Fiddling Demystified

Donna Hébert

Fiddling books, CDs, DVDs

Intro to Fiddling Demystified

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I am editing the intro to my 2006 Fiddling Demystified for Strings and thought the musings on learning to fiddle were blog-worthy. Some of the material covered in the book is also in the numbered lessons in my blog. Free sample pages.

Fiddling – a collection of cultural and regional folk violin styles – is mysterious and mutable, morphing from phrase to phrase, seeking the elusive, satisfying groove. Drummers at heart, we mine melodies for rhythms, teasing them out with our bows to make people dance! We nudge the rhythms along, swapping one for another in a spiral of variations. We tinker with the music because we must. We are fiddlers!

So how do we tinker? What do we change and when do we change it? Fiddling Demystified presents a practical, left/right hand, tune-by-tune, lick-by-lick foundation for understanding fiddling. I dig deep into each tune, detailing the sets of licks, rhythms and ornaments that define regional styles. There are 32 reels, waltzes, jigs, pipe marches, airs and a Cajun two-step here, each one decked out in its own style. Fourteen are originals, written by others and myself. The Practical Guide to Fiddling Style Markers, a four-part glossary of fiddle licks and lore, demonstrates dozens of subtle ways that fiddlers can mess with a melody, our raison d’être, after all.

For fiddling IS improvisation and variations. We punctuate with rhythm a little differently on each repetition. We jump the beat, swap slurs around, create variations, syncopated bowings and rhythm licks with the right hand. Simultaneously the left plays ornaments – grace-note flicks, triplets and reverse triplets, duplets, hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, drones and turns – bending notes in as many ways as possible to keep any one way from becoming tedious. Most fiddlers begin by immersing themselves in the music of one regional style. Over time, we learn to speak in that dialect, and don’t stop with one tune, or even one style, as we discover soon enough.

About orthodoxy: There is no one “right” way to play a tune, regardless of style. I’m not saying style doesn’t matter, or that you shouldn’t have favorite fiddlers or styles, but that there is no Holy Grail. Just because it’s published or recorded by a well-known primary source doesn’t change that fact. Fiddling is, by its nature, self-curated. It is interpretive, diverse, and democratic, and our own renditions change daily. Your iconic recording of that primary source was the way he or she played it that day. Learn it, study it, even, but please don’t enshrine it, or claim to have the one true version, (even if it is your favorite). Mine it for what you love about it, repeat that with multiple sources, then make the music your own.

Using the book and CDs

Families of ornaments and rhythm motifs set each tune in a regional style. To get the most out of Fiddling Demystified, use these left/right-hand technique sets to dress up tunes that you already play. Stick to one style per tune and accessorize each repetition a bit differently and you’ll see where the variations go. Get off the page as soon as possible, and find others to jam with – that’s where the real fun is!

Lessons include chord names, slurs, and accented bowings, all cross referenced with the Guide or the Index. Style markers are in bold italic inside a tune or in the Guide (7-25). Cross-referenced page numbers are italicized in parentheses, and the Index (63) will help you find a specific technique. Tunes are written in cut time rather than 2/4 for easier reading, but at 112-120 beats/minute in reels, play the 8ths as 16ths. Tempo markings are for a half-note in cut time (2/4), quarter-note in waltzes (3/4), and a dotted quarter-note in jigs (6/8).

NOTE: Fiddling Demystified’s viola and cello editions reset the melodies where it is necessary, retaining the fiddle key to allow jamming. Music examples in the Guide are in three clefs. Though not all fiddle ornaments will translate directly to the viola and cello, the rhythms will. I include a general transposition protocol, and some of the tunes are ‘native’ to cello and viola, sharing the same fingering as the fiddle.

This is not a complete theory manual, but has useful lessons on chord names and families, major, minor and modal harmony patterns, and on how to find harmonies and create rhythms. Tip #1: Learn the chords along with each tune. Pay attention to the repetitive patterns. After a dozen tunes in a key, you know that key. Tip #2: Get a mandolin chord book and memorize the chords in Bb, F, C, G, D, A and E and their minors. These both turbo-charge your ability to learn by ear, because now you can predict where the tune is going next.

