and publish books the more I did, I imagine it's kind of the same for working on an album. 

Yeah, so the tune for today is the Home Ruler, and this is another hornpipe, the one that pairs with Kitty's Wedding, which we did last week. It's a tune by Frank McCallum. So Frank McCallum was was a fiddle player and accordion player who, I believe, who lived in Ireland, also had a passion for gardening and bees and old clocks. He was a member of a local pipes band. 

When he got older he mostly focused on the fiddle and the accordion and the discussion about this tune is you know, people wondered if it was connected to the politics of Ireland. The Home Ruler, the story goes, is that he named it after his wife the home ruler after his wife, and it was just a little bit of a joke that it also kind of referred to this political situation in Ireland. 

Matt Malloy has a slow tempo version of this played on the B-flat flute on the Chieftain's album Boil the Breakfast Early, played as kind of a slow march, which sounds really nice, over a sort of cello drone accompaniment. Also versions recorded by Noel Hill and Tony Linnane and Sean Ryan, so you can check out this tune. We're going to play it for you right now. The Home Ruler. We'll play it as a faster hornpipe. This is how we did it at the session. Great. 

Starting after a break (Kitty's Wedding)

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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 Kitty's Wedding from a session at the ArtHouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about starting up after a break, and I don't mean a break like a solo. Sometimes a solo is called a break, but after you take a break from playing the fiddle, some things to think about in coming back to it, returning to it. There's the mental part of this and there's the physical part. So I don't know why another person may have taken a break. 

We all take breaks for different reasons. I certainly took a long break the very first time I could, which was actually after my senior recital in college, my senior year, so I must have been 20 or 21. And that was sort of the first time in my life when my teacher didn't care if I practiced. I was already had fulfilled the requirements for graduating and I didn't have any parents telling me to practice and I took a long break. I did come back to it. 

I took breaks after I had my children having a new baby and there were a few times when I took breaks, I guess you would say due to depression or grief getting a little personal there, I guess. But often when I've had sort of sharper emotions of anger, I will play more music because it can help me process. But when I have been more in states of numbness or just vaguely sad, sometimes I will just avoid playing or almost just forget about playing music, forget that it's there. 

I had students who have taken breaks because playing the fiddle can be frustrating and challenging or because they move or their life changes. They go to college, they start another instrument or have another interest. I've even had colleagues, very accomplished players, who just went on to other things in life and stopped playing music altogether, or mostly If you are coming back to the instrument, and it's been a while. There's a few things that I have done with students who have been in this position. 

Some people like to play very familiar music. So whether it's really old if you grew up playing Suzuki, getting out the old Suzuki books and playing really simple tunes that you remember really well from there. Some people like to play out of the hymnal play hymns that they grew up hearing in church, or even just very easy fiddle tunes that they knew and they played when they first started out. It could be that you do something different that you've never explored, whether it's something you're drawn to musically, or new music that's related to something that's going on with you right now. 

You live in a new place, exploring the music from that region or, if you're falling in love or falling out of love, looking for music related to that, you could try writing your own music always an option, and some people, when they come back to the instrument, want to try tackling a new skill. It's like this is the time I'm going to really learn to read music or get my vibrato down or learn to do chops or just a new tune or a piece to work on. 

I did ask this question on Facebook and, in terms of the mental side, a lot of the advice was to not expect too much of yourself at first. Yeah, just to be gentle with yourself. And forgiving the fiddle can be challenging, because when you're first starting out at something, you're so focused on how to do it that you're maybe not listening as carefully to the sound that comes out, and in some ways that can be kind of a blessing. But if you're coming back to it and you played a lot when you were younger, you probably know what it used to sound like and so you want to be forgiving of yourself if it doesn't sound like that when you first start out. 

I find one of the things that goes for me pretty quickly. My right arm stays okay, but my left hand will go out of tune If I take a couple weeks, a couple months off. The longer I take, the more my tuning suffers. I have to force myself to pay attention to it and to work on it, but also just trust that it's going to get better the more I play and I'm gonna get my my tuning back to how I like it to sound In terms of physically starting up the instrument again. 

Whatever you could do to manage pain or tension not all of us have this, but many of us do Stretching I roll my back on a foam roller. Gosh, if you don't do this and you have pain in your back, I would check it out. It has been a game changer for me. If I could afford to go and get a professional massage every day or every week, I would, but I can't. 

I'm a folk musician, but I have my cheapo foam roller and I lie on the floor and my kids laugh at me and I roll back and forth and make little noises when I find a part that hurts and then I kind of wiggle on that part for a little while. I get a lot of release from that and it really, really helps my back in that I do so much hunching over the laptop and playing violin and driving children around Stuff that puts a strain on my back. 

You want to stop. If you're feeling tension and pain in terms of your wrists, your elbows, your fingertips, building up your calluses slowly. Try to be aware of when you're hitting the edge of pain that's not just a little discomfort but something starting to hurt and make sure you stop. Then Come back to it on another day. 

I build my hand strength with double stops. This might just be a classical thing, but I'll tell you what Double stops playing two fingers at once, two different strings will make your hand stronger. They're very challenging and they will improve your tuning because they're hard to get in tune. So that is one of the things that I play a lot of when I'm trying to bring my technique back from a lower level to a higher level, I'll play a lot of scales and double stops. 

