Brad Kolodner (Stony Run)

On the Fiddle Studio Podcast this week.  Listen to the Fiddle Studio Podcast on Apple or on Spotify!

Hear an interview with fiddler and clawhammer banjo player Brad Kolodner. We talk a lot about the banjo, but Brad does more than just banjo. Topics include growing up as the children of folk musicians, the commercialization of Old-Time music, and the lack of women on bills at Old-Time Festivals. Hear all about Brad's upcoming projects, links below.

Features the tune Stony Run by Brad Kolodner from the album Stony Run from Ken and Brad Kolodner.

Brad's website: https://www.bradkolodner.com/
Charm City Junction: https://www.charmcityjunction.com/
The Baltimore Old-Time Festival: https://www.baltimoreoldtimefest.com/

Lissa Schneckenburger (for Grada)

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

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

00:27

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

02:07

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

Meg Wobus Beller

Yeah, so were you studying both? 

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

Meg Wobus Beller

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

05:59

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

Meg Wobus Beller

Wow, I never knew that you did contests. 

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

07:24

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

Meg Wobus Beller

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

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

09:59

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

10:34

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

Meg Wobus Beller

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

Meg Wobus Beller

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

13:22

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

14:13

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

Meg Wobus Beller

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

15:44

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

Meg Wobus Beller

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

17:16

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

17:55

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

Meg Wobus Beller

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

Meg Wobus Beller

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

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

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

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

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

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

Meg Wobus Beller

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

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

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

Meg Wobus Beller

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

I believe that the keys are for everyone. 

Meg Wobus Beller

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

Meg Wobus Beller

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

Lissa Schneckenburger

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

Casey Murray (Caribou Party)

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

Today we're going to be talking to the cellist and folk musician, Casey Murray. Casey Murray fiddles on the cello. Very exciting, our first guest to do this. Casey plays the cello. They also play guitar, mandolin, banjo, probably other instruments too. They write tunes and teach and perform in the Boston area and far beyond that. They went to the Berkelee School of Music where you can study cello and American roots music. We'll be hearing more about that and they perform with Molly Tucker and with Corner House, Calico. Lots of other bands I won't name them all. So, Casey, welcome. It's really great to have you here. Thanks for having me. 

I guess we'll start with a little bit about your journey just getting into music. All cards on the table. I know a little bit of this story because Casey and I go way back. How did you first get introduced to kind of string instruments and music when you were little? 

It wasn't really anything that was an impetus of my own. It kind of mostly sprung from my dad. Way back when I was, I think, probably about three, going on four, our local town had, I think, an advertisement column called the Penny Saver and there was an ad for introductory pre-twinkle violin classes to do parent-child kind of thing. And my dad signed us up and we did 10 weeks of classes together learning the open strings, how to hold a box cracker, jack violin with a little dowel stick. So that was my first instance of trying an instrument. 

So that was the Suzuki method. Yeah, you're not the only one we've talked to who started that way. What about after that? 

After that it kind of felt like a pretty natural progression of I really enjoyed it. It didn't feel like anything that I had to crumble about practicing or going to lessons or it was something that was enjoyable and I looked forward to doing whenever it was time to do it. So I think it was kind of almost like a positive snowball effect of rolling with going through the Suzuki method on violin and going to group classes and doing improv and fiddle classes and seeing different people in different ages of their own musical journeys, seeing other instruments and learning about how other instruments worked and being curious about them myself. The school of where we were at at the time kind of had this environment of curiosity and I think I was just very curious musically and I think that was a very positive setting for me to get my first bit of footing with music. 

Yeah, that curiosity makes sense, considering how many instruments and kind of styles you've explored since then. When I knew you back at the Kanack School, you were playing violin, like you're describing, but at some point you switched to cello. Mm-hmm, what was that? 

I think I was about six or seven, my younger brother played the cello and I was always mildly jealous about the fact that he could sit and play and also had a C string. 

It's always the sitting. 

I know yeah. 

Like relax. 

I pitched this idea to my parents of playing the cello and they were pretty hesitant about well, what about the violin? You've worked so hard, we don't want to put all of those years of practice to the side. So I was like well, I will make a deal, I'll practice both and work equally as hard at both, if I can start cell lessons. So I did that for about six years and then eventually decided that playing the violin was not exactly the thing I wanted to do long term. So let that one fall to the side a little bit. 

Do you still have a fiddle? 

I do Yep. 

I've seen you play it, so a lot of people might not be familiar with cello as an instrument in folk music. So you said you were doing improv and fiddle already in the school where you were learning. Did you dive into that with cello right away also? 

Yeah, I think the part of learning to play the cello in that kind of context was knowing the comfort I had on the fiddle with being able to fiddle and improvise and things like that. I kind of gave the cello another lens that felt more approachable and that it was okay to explore and kind of figure out what it was the sound I was looking for to come from the cello. So it didn't feel like a prescribed classical Suzuki square feeling of cello sound. I kind of had a way of exploring what I wanted the cello to sound like. 

So that curiosity what did cellos do when they play fiddle tunes in folk music? Do you play the tune? How does it fit on there? And if not, what else do you do? 

There are so many things you can do with the cello. 

Mostly a lot of melodies unfortunately don't fit super well on the cello. 

The lack of an E string makes that a little bit tricky, but there's some melodies that sit really nicely on the cello and switching octaves also works Some B parts or A parts depending on the tune. Swapping the octave can not be a nice arrangement choice too, even though we have to do it out of necessity and something that I love doing with the cellos. Backing up the tune as a guitarist might. There isn't like a ton of, I guess, background or history of cello and folk music. So my approach to what figuring out what to do with the fiddle tune on the cello is listening to a lot of what a guitar might do, or a bazookie, sometimes even a mandolin, and also listening to percussionists or drummers, kind of figuring out how they're supporting melodic ideas and figuring out how I can incorporate those sounds onto the cello to really as a backup player or not at all trying to distract or take away from a melody, but we're trying to uplift it and support it and highlight moments in them through how we're backing it up. 