On the companion CDs, I swing the eighth-notes, common fiddle practice. Waltzes and airs have harmony parts added the second time on the (a) track, with harmony only on the (b) track. Track numbers, tune names and keys are announced in each track. (A) tracks are at reduced speed, with lessons and style markers on the (b) track. (C) tracks play at or near dance tempo, adding variations. Because of disc space, I play only once through for both fast and slow tracks, but try using computer slow-down software like The Amazing Slow-downer™. This handy learning aid loops selected clips and slows the speed while retaining the original note pitches.

Listen to the jam CD several times and hum, sing or deedle along before reading or playing. You will hear more tune layers this way and it will help you decide where to dig into what’s on the menu. Listen carefully for note bendings, dynamic accents, phrasing cues and transitions, drones, syncopations, double-stops or percussive effects – all the interesting stuff that’s missing from a transcription.

You’ll notice bowing differences between the CD and the sheet music. Fiddlers who sight-read learn to interpret sheet music (heresy, but oh-so-liberating!), changing the bowings constantly to keep things moving. Our motto is “never the same way twice!” So, on the slow tracks, I reconciled the first repeats of A and B phrases with each transcription, but the second repeats vary. The faster track is played off the page more. Then the Fiddlejam CD plays the tunes in medleys, creating variations on the fly. Jam along with that CD to practice grooving once you can play the tune, even at slower speeds. Slow the track down with software till you can jam along. Way more fun than a metronome!

Immersion and apprenticeship are the best ways to learn. Check out the NEA’s Master/Apprenticeship Program in the Traditional Arts (state arts councils administer this program), find a great local fiddler and apply to work together. This book and CD are at best an introduction to fiddling styles and performance practice. Find a fiddler in your community and become friends. The rest is up to you.

Acknowledgments

Peggy and Her Range Riders - 1938. Donna's mom Peggy is on the left, her aunt, Theresa, on the right
Peggy and Her Range Riders – 1938. Donna’s mom Peggy is on the left, her aunt, Theresa, on the right
My mother, Mary Margaret (Blair) Hinds, sang and played music with me as a child and made me practice the violin when I was nine. I keep her cowgirl band’s 1938 promo shot on my desktop to remind me to hang on to my dreams. My daughter Molly put up with hundreds of fiddlers and ended up playing the bass. She is one of my music partners today.

Amanda Bernhard (Autumn Frolic), Russell Barenberg (Lullaby/Berceuse), Jane Rothfield (November Wind), Cynthia Thomas (Thanksgiving Waltz), and George Wilson (Sweet Journeys) have allowed me to publish their wonderful tunes in this collection.

Darol Anger is a friend, creative inspiration and a mighty fiddle and jazz violin master. He urged me to publish the book, wrote the foreword, and I wrote Transylvanian Landslide for him in 2003. Renata Bratt tweaked my cello arrangements for playability and fingerings.

Fiddle masters Alan Jabbour, George Wilson, Jane Rothfield, Suzy Thompson, Barbara MacOwen, Seamus Connolly and others help clarify my thinking on the building blocks I call style markers. John McGann answered theory questions. Guitarist Max Cohen reviewed my chord choices and made sensible changes. Thank you all!

My students have taught me so much over the years. Their hunger for music, rhythms and groove matches mine, their questions inspire our research and work together, and their trust keeps my answers honest. The feast of music they bring in the door just makes me grin! So many tunes . . .

Donna Hébert
Amherst Massachusetts, 2014

Lesson #4: The art of ‘groove’ – (Smith College: 2014)

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31314.Hebertworkshop.SmithFREE WORKSHOP AT SMITH COLLEGE – Bring your instrument! Download handouts below.

I was 23 the summer I fell into fiddling. Four contradances was enough to do it. I started sitting on the stage. Next thing you knew I was talking to the musicians. Word filtered back through them to the caller that I used to play. Then one day at the Concord Scout House “NEFFA on Sunday” dance, the caller walked up to me at the break with a fiddle under his arm. “Here,” he said, thrusting it into my hands. “Sit in the back. There’s music in the bag. Don’t mess with the beat.” It was 1972. The caller was Dudley Laufman, the fiddler was Allan Block and the pianist was Bob McQuillen. That was how I came to play with the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra.