If you're working on your tuning, just go slow and careful. You can use a drone if you want. If you're working on your bow, if you're hitting other strings and kind of squeaking a lot, try using less bow and going a little slower. And if you can play something that you know you don't have to read music for and just watch your bow, see what's going on with it. 

Take a look at it, either right from where you are, from your eyes, or in the mirror, where you can see what's going on. Don't be afraid to experiment. If you had a teacher a long time ago and you don't now, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Now there's no one to tell you oh, you have to do it this way, you have to do it that way you really can experiment and try to see what feels good in your body. 

There's a lot of different ways to hold and play the fiddle and, even though I talk a lot about how I think the best ways are, there's no right way of doing things. I think the best thing you can do for your body is to try to develop the awareness to feel when something feels good and isn't placing a lot of tension on your body, that's going to help a lot. 

Our tune for today is a hornpipe Kitty's Wedding. I guess there's a jig the Ships in Full Sail which is also called Kitty's Wedding. It's not the jig, this is the hornpipe. It's Irish, played in County Claire, also played in West Virginia and all the way up to Cape Breton in Canada. 

Wow, it just gives you kind of a scope of the reach of the music from Irish immigrants in North America. It was published in O'Neill's recorded in Off to Dublin album in 1966. In County Claire this tune is normally played third in the set after Sonny Murray's and the Home Ruler. We played it in the middle of the set. We did Home Ruler first, then Kitty's Wedding and ended with Harp and Shamrock. 

This isn't really a thing in old time but for Irish musicians and I'm of course still feel like I'm kind of an advanced beginner at Irish music, but there are these sets that people know. A lot of times it was a traditional set of tunes, three tunes normally that were played in a certain area and musicians learned them there and traveled around, and so people just got used to playing these three tunes always in the same order or these days. 

A lot of times it was maybe on a famous album for a musician and everybody loved the way the tunes sound on that album and so then they will still play the tunes that way. Sometimes I play one of these tunes in a set and then everyone will just run into another tune that I didn't even know was coming and it takes me by surprise, but it's because that's a tune that everyone always plays after the tune that I was playing. 

There are these well-known sets and I guess playing this hornpipe after Home Ruler, which we're gonna do next week, is a really traditional way to play this. Right now we'll just do it on its own. You ready?

 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. 

Starting Fiddle Studio (Flowers of Edinburgh)

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Welcome to the fiddle studio podcast, featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddle. I'm Megan Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of The Flowers of Edinburgh from a session at the Bru House in Dublin.

Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about my website, Fiddle Studio and how that got started. I've had the Fiddle Studio website since about 2009. I went back to see when the date of the first post was. I was teaching fiddle before that, my first job out of college was as a violin and fiddle teacher at the Kanack School in Rochester, New York. 

Teaching at the Kanack School was fun because the kids were already learning by ear and playing music by ear, this was a Suzuki school. They were also learning to improvise, because Alice Kanack the founder of the school has a wonderful method for teaching children a creative approach to improvising. 

So I went in there and started teaching fiddle tunes to these kids. And they just picked it up really quickly. And for years, when I wanted to send somebody home with a reference to practice at home, I had a binder full of photocopies of fiddle tunes, except that they weren't always the exact version that I played. So I'd be crossing notes out or writing in different numbers above. I had the tape recorder, stick a tape in there, make a recording of me playing the tune and give it to my student as a reference. 

Although as time went on, fewer and fewer people had a way to play a tape. Sometimes they could play it in their car only and eventually no one could play it at all. And I really wanted another way for my students to practice at home to be able to look at the sheet music, listen to the tune and have a reference for that. So that was when I got the fiddle studio domain and I started putting sheet music up on the website and sound files that I collected sometimes at school, at Fiddle Camp, or that I recorded and I used it for many years. 

Every time I had a student who was learning a tune that's when I would post it on Fiddle Studio and say go go look it up on the website and practice it there. I would say in later years, I use the website less because I was more likely just to record it on their phone. Okay, get your phone out, press record play the tune for them and have them just take a picture you know if I have the sheet music with me just take a picture of it.

 So that's a little bit about my website Fiddle Studio. Our tune today is from that same Irish session that I went to in Dublin, Ireland at a bar called the Bru House, and this was in June of 2022. They played the Flowers of Edinburgh, played it as a hornpipe. I grew up playing this tune as a New England tune. It's really a Scottish tune but I grew up playing it as a reel but this is a setting of it as a hornpipe. And I've also actually after looking it up, I've see that it's used a lot as a Morris dance tune also, I really liked it as a hornpipe. When we play it will play it a little slow. Try to get that hornpipe sound for you. 

There is a lot of speculation online about what the name might mean. I saw on the Session somebody was talking about the Flowers of Edinburgh being a sarcastic way to refer to the contents of chamber pots being thrown out of the windows onto the streets of Edinburgh. But a lot of tunes are named after the flower of this place or flower of that place. It often would just refer to a beautiful woman who lived there.

So we don't know if it's referring to somebody lovely who lived in Edinburgh or the stench of the city or what else it could be talking about. This is a very old tune. I saw it referenced in John Walsh's Caledonian Country Dances Volume Two out of London 1737. So this tune has been around a lot and it is a Scottish tune, but it was being played in an Irish session. Will wonders never cease. Charley and I are gonna play it here for you.

Thanks so much for listening. You can head over to fiddlestudio.com for the sheet music to this and all of the tunes I teach. I'll be back next time with another tune for you have a wonderful day.