Thank you for that. It's really interesting to think about listening to how other instruments are accompanying and then how you can do that with the instrument you have. But I know you also play some of those other instruments. When did you feel like I turned around and all of a sudden played a bunch of things, whereas before I only knew you as a fiddle and cello player, and did you get into the banjo and guitar and those other? 

guitar was, I think, something more. In high school I was starting to look at figuring out a way to play for a contra dance a little bit more and I started playing some cello for some dances and then soon very quickly figured out how physically exhausting it is to play for a contra dance, backing it up completely on the cello. There are thick strings and you can really only play two of them at the same time and it's quite physically taxing. So I was trying to find a way to approach playing for dance music that I wouldn't end the night in pain or exhausted completely. So I got my first little dinky e-bay guitar to start teaching myself a little bit on, just getting familiar with how the bottom two strings work because that's usually what I'm working with on the cello when I'm backing up a fiddle tune and kind of started there on the guitar. The banjo came a bit later. I started playing the banjo more seriously in college. I started taking lessons with Bruce Molsky and learning some old-time clawhammer banjo. 

You had such a unique college experience. I don't think I went to college in 1999, and Berkeley was just jazz. I think they hadn't started their roots music. It's so amazing to have that available now. How did you decide I mean such a commitment to spend your college years diving so deeply into the world of folk music? How did you decide to do that? And I don't know Then, what was it like? Was it what you expected? 

Yeah, I was applying to college was kind of a I didn't. It wasn't quite necessarily kicking and screaming because I didn't want to go, it was more of a concession to my parents who were like wondering if it was possible to have a successful music career without going to college. So I reached out to a couple mentors and got some opinions and advice. And at the time high school Casey was a little bit kind of shooting for the stars and figuring out what it is I wanted a little bit. So I sent an email to Natalie Haas asking for some advice on what she would recommend someone in my position who was gigging already, teaching a little bit already, and what kind of my options were looking forward to a career in music. And she responded and that was quite over the moon at the time, so exciting. And she she gave me some details on the Berklee American Roots Music Program. I decided to go for it. Berkelee was the only place I applied. I figured if there was one school that worked for me, this was probably it, and if I didn't get in, that's fine too. Hmm. 

So my Berkelee, my Berkelee time was quite special. I feel like I learned a lot and grew a lot as a as a cellist and a musician. I Got to study with a lot of cool people. I was quite likely in the fact that Natalie was teaching at Berkelee the exact four years I was there, so I got to study with her the whole time, which was quite special, getting to study from musicians who weren't chalice too. And that's something that I really valued a lot at Berkelee was I had my weekly lessons with Natalie, but I could also have extra lessons with mandolin players, harpists, banjo players, little players, things like that. So it's very, very apt to the kind of music learning that I like to do. Which was curious about how a harpist might play a tuner, backup a tune and Incorporate their melodic sense of chords to back in fiddle tune and things like that. 

Yeah, so many ways to satisfy that curiosity we were talking about when you're going to college for a fiddling. Is it like you have a class in like old time from the Appalachian Mountains and then a class in like Irish from Donegal, like You're just learning all the things, or I'm just so curious because I never got to do it? 

Yeah, I think it varied from. It was always so dependent on what, like my schedule, was that semester. There is some, depending on the teachers. So I think my first year I did Greg List's 21st century string band, which was essentially an ensemble of a bunch of people who learned punch brother tunes or crooked still tunes and figured out how to incorporate those tunes from those recordings to the instrumentation of the ensemble. That was that class. And then the next semester I was in Celtic ensemble. We learned a bunch of Celtic tunes. And then there's old-time ensemble and what else was there? There is contemporary string quartet where we dove into like some Turtle Island string quartet stuff, and another 21st century string band that kind of more focused on playing things like Mike Marshall and Dawg and Daryl Anger and stuff like that. So there's kind of a whole world of things and that's just like the folk music side of it that doesn't even dive into the world, music from Greece or India or anything like that. 

Wow, casey, I was up to correct the transcription afterwards and there's gonna be so many names for me to look up the spelling off. Okay, so I know you. You write tunes, you compose tunes. The first tunes of yours that I heard were part of your project with your partner, Molly. The album that we have a tune from today, it gets called After the Sky Weeps. I'm curious when you started writing tunes and what the process was Creating the music for that album, which is so beautiful. 

Yeah, my tune writing, I think, started probably around high school. A lot of it I did mostly with Daphne Pickins. We kind of collaborated a lot and it happened mostly when I was learning to play the guitar. And this is kind of has been my approach to new instruments, is kind of my way of figuring out how an instrument works is writing on it, and I started with like writing chord progressions on the guitar and bring them to Daphne, just playing them a bunch, and she'd improvise and write a tune over it and that was kind of how that would start. Then that kind of continued playing cello, starting to play more melody on it, figuring out how the melodic fingerings and things worked on the cello and writing tunes. That way I wrote. I wrote a lot of banjo tunes. 

In college. I learned a new tuning from Bruce and trying to have to figure out where all the chords and intervals landed and I Would write a tune in that tuning just to figure out how it worked. So a lot of the tunes that Molly and I wrote for that record stem from a lot of tunes that I wrote as, I guess, homework assignments in college. Her tune writing also came from that same time. It was kind of early pandemic. We had a lot of free time and Writing tunes was the way we spent those, those spare nights without social plans. 