Dudley Laufman
Dudley Laufman

Yup, there was music in the bag. Two huge LL Bean bags full. My sight-reading skills did not include reading sixteenth notes at 120 beats per minute, so I bought the LPs to listen to. Over and over and over. I bought three copies of each record. My Sears Silvertone record changer was primitive enough to allow me to slow the record down by almost half. With my thumb. Then I could record the resulting, octave lower output on my mono Sony tape recorder, my first ear training tool. Made the tunes sound a bit ‘wubba wubba’ but the rhythms popped out. Still, the fiddles were buried in the big band sound. The LPs only lasted awhile before I destroyed them with my primitive ‘learning by ear’ technology, laughable by today’s standards. And I still didn’t have the fiddle knack I was looking for.

Allan Block, circa 1970s.
Allan Block, circa 1970s.

So, I began watching the fiddlers at the dance. Allan Block was the clear leader (he sat next to the piano, and had a microphone). After awhile, I stopped worrying about hitting every note on the page and began to play less and less, kind of trancing a little on the repetitive nature of both the dance and the tune. Must have been a modal tune, maybe Em/D, one of those where it’s easy to zone out. Next thing you know I’m copping Allan’s right hand movements and [hot DAMN!] sounding just the least little bit like him. Not all the notes, but the rhythms, and I’m dancing inside!

Not long after, Allan took me under his wing and showed me the really cool basics (link to lesson #3) of bowing rhythms. Within a few years, I was “messing with the beat” in my own bands, a practice I honed and practiced by subdividing and syncopating dance phrases at thousands of contradances. Talk about altered states. To this day, my right hand groove owes a whole lot to Allan Block.

We lost Allan last year, and Bob McQuillen left us in February 2014. Big giant shoes to fill. Bob was a prolific composer of fiddle tunes (more than 1500), all dedicated to friends. Perhaps his best-known tune is “Amelia,” a waltz in D major.

Bob McQuillen (Brie Morrissey photo)
Bob McQuillen (Brie Morrissey photo)

We’ll use “Amelia” as part of this lesson. It’s a lovely piece, using all the chords we need to review in D major. We’ll learn the tune, learn to follow the chords and find some harmonies and maybe a countermelody or two. Then we’ll play some faster tunes in the two most common ‘modal’ patterns we find in Celtic music. Both Irish and Scottish minors are almost entirely Dorian (Em/D, Am/G, Dm/C, etc) and Scottish bagpipes carry a flatted seventh in their scale, so are naturally Mixo-Lydian (A/G, D/C). “Swallowtail Jig” is from my “Fiddling Demystified for Strings”:

Marching Down 5th Ave. is a Mixo pipe march in A that I wrote the week my daughter went off to live in an NYU dorm on 5th Ave. She called me every day walking up 5th Ave. to acting classes in Chelsea. The tune is played AABBCCDD. Rhythm players often leave the third out of chords behind ‘modal’ tunes, making the third even more bendable.

Swallowtail Jig is a standard in the contradance and Irish fiddling repertoire. It’s a great Irish Dorian tune, and can carry a lot of ornament or not very much, your taste being the deciding factor. Pick and choose from the menu of ornamentation shown in the tune. This is my classic “what you see in a fiddle tunebook” and “what we really play” example, showing both the basic, un-styled setting, and a fully-styled one. [NOTE: Remember that taking away is as important as adding. Try adding fewer ornaments and stretching rhythms instead!]

You can download the learning aids below for the workshop on March 13 at Smith College, where I teach fiddle instruction and performance.

I was lucky. I could study Allan Block’s right hand from behind and intuit rhythms from his movements, all the while listening to Bob McQuillen’s rock-solid groove. This workshop format allows me to be the groove-master in the room. I can turn my back on the class, and instead of them trying to figure out what I’m doing while mirrored, participants can follow my actual movements and pick up the rhythms more easily.

Wish you could all be there. It’s an honor to pass on the lore and the music of such great players.

