Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller. And today I'll be bringing you a setting of Buck Mountain from a session at the Peabody Heights Brewery in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today I'm going to be talking all about the vibrato and vibrato and fiddling we will talk about what it is, when to use it, when not to use it. And I'll give you some information about how to learn it as best as I can over you know, without you being able to see when I'm doing. There are a lot of great videos so if you're trying to learn vibrato, look it up. But I'll tell you how I teach it.
I don't know what it is about the quality of vibrato that makes it sound good to people. I mean, the human voice does vibrato people when people sing they have a vibrato. I don't really understand the mechanism because my voice has never naturally done a vibrato and I have never learned how to how to make it happen. So I hear people do vibrato on their singing.
And you hear it in a lot of instruments. You know, all the bowed stringed instruments will do vibrato. Even on the brass and woodwinds, I did play the flute and and the flute could do a vibrato with your with your breath, in and out. And sometimes you'll also see with Irish flute they'll be doing their finger up and down over the hole, to give it that kind of quaver that shimmery up and down sound. Something about it must sound good, people like the sound of it.
It is, on the fiddle, it's emotion that comes from your finger, your fingers tilting back and forth as it's pushing the note down. As it tilts, it makes the pitch waver and go up and down. But it's, it's not a motion of your finger. So it's not, I've seen everything, people. You're fingers not kind of going up and down as it's pressing down. It's not sliding at all. There's no sliding of your finger in vibrato. It's nothing you're doing with your bow arm.
It is a motion that's either done from your arm or your your kind of wrist in your hands. So people talk about arm vibrato where the arm is moving, kind of sliding back and forth, and the fingers tilting in response. And you get vibrato. Or you can just tilt, sort of flop, flap your hand back and forth, and your fingers tilting in response. So that's often called wrist vibrato.
When we use vibrato. Well, classical violinists use vibrato anywhere they can use, it every single note. Basically, it's a special effect in classical music, NOT to use vibrato. Fiddlers use vibrato for waltzes. I use it for waltzes, generally, or airs. As desired for longer notes in tunes, or songs. But we don't use it for most up tempo, dance tunes. So talking about jigs, reels, polkas, hornpipes. We're not, we're not using vibrato basically not at all.
And that's the biggest thing I have to work on. When I work with classical players. Oh, my goodness, they have made the vibrato so automatic, that it's really hard for their hand to stop vibrating while they're playing. Of course, they can't learn the tune up to tempo. So they're playing it slow. And it just, their classical brain kicks in. And they really, their hand wants to do vibrato so bad. So if you've learned to do vibrato, and it's automatic, you've got to take the control back and learn to minimize basically eliminate vibrato for up to speed dance tunes. And you can still throw it in for the other stuff, the slower pieces.
A lot of Fiddler's may not do any vibrato at all. But, but if you want to learn it, I'll give you my little by little method. It can be pretty you know, if you're playing Ashokan Farewell, throw vibrato in there, Actually, it's funny. I did my whole degree, violin and music education, but nobody taught me how to teach vibrato. And I didn't remember I was so young when I learned it.
So when I was a very young teacher, just out of college, maybe 22 I was working for Alice Kanack wonderful Suzuki teacher at her school in Rochester, where I went to college. And I had a student who was trying to do vibrato. I didn't I didn't think the student could do it and I didn't really know how to teach it.
I ended up kind of sucking it up and going to Alice and saying, I don't know what to do about the student. You know, I didn't want to look like I couldn't teach. But she was trying to do vibrato, my student, and she wasn't getting it at all it was, you know, she was doing something else. One of those other things I mentioned, sliding your fingers, something.
Alice was really great about it. She said, we'll just teach her vibrato. And I said, well, she's in book one, or whatever she wasn't at the at the place in the books where we usually teach vibrato. And she said, Just break it down and teach it to her.
That was really helpful. Not only did I learn from Alice that day, and then in future days, how to teach vibrato, her her method, which I use a variation of. But also I just love the attitude of just break it down and teach it. And that's basically how I approach a lot of aspects of fiddling, and teaching fiddle and teaching fiddle tunes, that there's nothing too hard to learn. If you want to learn it, it just break it down. And you can go through it bit by bit, master each step, and move on to the next one.