Fair enough. You know that's so funny. Noah says that he taught himself fiddle just by writing tunes. He said he'd get frustrated trying to learn a tune. He just write his own. I've been trying to learn the concertina and so I've never learned an instrument by trying to write tunes on it. But after hearing Noah say that and, honestly, after hearing you talk about it today, I've been trying it out. It's a pretty cool way to get to know an instrument, just with that curious bend to it, trying to find out more, like really getting to know it, like you might get to know a person asking it. So you wrote the music in college and, like you said at the beginning of lockdown, where did you guys record that album? 

We recorded it in some of the Massachusetts because it was kind of like deep pandemic we were trying to figure out we have all this time it seems like it could be possible to have this happen, but we weren't really quite sure how. So we kind of started throwing things at the ball and seeing what stuck and we reached out to Jenna Moynihan about producing it. She had never produced an album before, so we were her first album production project. She had told us that Yann Falquet was starting to create this home studio kind of thing and he had recorded some stuff for Hanneke Castle during lockdown and it seemed like the easiest solution that was right around the corner and make a little bubble and not have to go anywhere. And it was cold, cozy January and we could just pull up for a weekend track a record. 

Yeah, oh, it's a beautiful record, but where can people find it online if they want to check it out? 

You can buy it from us directly on Bandcamp. It's also on all the streaming services Spotify, apple Music, tidal, et cetera. 

So when you came to Baltimore I heard you play with a different band, with the band Corner House, at a house concert at Brad Kolodner's. It was so fun and I think you're on the road a lot with Corner House. Can you tell us about that band? 

Yeah, Corner House is a super fun project and I really enjoy playing with this band because it feels like it's such a wild melting pot of musicians. I haven't found another band that sounds quite like us, I think, because of the individuality of each person is so different. It's quite fun to explore the possibilities of that band, but they started out as a trio without me way back in 2017. And they went on tour in Scotland and realized that they wanted to chill us in the band full time and asked me to join. So we started digging around Boston a little bit, getting our footing, building some material together. Yeah, really cool to just grow musically together. My background stems from Celtic and contra dance music and Louise, our fiddler, is from Scotland, so she has very Scottish fiddle roots. And then Ethan and Ethan they're two of them have both like a more of an old-time bluegrass background and a little bit of jazz. So it's kind of cool to melt all of those things together and have this one crazy old-time bluegrass Celtic sound. 

It's a really unique sound. Any fun things you've guys have been up to lately. 

Recently we've been doing a lot of touring around the Northeast playing for some festivals. We had a really fun time at the Rochester Jazz Festival this past year Our first time we played two back-to-back completely sold-out shows. It was really. We haven't played to a room that full and not excited before. It was quite fun for us to be a part of. 

Casey, we're going to talk about ways that people can connect to you, but you teach in the Boston area, is that right? Yeah, you teach online also A little bit, yeah. 

Kind of have a few different ways in which I teach. I teach at a community music school in Wayland, teach a little bit at home and some on Zoom and if people want to find out more, how can they get in touch with you? 

Best way is through my website Caseymurraymusic.com.

My email is also Caseymurraymusic.gmail.com to get in touch and reach out. 

Cool. Well, so everyone definitely check out Corner House and look for Casey's album with Molly. Our tune for today is called Caribou Party and we're going to hear Casey play it on the cello from the album After the Sky Weeps. This is I guess I quizzed Casey before we started it's Crooked Old Time Tune in C Minor. Is it your tune or is it traditional? Can you tell us about this tune? 

Yeah, it's one of mine. My last spring college, where everything went to Zoom, I was in a class called. It was an ensemble tune writing, and every week everybody wrote a tune. We played through everybody's tune. We all had so much fun during the semester and after we all graduated we decided to keep doing it throughout the summer. So we kept meeting every couple weeks on Zoom and sharing tunes through writing. This is, you know, deep summer 2020. This was a tune. Usually we had a prompt. I don't think I had a prompt for this tune, but I had never written a minor banjo tune before, so I decided to give it a go and this is the tune that fell out, and it also sits nicely on the cello because of the nice low C string the tune name came from, I think I was trying to remember or figure out what you refer to as a group of plural caribou, and so I came up with just probably just called the caribou party. 

I love that. Well, Casey Murray, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Thanks for having me. 

It's been quite a pleasure. Be sure to look at Casey's website, caseymurraymusic.com. Look Casey up on Instagram, where their kind of latest updates will be. I enjoy the corner house Instagram too. Sometimes you get to see the dog. What's your dog's name? Susie? Oh Susie, she's so sweet. I mean I also like seeing your updates. But okay, thank you everyone. 

Cross Tuning (All's Quiet)

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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 All's Quiet from the album Broke the Floor by Meg Wobus and Charley Beller. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about cross tuning, finishing up my podcast recording here. There's a lot of Tuesdays in October I've been trying to do an interview kind of once a month, so we'll probably be hearing that. Next week will be my interview with Casey Murray, a cellist who plays fiddle and a fabulous musician with the band Corner House, and then we'll be doing some new topics for November. 

There are a lot of things to talk about with the fiddle, but my kids kind of tease me that my eventually I'll just be writing about like the third finger, the fourth finger, the second finger, because I'll just run out of things to say. If you have an idea for a podcast, something you'd like to hear about, please let me know. That would be great. 