LEARNING AIDS (download by clef )

>> Amelia © Bob McQuillen (used with permission). Treble  •  Alto  • Bass
>> Amelia – chord chart in D major with all 3 minor substitutions
YouTube of Glen Echo dance 2/17/14 playing “Amelia”

>> Swallowtail Jig (traditional). Treble 1 – Treble 2  •  Alto  • Bass

>> Marching Down 5th Ave. © Donna Hébert Treble  •  Alto  • Bass

>> C-D-A-E Diatonic triads and broken (2-note) chords. Treble  •  Alto  • Bass

>> Common progressions with 2-note chords on D & G strings. Treble  •  Alto  • Bass

>> Common-tone chords (chord pairs and the other chords they share). Treble  •  Alto  • Bass

>> Chord Wheel from Fiddling Demystified for Strings

Lesson #3: Rhythm bowing patterns for jigs and reels

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How we divide and subdivide rhythms is the real mystery in fiddling. Jean Carignan, the great Québecois fiddle master, was asked by another fiddler how long it would take to play like him. Raising his left hand, he said, “about ten years, if you work hard.” Raising his right hand, he said, “the rest of your life.” With an endless variety of rhythm choices available, you’ll run out of time before you run out of syncopation!

Rhythm defines fiddling and makes it danceable. Groove is the heart of what we do. How those grooves are pulled out of a melody varies from one country, or region within a country, to another. Rhythms are laid over the downbeat, which either falls directly on the one, or is anticipated or delayed slightly. Beat placement is the ‘floor,’ then the grooves sit on that like furniture. Only when those two right-hand fundamental skills are in place can the left hand start fooling around with triplets and slides and pull-offs and hammer-on techniques (the last added layer of tune decoration). Authenticity in fiddling depends on that groove being there FIRST.

I’ve provided a general guide here, meant to assist my students and others curious about what makes fiddling, well, FIDDLING! To learn more about any one style, immersion (obsession, really!) is key. Find people who play that style well and ask them to help you (with Skype, you can find mentors anywhere). And never stop listening!

The bowing patterns in the JPG below (download a pdf copy) are written in D major, using only the open A string. When there is a slur noted, the note moves up a whole tone and then comes back down. Most examples are two bars long. A few are only one.

I give permission for my students and other string teachers and students to use this as a learning resource, while I retain all publication rights. If you want to reprint this in a book or just want to reblog it, please contact me first.

For more fiddling lore, check out the sample pages for “Fiddling Demystified for Strings.” and of course my other lessons in the sidebar at right. Happy Fiddling!Rhythm bowing patterns

Holistic fiddle lesson #1: Diatonic chords & music

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OK, what’s ‘wholistic’ fiddling?

Wholistic fiddling teaches the whole tune – the melody PLUS the rhythms, the chord progression, what two-note chords you find on adjacent strings, and especially, how to dance them around in rhythm under the melody!

Music is much more than sound – it’s color and movement and history. There are many layers, some musical – one-two-three or more harmonies, countermelodies, even more rhythms, while others are more cerebral and emotional. Your skills and your inspiration (and of course, your taste!) are the limit. Create your own palette – of stories, chord possibilities, harmonies and multiple rhythms for each tune. Then you OWN it!

Regardless of regional fiddling style, inspiration is the point. Going deep primes the pump, starts the creative process. Finding the musical layers, bringing up new ideas, you create your own unique and tasty setting for the tune. Don’t just add melodies to your tune list. Learn as much as possible about each new tune’s origins and what it offers musically. Listen closely for the emotional content offered by each piece of music. Your job is to unlock that so others can feel it, too!

Here’s the lesson in two parts. The first lays out how to find the diatonic chords in any major key, using D as a template, with a copy of the Chord Wheel from my Fiddling Demystified Vol I. The second offers a pretty Cajun-style waltz of mine to try them out on! I encourage you to use the written music as a jumping-off point for your own interpretations!

I. Theory is your friend

Music theory is much simpler than you think. It’s just a template for understanding musical structures. You can learn most of the theory you’ll need in one key and then move the template around from key to key. For fiddle, I choose D major as my ‘template key’, because I think it’s the easiest key to play on the instrument. Violists and cellists might choose G major, with the same fingering pattern as D for the violin.