So that's how I do vibrato. Can take some people I've seen learn vibrato in a couple of days. Most times it takes a couple months. To get all these steps down, you want to get each one down. If you're having trouble with the next one, go back, go from the beginning. Or the last step.
I start with a knuckles. So here are the steps. Knuckles, Banjo slide, Banjo stick, fiddle slide, fiddle stick, Add the bow and Pass it. So that's my little sequence for vibrato.
When I'm saying knuckles, I'm making a circle with my thumb and my first finger. And I'm kind of gently pressing the very first knuckle on my first finger to loosen it up. This is the knuckle that's going to need to be responsive to get you that tilting. I do it with each finger. I'll try to do a reel of this. So you can see it's a really great vibrato exercise, it's hard to describe, oh, I was gonna say over the phone. But over the podcast.
We start with that, and then we do banjo slides. So you're holding your fiddle like a banjo or sort of under your arm holding it down, or you would hold a guitar. And put your first finger on the A string lightly and you just slide it up and down your whole hand. Your thumb comes with it. And you're sliding, no bow and not really pressing on the string just lightly kind of like you're polishing your string. You do different fingers, different strings. And that's banjo slide.
And banjo stick is you speed up your slides. So if you're going whoosha whoosha. Now you're going wish, wish, wish, wish wish, just with your finger lightly touching the string, and then gently use stick that finger, your arm keeps moving back and forth. But now your fingers sticking and hopefully kind of tilting back and forth in response to your arm.
So you've got your banjo slide, and then your banjo stick. And then fiddle slide, fiddle stick is doing the same thing. But now you're putting the fiddle on the shoulder. When people put their fiddle on their shoulder, some kind of tension can creep up. So sometimes they, their vibrato looks beautiful when their fiddle's down kind of in that banjo style on their lap. And then they put it up on their shoulder and they can't do it at all.
So keep recycling the steps as you need them. On your shoulder you you put a finger on a string, trace it up and down, very lightly. Finger lightly on the string, thumb lightly on the side of the neck and practice that motion. This is arm vibrato. So practicing that motion with your arm.
And then when you do fiddle stick, you make the motion smaller and faster. And you start to push that finger down ,to stick it in one place on the string while your arm keeps making that back and forth motion. And now you should have, still not using your bow, but a kind of silent vibrato.
And the last two steps are add your bow and I when I'm doing this with students, I have them get their vibrato started. And, then kind of put the bow in their hand and have them start playing after they've already, already shaking their arm. They're already doing vibrato. Because again, just like when you put your fiddle on your shoulder and you kind of tense up a lot of students will once they're bringing their bow to their string though they'll tense up so that's another place you may have to go back and recycle old steps.
And once you can do it with the bow now, not you just want to use a scale and practice passing it from finger to finger. That a lot of information I look. I will make a video of this so you can see it's a great little method. I've used it a lot.
Our tune today is Buck mountain. Buck Mountain is a reel in D major. So Buck Mountain is a mountain in northwestern Albermarle County, Virginia. Hmm, not sure at all if that's how you say it. And I guess it's a pretty prominent mountain in that area.
Hadn't been down there. I hike a lot of mountains but haven't hiked Buck mountain. So this, this tune comes from that area. So apparently there was a fiddler from Woodbridge in that area, by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte Chisholm, who went by Uncle Nip. And they said the Uncle Nip was from his drinking habits and not a shortening of Napoleon. He was playing down there in Virginia in the 30s. This tune kind of caught on he played it.
And there was a group called the Virginia Vagabonds. 1932, who also learned it from him maybe, and played it. The Vagabonds would sometimes play this tune in G major, but yeah, we do the version that's in D major.
There's another Fiddler who played it, Armen Barnett, who was the source for this too, and I guess his tune is in the Portland Collection, which is a famous collection for contra fiddlers. So I've got that one. He was playing it in the early 1970s and sort of part of its revival. He was a fiddler who went to school down in Charlotte, North Carolina. So maybe picked up the tune down there.
Yeah, Barnett played a lot of different things played Irish really well one, won All Ireland in 1978. Also, you know, played old time when he was in that area still plays and tours with a lot of different string bands and based in Seattle.
So here we go with Buck mountain. Are you ready?