We're going to be talking about cross tuning and this is a topic that I know some things about and I'll share that with you and I want you know if you don't know anything about cross tuning it'll probably be helpful, but I am in no way an expert on cross tuning. I really didn't even start cross tuning my own fiddle until, like the last six months, got inspired to learn about that and get more into it. So in classical music we usually don't change the tuning, it's just set G, D, A, E and because I grew up in the New England tradition and a lot of those fiddling traditions that they use piano and piano is a very traditional instrument for New England fiddling the piano can play pretty easily in most keys so the fiddlers don't change the tuning because they might want to play. 

I mean there's New England tunes in B flat and F and all kinds of fun keys that a guitar player at an Irish session may decline to play a tune in B flat, but a piano player it's probably not too bad. They can do it no problem. So I didn't grow up cross tuning. It is used, I guess, very occasionally in Irish or Scottish. I saw some examples online. 

But really the place where people are most often changing the tuning of the strings of their fiddle and then playing fiddle like that with strings that are tuned to a different set of notes is in old time and the different tunings have different names. You can go and look up the Wikipedia article on cross tuning. It gives you a little bit of an indication. There's one called Cajun tuning Sawmill, I've heard of that. Some of them are named after like what, the, what the letters spell out. 

So if you tune your fiddle G, d, a and then the top string D, so you've tuned your E down a whole step to D, what people call that G-dad. There's a tuning called Dead Man's Tuning. Yeah, cross tuning, cross A, that A-E-A-E tuning. That's the one I've used the most. Calico tuning with the C-sharp. I don't know any tunes that use calico tuning. 

So there are a lot of different ways you can tune a fiddle. I mean there's no law saying that the bottom note of a fiddle has to be G. You just turn that peg, turn it up to A and you've cross tuned your fiddle. So that's what cross tuning is. It's tuning one or more strings on your fiddle to a different note. 

When you hear someone playing with a lot of double stops and drones and a lot of close harmonies, often a kind of lonesome sound, it sounds thick, like there's a lot of strings and intervals that you're not usually used to hearing on fiddle. They've cross tuned their fiddle and it's a beautiful way to incorporate drones into old-time tunes and it's a very unique sound. There's a lot of tunes that you really can't get to sound complete without cross tuning. 

Or you listen to how someone plays it and I'm thinking like well, I could hold my fingers and do all these complicated double stops to try to recreate that, or I could just tune my E down to a D and then I'm going to have that D drone across the top of the of the tune. So if you can't get it to sound right with your drones, you might need to cross tune. It's common enough for old-time that if you hear an old-time fiddler at a performance at like a dance or a concert, they may actually have multiple fiddles there. 

So they'll have a fiddle that's already been tuned up into A A-E-A-E so that they because when you change the tension of the strings tune it to a different note, it's gonna kind of make the other strings on the fiddle go off a little and the fiddle's gonna have a hard time settling into that new tuning quickly. So that's why people will have multiple fiddles for performing tunes in different tunings In a jam. 

Usually everyone just stops and says, okay, no more G tunes, we're changing to D or we're going to A now, and everyone will stop and adjust their tuning. If you're gonna cross tune on a regular basis, you definitely want to have fine tuners and probably one of those little micro tuner guys you know that you put on the shoulder of your violin so that you can just double check your strings. That's really easy to do and then you've got the fine tuners. So you're not always using the pegs, but you're using these little little bitty screws at the top of the fiddle to get your strings in tune. 

So the, the alternate tuning, the cross tuning that I most familiar with, is is that a tuning a, e, a, e, and the violin or the fiddle sounds completely different. I mean, my violin sounds really different, louder for sure. I mean you'll. You'll hear people say, oh my gosh, the. The jam got so loud after everyone tuned up to a because those bottom strings are tighter now and there's going to be a different resonance coming out of the instrument. 

You've got more overtones, the whole thing is going to be louder and more resonant and kind of kind of amazing sounding. But we, we shouldn't. But along with that amazing sound that you're going to get when you cross tune, it is fingered differently. So so don't panic. I mean, if you've never, ever played a different instrument you've only played fiddle and it's only been G,D A, E it is going to make your brain buzz a little to try to play with a string tuned to a different note. 

But it's not rocket science, you know, it's not like inventing the wheel. If you've tried to pick out a little tune on the ukulele or a little tune on the piano, I mean it's basically like that. To me it feels like playing on a slightly different instrument to play cross tuning, and there often aren't a a ton of notes on those other strings. So you just have to get used to like, yes, the first time you play an F sharp with your one, it's going to feel funny. 

I mean, if you've, if you've done a lot of classical, it's a little bit like playing in second position or something. But you get a feel for it pretty quickly and then it's just a different way of playing that tune. And you know what, if you put the wrong finger down and a different note comes out, it's not the end of the world, it's just fiddling, it's just folk music, not too big of a deal, as with all playing by ear and we talked about this earlier this month you want to be curious, play around with it. 

Cross tuning definitely goes hand in hand with droning. So if you're interested in getting this kind of gorgeous, loud cross tuned fiddle sound, you want to practice your droning too. I have an episode on droning. Episode 15 is called double stops and drones, one of my most popular episodes. I also have a whole course at fiddle studio. If you, if you really want to dig in and practice all different ways of droning and and get a lot of tips for that, you can look up my droning course and learning to drone. 

Be careful when you're tuning. You don't want to break a string. Most, most strings break when you're you're turning the wrong peg, you know. So you want your A to sound different, but you're you're turning the D string. You're like why isn't the A getting higher or lower? But you're turning the wrong peg, and then that you can actually break a string that way. So just be careful anytime you're tuning your violin. You don't want to break your strings, since they're a little pricey, I guess, especially if you get the good ones, but have your fine tuners and your little micro tuner and, yeah, look up some, look up some fun cross tunes. Get your drones happening. Such a such a great sound. 