Why is theory important? Well, it’s language. Do you want to have a conversation and make sense? I try to speak French with musical partners so I know how frustrating it is to try to communicate clearly when the language just isn’t there. So here’s my answer:

Learn theory one fiddle tune at a time

For each and every tune you add to your playlist, learn the chord progression and write it down (even if you don’t notate the tunes). Take a few minutes and outline the chords on two-string pairs (usually just the bottom two pairs for fiddles – violas and cellos can use all three string pairs). Of course, if you already play a rhythm instrument, I’m preaching to the choir, but make sure to transfer your knowledge of those harmonic patterns to the fiddle if you want to use them!

    [Even for a classical string player who doesn’t fiddle, this method would be useful in learning to recognize harmonic changes. It’s much easier to follow chord movement over 32 bars than through a symphony. Yet a symphony is built in large part of 4 and 8 bar fragments, just like a fiddle tune!]

 
Pay attention to movement, up or down. Learn each chord’s NAME and learn it’s universal key number (I, iim, etc). After chording ten different tunes in D major, I guarantee you’ll know D major. You’ll also know that the IV chord in D is a G major and that the relative minor of that IV chord is a iim and it’s named Em. It’s also a whole step up from the D major chord, so that’s where you look for it on the fingerboard. It shares two notes with the G major/IV chord, which is why it can sub for it in the progression and you use it because it changes the emotional content. Oh, and you can do all that with just one note (if it’s the right one)! Isn’t THAT language string players can use?

Diatonic? What does that mean?

‘Diatonic’ refers to a melody in the common major Western scale. The Ionian Mode is another way to name it – modes describe the unique scale patterns originally defined in classical Greek music. But today, if you want to add a rhythm to a melody, knowing where a tune is likely to travel harmonically is far more useful.

This is all vocabulary:

    The vast majority of fiddle tunes in major keys use the diatonic scale/Ionian mode. Using the notes from just one scale (in this example, D major) defines the ‘key signature’ or ‘home/tonic key,’ which all mean the same thing – that the tonal center of the tune is D.

    A chord ‘triad’ is the same as the three arpeggio notes – DO-MI-SO. The triad is played simultaneously, unlike the arpeggio, which is played sequentially.

    Minor and major chord triads in every key are built from these ascending thirds using the notes of that key’s major scale.

    Download Chord Wheel with spellings, relative minors, and the Universal Key, excerpted from my “Fiddling Demystified for Strings” Vol. I.

    Chords are written with note names or Roman numerals, as shown below:

D E F# G A B C# – D major scale

I ii iii IV V vi – UNIVERSAL KEY notation is written in Roman numerals, with major chords in upper case and minor chords in lower case. This is another way to think of the key of D chords that follow, but since this can be used to talk about any key, it allows ease of transposition.

D Em F#m G A Bm – Chords built out of D major chord (arpeggio) notes. This is the D major family of DIATONIC chords, spelled out here:

CHORD | SPELLING | FUNCTION
D major – D-F#-A – I chord (tonic, home key, starts or ends most tunes)
E minor – E-G-B – iim chord (relative minor of IV chord, substituted for IV, most often used substitution)
F# minor – F#-A-C# – iiim chord (relative minor of V chord, substituted for V, least often used substitution)
G major – G-B-D – IV chord (sub-dominant)
A major – A-C#-E – V chord (dominant)
B minor – B-D-F# – vim chord (relative minor of I chord, substituted for I, less often used substitution)

Before you ask what happened to that poor little 7th note in the scale and where it’s triad disappeared to, a triad/arpeggio built on C# using only D-scale notes gives you a C#-E-F# diminished chord, two minor thirds stacked on top of each other. That chord is the orphan – it’s never used. [Even in the jazziest Québecois piano accompaniment, the diminished chord you hear is a I# or IV# diminished, never a vii diminished.]

Once we play with these ascending and descending triads, it’s obvious that, as string players, we have choices. We can pizz the whole triad on three strings, but we only need to bow two of those three notes on adjacent strings (usually A/D, D/G or G/C) to imply a chord. And you’ll find that those two notes are often doing double duty as part of another chord, so it gets interesting quickly. You start looking at notes and asking yourself, “how many chords can I make with these two notes?” [I’ll go deeper into ‘broken chords’ and how to use them in a future lesson!]