Our tune for today is a jig from my album. This will be the last tune I'm sharing from my album, broke the floor. You can look for it. Look for it online. It's called broke the floor by Meg Wobus and Charley Beller. It's on my bandcamp, megwobus.bandcamp.com, or just look. You know, look in the description of the podcast. Hopefully I'll stick a link in there. 

I was thinking about Irish sessions when I was writing this tune and trying to maybe write a jig that would fit in a session. That would sound a little bit Irish or at least not too contradancy. I'm not sure I achieved that. It does have the key switch at the beginning of the B part which is I mean, frankly it's a very New England, french, Canadian thing. I can't completely shake that. You know, when you're raised in it and steeped in it, I always have that, those New England habits, that they creep in, even when I'm trying to write an Irish tune. So key change in the B parts a little little northern sounding but it's a little bit like an Irish jig. We'll see. I kind of like that. This tune is mostly just a scale. You know you can do a lot with a scale. It's kind of that D-scale and then I just skipped a note, so we'll hear it now. It's a jig. It's called All's Quiet.

Playing by ear (Heater Don't Stop)

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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. Today I'll be bringing you a setting of Heater Don't Stop from my album Broke the Floor by Meg Wobus and Charlie Beller. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about playing by ear on the fiddle or this might pertain to other instruments as well. 

Playing by ear is funny. Some folks take to it right away. I always wonder, especially if they haven't played other instruments. Did they experiment a lot with instruments when they were a kid? Did they spend a lot of time whistling? Yeah, I wonder how they got basically the part of their brain that thinks about melodies and music wired to their fingers where they could just easily figure out, pick out a tune or find the notes to play along. 

For some people it's a struggle, and I don't think it's their fault. I just think our brains are wired differently and sometimes you have to work to connect those two things Physical motion of your hands, if we're talking about fiddling with what you're hearing and what you're thinking about trying to play. 

You can't really play by ear if you're not listening to what you're doing. So people playing music without listening to what they're doing. Sometimes they call it typing. I think that comes from piano Pianists kind of an insult to say, oh, he's just typing. The way you might practice typing you're just reading a document and then making your fingers type it out on the piano. 

Just reading music and then just making your fingers type it out on the piano. So with a violin I think you're kind of forced a little bit more to listen to what you're doing. But people still tuck their instrument under their chins and I do this sometimes and I'm just off in a different world and I'm not really listening to what's happening. Sometimes I'll go back and hear myself and say is that what I sounded? Like I wasn't paying any attention. 

If you're trying to Listen in focus on what's coming out of your instrument, it really helps not to have something that you're reading. You're not reading music, you're not trying to read something else, you're not looking at anything in particular. Maybe your eyes are closed or you're just soft gaze and you're listening to the notes coming out. 

You may, if you have trouble distinguishing between notes, just like some people have trouble distinguishing between colors, it's just a difference that comes up. You may want to do ear training test or software online to try to develop that skill of just being able to hear the difference between the different notes. 

One way I like to play around with ear training for people who are just starting off with fiddling or just dipping their toe into playing by ear is in a curious kind of improvisational way. Start on one string, take your A string or your D string and try to make up some little four note tunes on a string. Just to hear what the notes are doing, play around with your fingers, listen to what's coming out. You only need four notes to make a tune if you play, play some little patterns, put them together. Pretty soon you'll have a little four note, three or four note song. 

You can go from there to picking out simple children's songs. You know really well. If you know Row River, your boat or Three Blind Mice or any other song that you grew up with, that you can hear it in your head. And then pick out a note and try to make that sound on the fiddle. Yeah, also works with simple fiddle tunes, but of course if you're not using the music, you want to know it in your head, the sound of it. You want to basically know it is so well you can hum it. So if you can hum old Joe Clark then you can try picking it out. But if you can't hum it yet you can't remember how it goes. You're not really playing by ear trying to figure it out. 

You do have to think a little bit about keys. So it helps, when you're first starting to play around with learning by ear, playing by ear, to have just one or maybe two keys, that you're working in the key of G. And you're working in the key of G basically means that any songs you're trying to figure out, or even little songs that you're writing, would end on a G. Because if something's in G it means it's all centered around that resting tone of G and it may not necessarily start on a G, although a lot of songs do start on their home base note. 

But it would normally end on a G. And then you'd want to know the seven notes that make up that scale. Seven's, not that many, you can learn it. The one octave G scale is just on the D string 3A, 1, 2, 3e, 1, 2 and your twos are low. So you know that. Or you can use A if you like your high twos but work in that one key. 

Try making up your songs, working out some children's songs, maybe working out an easy tune or two, and just do them in that key until you get comfortable with those seven notes Going back and forth, skipping, hopping, leaping, different patterns that basically make up music in that key. Then you can branch out to some other keys. You've got D, a, e, minor, a minor. I mean that might hold you for a while. 

I love to take a really easy tune and try starting it on different notes, so playing it in different keys. This is a classic way to practice. You can do it with a scale. I had my interview with VanNorstrand  and he said he'd never played scales. But I think playing scales is really useful. You can just make up your own music, like Noah did, or you can play some scales and move that around to different keys and then try it with some easy tunes. 

You know if you're playing the piano or right now I'm playing the English concertina. I know where all of the natural notes like on the piano it's the white notes and then all the black notes on the piano are sharps or flats and on the concertina it's the same where you kind of know where all the white notes are and then on the edges are all the sharps and flats. It makes it easier to know what key you're playing in because you know in G you've just got that one black note on the piano, the F-sharp, and the rest are the white notes. But on the fiddle you need to know your finger pattern, loathe, high, twos, what's going on, what the notes are, but there's only seven, you know. 