While this relationship among the diatonic triads made from the notes of ANY one scale – I, iim, iiim, IV, V, vi – is the same in every key, the note and chord names change in each key. This reality is why we learn the chord name, for instance, “D major,” and learn to call it “I” in the Universal Key. If I’m playing with a singer or another fiddler who plays the tune in a different key, using numbers instead of chord names makes quick and easy chord transposition possible.

II. Hommage à Johnny – waltz in D major

My tune example gives you TWO keys to fool around in, since the second half of the tune moves into G major. I wanted to keep the entire melody within an octave to make it easier to play and also to find harmonies. Setting the ‘B’ part in G major gave me the drama and change I like in a second half, while still staying tidily within that octave in D major.

Suitable for strings or any ensemble, I wrote it this in 2012 in memory of John McGann, a great musician and pal and a beloved Berklee prof. And yes, this tune jumps off the D scale for one C chord in the B part, but that C chord is John, jumping in to surprise us! Good art can trump the rules!

It’s a Cajun waltz, so be sure to crank the two beat, not the one! You can hear Stuart Kenney’s bass with me on that two-beat, with Max Cohen on guitar, at the Greenfield MA contradance. Stu played with fiddler Dewey Balfa back in the day, so he knows Cajun waltzes! The tune is also viola/cello friendly with no E-string action, octave jumps or third-position workouts.

With a one-bar intro, the chords start on a walk down from the D on the downbeat. No worries if you can’t play the chords with the bass note written under the chord name D – D/c# – D/b – D/a. That’s how we write a bass run into a chord progression for backup players. It’s simply a walking line down, D-C#-B-A, played over a long D chord. We’re string players, so we get to play the sustained line!

Hommage à Johnny has been road-tested at the Old Songs and Philadelphia Folk Festivals in 2012, where young musicians from age 6-17 learned one of these three parts by ear (no music) or played a backup instrument, and performed with the Great Groove Band on the main stage at both festivals!

Copyright and your use

This is an original piece of music and all parts are copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Download them, learn them, teach them to your students. However, if you want to use my tune or my arrangements in ANY public performance, or if you want to record them, (even if it’s only in your living room), if you want to post it on YouTube or Facebook or otherwise perform it publicly or release it on a CD, you need to ask me first. I’ll say YES, but you have to ask me. And there’s a feel-good catch!

Permission is granted when you or your organization make a donation of $25 or more online to the Amherst Survival Center or you mail a check to them at 138 Sunderland Rd Amherst, MA 01002 – (413) 549-3968. The donation is tax-deductible. Make sure they know this is a ‘fiddlingdemystified.com’ donation and they will notify me. You’ll get a permission letter by mail, so be sure to give the Amherst Survival Center your mailing address! I figure my tunes should do good in the world, so helping to feed and clothe the needy and homeless in my town is a good place to start. I hope you agree!

Downloads

Download practice and performance mp3s and 3 separate parts each for fiddle, viola, and cello. The easy melody part, with a strong two-beat accent in 3/4 time, is especially useful for teaching syncopation.

How to use the materials

Listen first – in class if possible. Post a link to the materials online for students to listen to as well.

Listen at least twice, allowing students to finger notes as they HEAR them with their left hand, but not read or play yet. After listening, let them turn over the music and read along while listening simultaneously. Listening first gives them a much better sense of rhythm and beat placement. This an effective way to teach authentic roots music in a classroom setting.

Now they are ready to play. Play in class, repeating the tune for long enough that students can try out harmonies, bass lines and other ideas. The waltz is a 64-bar tune and those repeats are helpful in memorization.

Encourage students to memorize the tune and get off the page. Then they are free to look each other in the eye. To stand next to someone else and play a nice harmony to their melody. To have the freedom to choose what to play based on where they think their voice can add the most to the overall sound. This invariably brings parents and other audience members to their feet when they see students and teachers playing freely together, having a true musical conversation on stage. It’s electrifying!

Please record your group playing this tune and send it to me!

Other fiddilng resources

Please share this lesson (including copyright and use) with other string or fiddle teachers you might know. You might also consider joining the Facebook Fiddlers’ Association, which I founded and help run. We have more than 2500 members from all around the world. It’s an amazing network, offering some pretty deep fiddle lore – and a great way to get fiddling questions answered!

My blog posts here are almost all lessons, so be sure to check out the older posts at right.

Happy fiddling!

Donna Hébert