I guess the last thing I'll say is the next step, after listening in to what you're doing and learning to pick things out and just let the wrong notes slide by and keep figuring out until your hand is able to into it its way through a tune is that you want to actually push it into your subconscious. This is where I'll actually I'm trying to do this with the concertina now. I want it to be subconscious so that if I'm hearing a tune in my head, my fingers will just do it and there's no thinking about it. I can think it where are the buttons and it'll go slow. 

But in order to get it fast it needs to be happening basically subconsciously. Unless I've like practiced, practiced, practiced, practiced, I'll have that one tune fast. But I want all my tunes fast. So I've actually been propping open a book or even, you know, reading an article on the internet and playing tunes while I'm trying to do something else trying to read or have a conversation with somebody and making the tune as easy as it needs to be for me to do it while I'm not focused on it. As you push the skills into your subconscious, you're creating that faster link between the melody remembering part of your brain and the finger muscle movement part of your brain. I want those to be super well linked so that it just happens before you can even stop to think is that a two? Your two is already playing it. It takes a little while. 

Our tune for today is called Heater Don't Stop. This is a tune I wrote kind of a crazy tune, to be honest, but I like it. I think I was trying to write an old time tune, but it's not really old time. It's in D minor. It's got some unusual notes in it. I wrote this up in a cabin in Pennsylvania. It was by a stream and I was playing around a lot with tunes that I know that have hits in them and writing tunes with hits. 

I really love it when the fast notes stop and then there's these kind of bum, bum, bum bum. I call them hits. They're just longer notes that really emphasize that part of the tune. In Contra Dancing they're used for balancing, doing the balance movement. Yeah, I somehow ended up writing this tune that has five hits in a row, which is five is not a great number for dance. Everything is four or eight. It's actually very hard to use this tune for Contra Dancing. It's hard to dance to, but it's fun to play. Yeah, I'll share this tune with you. This is Heater Don't Stop. From my album Broke the Floor. 

Putting sets of tunes together (Waltz for Charley)

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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 Waltz for Charley from my album Broke the Floor by Meg Wobus and Charley Beller. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about pairing fiddle tunes and putting together sets of tunes. But before we talk about putting tunes together into sets, a word in defense of just playing the same tune over and over again. So this isn't completely unknown in the world of fiddling. If you go to a square dance or an old time jam, you'll hear people playing just one tune, focusing on that tune. 

I do think there's something in our modern culture where people aren't really used to just doing the same thing for a long time in kind of a meditative way. They're in a hurry, they're anxious to get on to the next thing. And I'm fiddling that can be like let's get on to the next tune. But if you can relax into the repetition of playing a tune 10 times or 20 times, you can find things. I think you can find things in it that you might not notice just from playing it once. 

Sometimes, I'm Jewish, and sometimes on the Sabbath, on Shabbat, we will sing songs that go on, either have lots and lots of verses or wordless melodies that you sing many, many, many times, like you would play a tune at a square dance, and it can kind of shape to just do the same thing again and then do it again, and then do it again. But once that itchy I'm getting tired of this feeling goes away, for me it can be really beautiful and transformative. 

I've read about how some art teachers will have their students just stare at the same piece of art for like 30 minutes or an hour and that as soon as they stop feeling antsy about it, they'll start to notice things. And I find this if I'm like watching the sunrise, which you think, oh, I'm gonna watch the sun rises, oh my gosh, it takes forever. But then I'll keep noticing like, oh, there's a bird flying there now, or now there's a little house I didn't see on that hill over there before. 

So I think when you play tunes over and over again and you're not in a hurry to get to another tune, you can start to, yeah, change your experience with a tune or notice new things about it. It's not necessarily bad, but that's not actually what I was gonna talk about. I was gonna talk about putting tunes together, so let's do that. 

Okay, start with dance sets. So when I was growing up, tunes went in sets. I didn't ever go to an old time jam. I didn't ever play tune 10 times in a row. I put the tunes together into sets for contra dances. You know, working with my dad or with a band in college when I got a little older, you play the tunes five or six times at the dance and go to the next tune. 

If you're putting tunes together that way for a contra dance, often the first tune is a little simpler, because the dancers are hearing the moves called out initially and you don't want them necessarily trying to parse what the caller is saying to do while also hearing this really, really complicated tune. Then you go into the second tune and you always kind of wanna bring the energy up a little bit, unless you're going for something really dramatic and decreasing energy in the middle of the set not sure why you would do that and then at the end of the set you'd either bring the energy up again or maybe end with like a big expansive sort of finishing sounding tune, and the key is usually up. It either goes up a fourth or a whole step or it can go from minor to major. 

So a really common order of keys for like a three-tune set would be tune in D and then G and then A. I mean, if we're just talking about sets for contra dancing, I also look at the personality of a tune. I like to match up tunes that have a similar personality, like maybe a tune that sounds a little bit like a rag or a very kind of smooth Irish sounding tune, with more tunes like that. Or even look at the personality of the A part and the B part separate. You know, if the A part is marchy and then the B part is kind of syncopated, then I might look for other tunes like that so that when they're playing the second half of the dance they'll have the syncopated beat to dance against and that that will remain even when the tune changes throughout the dance. 

You can really get into the weeds about how individual parts of the tune will fit. Certain dance moves, like where the balances are forward and back down the hall for more marchy things. Playful moves like a California twirl is a dance move. Sometimes I look for a more playful tune. There's, of course, the Hay for four, which people go back and forth. Some people like a real dark, brooding tune for Hey for Four. Becky Tracy said she loves sweet marches for Hey for Four. 

So for me, for matching up tunes, I have this huge spreadsheet with all my tunes and then there's all these different rows and it's like how does the A part feel? Where's the balance? How does the B part feel? What is the whole tune driving, or is it smooth, or is it syncopated? And then I'll look at that and look at all the sort of characteristics of the tune. 

And it doesn't even matter necessarily, for Contra Dance is how the two tunes fit together, cause you can always make them fit. It's a little more about matching up so that the the whole dance, even though the tune changes, that the feel of the dance will be kind of the same, or it'll be how you want it to be. If you want to start kind of dark and brooding and then open up to something big and beautiful at the end, that you have control over that through the tunes that you pick. Ooh, you could talk about that for a while. 

If I'm just playing like a concert or basically just stringing tunes together, you know, playing them in a church or for friends, kind of casually. I don't certainly don't play a tune six times through for that. Maybe just play it twice and I'll mix up the type of tune more. They do this in Cape Breton too. They'll start with the slowest, you know, a waltz or an air, and then go into a hornpipe, maybe in the same key, a jig in the same key, a reel in the same key. 

So the feel of the tune is changing but the key is staying the same. Sometimes they'll just have a bunch of tunes just once in a row. It can be a whirlwind listening to a whole long Cape Breton set. Oh, my goodness For a concert setting. I'll look to that to mix things up more, not just play three reels but try to have another type of tune in there. 

If you're thinking about Irish sessions, sets are big in Irish music I've talked about this before there's some sets. Everybody knows If you go on the session there's a whole section just with sets. People add in the sets that they like and I do feel like Irish players put together jigs with jigs, hornpipes with hornpipes. So they're not mixing like Cape Breton. The types of tunes and the key will change each. Ah, does it change each time? I was going to say the key will change each time, but some of the sets they don't. 

I remember hearing Kevin Burke talk about this and that he had done a set that was all. Maybe it was all A minor and the Abbey was part of it. And then somebody complained to him, said oh, you can't play, you can't play all in the same key, and he was like that made me want to do it. I made a big old set all the same key. It was funnier when he told the story, but anyway, often they're in a different key. So three tunes all the same type of tune but three different keys. 

And I think my impression since I'm not, you know, born and bred Irish musician is that Irish players are very into how the end of the tune fits with the beginning of the next tune and kind of fitting them together and then the general feel of the tune. But you won't really hear them talking about like, where's the balance, where's the like, the specific parts that might fit dances, because with Ceilis and everything, and of course in a session there's not usually somebody dancing and they're not thinking about that as much so it's a little more about getting a really beautiful transition into the next tune. The way they fit together, that's just my impression. Anyway, put some, put some sets together. Let me know how it goes. 

Our tune for today is Charley's Waltz. I wrote this Waltz for my husband, Charley, and I was camping not with Charley, actually, just by myself in a cabin off the AT the Appalachian Trail in Maryland called Bear Spring Cabin and I was playing around with the melody for the A part. I didn't start off thinking I was writing this tune for Charley, but when I got to the B part, which starts with some long notes, it made me think about dancing with Charlie, maybe because there's a Waltz with very long notes by Keith Murphy called Evergreen. That was our wedding Waltz. 

But yeah, as I was playing the B part, I was just imagining dancing with Charlie. Charlie and I have danced a long time. We actually met on the dance floor so in contra dancing. Both of our parents were folk dancers and involved in the folk music community, so we dance a lot and I thought about it. So I named the Waltz after him and I'm pretty, pretty proud of this tune. 

I've gotten the my scale of if I've written. A good tune is. One is if other people want to play it and ask for the music or I hear them play it, and another is is I like it? People say, oh, did you, you wrote that? Who wrote that? Did you write that? That's usually a good sign Making a tune that sounds really like settled, like it's been there a while Maybe it has, who knows. So yeah, we're going to hear Waltz from Charley. This is from my new album called broke the floor.

Sitting or Standing (On the Loose)

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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 On the Loose from my album Broke the Floor by Meg Wobus and Charley Beller. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about sitting vs standing for playing the fiddle what? But first a quick word about reviews. The place where you can leave a review of a podcast is on Apple Podcasts that site and thank you to two lovely reviews I got recently from New Fiddler with Big Ears and Drew Reynolds. Thank you so much for those reviews. 

If you listen on a different platform, you can often leave a rating, or if you want to recommend the podcast, you can always just post about it. Wherever you run into other fiddlers online, whether somewhere on Facebook or Fiddle Hangout or some other place, the reason that I'm asking for reviews and recommendations is that this podcast is an investment for me in time and it also costs money for the mixing and the hosting. 

I don't know if you noticed, but I don't do any commercials or sponsored products. So basically it helps to sell some of my fiddle studio books and my online courses, and it's how it kind of works commercially. So connecting to beginning fiddlers or fiddlers who might be interested in this content is a way to just help the podcast get out there and make it kind of viable for me to continue spending kind of a week out of every month working on it. 

Anyway, let's talk about this topic. Gosh, I haven't been playing a lot of fiddle. I've just been playing the concertina lately and having a lot of fun with that and our guitar, my father's Martin guitar, has been in the shop for six or seven weeks and it's coming back next week. So in my house there'll be a little bit of fighting over who gets to play the guitar between me and my husband when it comes back. 

Should you sit or stand to play the fiddle? This is a silly topic. I like the silly topics the best. You can do anything. You can sit, you can stand, you can lie on the floor. Have you tried lying on the floor? It's kind of crazy. All the angles are different. The gravity works very differently when you're trying to play and you're lying on the floor. But I thought I'd tell you some of my thoughts about it. 

People stand a lot for classical music. In fact it's kind of an issue with kids when I'm trying to teach kids because you're trying to get them to stand a lot, and then they see the cellists and there's always some kids who want to switch to cello just because they can sit. In fact, I have an interview in November coming out with Casey Murray who said that they switched when they were a kid from fiddle to cello partly because of the sitting. 

But the reason that classical players stand so much and this is not an orchestra, but they usually stand to practice and to perform, you know, as a solo is because when you stand up, your body is very aligned. Your back is just naturally straight. You're using your lower body to hold your weight up, your shoulders and your head are more upright and loose and your arms are longer and straight. So you have already set yourself up to be playing the fiddle in a more relaxed and aligned way and you've got your angles a certain way. 

When you're standing up, because your back is straight, it's pretty different from sitting. Even when classical players sit, they try to sit with their back really straight. I will often sit with my back, not touching the back of my chair, if I'm, if I'm sitting to perform in a string quartet or in an orchestra, trying to mimic standing as much as possible, have my feet on the floor and all my weight in my feet the way that I would if I was standing. 

If you're sitting on a couch it's a completely different story. Or kind of slumped in a chair, you've got that curve in your back. Things are collapsing and basically when you're sitting and you're playing the fiddle, you're using your arms, neck, shoulders, head just that very top part of your body to do the work. So you're not standing in a way that your whole body is supported and that maybe your head is just holding the fiddle up and your shoulder and your arm are relaxed and not working so hard to hold. 

I hope I'm explaining this well. Of course I'm not. I'm not a medical professional and I don't know that much about bodies, but I have played standing and sitting up and when you're standing it's easier on your arms and your shoulders and your neck and when you're sitting it's going to put a lot more strain on those. They're going to be working harder. 

You can be more likely to have some pain, some tension, to kind of wear yourself out sitting. Of course, if you're standing, your feet are going to, you know, get tired, you're going to wear yourself out in a different way. So if we just think about sitting and fiddlers sit a lot more than they stand. Okay, so those, those classical players practicing you know, when I was in conservatory practicing two, three hours a day, I was standing that whole time. 

But when I fiddle I usually sit down and partly that's because I don't need perfect alignment and to be completely holding with my head. When I'm playing the fiddle I'm usually playing in first position. I can hold the fiddle with my hand. More it doesn't really matter and I'm not playing things that are so difficult that I'm going to have trouble getting around. Like, if you're trying to shift and you're slumped in a chair, you're going to elbow yourself right in the ribs. 

If you're standing, you're going to have a lot more space and openness to shift around, get around the fiddle. But I don't need to get around the fiddle if I'm playing traditional music, just in first position. If I'm trying to play Tchaikovsky Concerto, I need to get around the violin. So if I'm just playing at home, I sit down and when I teach kids and adults and we're playing fiddle tunes, we usually sit down and then if we're going to play something hard, then I'll have them stand up. 

Or if they're having trouble with your angles, if you've only really played sitting down but you're not happy about your tone, hey, why not try standing up? You may have a change in the angles of your bow and your highway and also a change in the way you put your weight into the string. Gravity is kind of working with you or against you in terms of playing the violin and you might have more success standing up. And also, if you're just one of these people that gets kind of antsy sitting down or your back starts to hurt, try standing up. It's great. 

When I perform for like a full dance, I try to stand up because if I sit, everything just gets too heavy and starts to hurt. I'm actually more likely to kind of have cramping in my left hand playing a full dance. If I'm sitting, for that same reason, like I'm hunching a little, everything's getting heavy, my fingers are getting heavy on the string and my hands clenching too much and I'm gonna start to cramp, whereas if I stand up, I tend to use that drilled into me so many years that lighter, more floating posture and way of playing, and it's more sustainable for a three-hour dance, oh my gosh, anyway. So if you only do one, try branching out, and if you really wanna be crazy, lie down on the floor, try playing that way. 

Our tune for today is called On the Loose. This is a tune that I composed. I haven't shared one of my tunes yet. It's in kind of an old-time style. It's in G major. I wrote it so many years ago. I don't actually remember composing it so I can't tell you what was going through my head, but I do know that I wrote a lot of unusual and experimental tunes and then this was part of an effort of mine to write tunes in a more accessible style that sounded more like traditional tunes. 

I shared this tune online I don't know, maybe it was last year and I remember somebody who watched the Real on Instagram wrote, because I said you know, this is a tune that I wrote. And they said I don't really believe that it's possible you could write this tune because it's just really complicated and I don't think you composed it. I was like, huh, well, I did and it's true, this tune sounds more complicated than it is. 

I love to just take advantage of the little tricks on fiddle with. You know the way double stops work and everything and drones, where you can make it sound a little fancier than it. And it's not that hard to play. It's not as hard as it sounds. I knew you'd write it. The B part for this tune is one of those four bars that repeats, you know, and then the whole B part repeats. You end up playing these big four bar chunks four times. And in the contradance world we use those kinds of tunes for a dance that ends in Petronella, turns, contra corners, even like a tight series of four bar moves, like circles and stars or the balance and the wavy line. So I don't know If you know about contra dancing. That's what I use those repetitive B parts for. 

We are sharing tunes from our album this month, so this tune is off my new album which is called Broke the Floor. It's me playing fiddle, my husband Charley is playing guitar and we will be back next month with some old time tunes for you. I think I have an old time jam to pull tunes from, but we wanted to give you I don't know a little taste of the album. You can find it online. 

Broke the Floor should be out pretty soon and also available on my bandcamp paying for the digital or the CD. My bandcamp page is actually megwobus.bandcamp.com. Wobus is spelled W-O-B-U-S as in bus. Anyway, I won't pretend we're gonna play it now. I'm gonna put in a clip from the finally finished and mastered version of our album here for the tune On the Loose by Meg Wobus Beller.