A Treasury of Techniques, in short video form

Fiddle-online.com has a unique offering in its Technique Video Groups. Each group has 10 short videos (except #2, where the ninth video is actually 3 videos on learning vibrato).

Visit the TechVids page to learn more and/or sign up. There is a video introduction describing each group videos, and there is even a sampler which has one video from each group for only 3 credits. Each full video group of 10 videos is 12 credits for 2 months, and only 8 credits to renew. These videos are practical and help you work with them for about 3 minutes each. They’re great to keep coming back to for maximum benefit, as physical games/exercises, and awareness builders. They’re not really for people to accomplish and move on; they’re really for all levels. This includes Group #1 even though those exercises are really helpful to beginners as well.

Let’s take a quick look at what each group of videos offers —  Continue reading A Treasury of Techniques, in short video form

Fiddle for the Classically Trained

Many fiddlers started playing the instrument with classical training, and some who are classical players are interested in learning fiddle. First we’ll take note of the differences between classical and fiddle, and then we’ll talk about specific ideas to help classical players, to help classical players appreciate and play fiddle music better.

I’ve always noticed that the best fiddlers and classical violinists are good at everything, even if their styles differ. Their pathways to the top, though, expose very different priorities. Fiddlers tend to care most about these things, in roughly this order: timing, energy, bow articulation, expression, ornamentation, tone, intonation, clean notes. Classical violinists tend to care about roughly the same things, but in a different order: Tone, intonation, clean notes, vibrato, bow articulation, expression, timing, energy.

Two items are not shared between the lists. One is ornamentation, which is very important in fiddling, but it is written in for most styles of classical violin, and is executed the same as playing notes cleanly. The other is vibrato, which is essential to classical violin, but is used more as an ornament in fiddling. There is a little more blurring of the lines when speaking of baroque violin playing, where vibrato is also used as an ornament, and ornamentation is often improvised as part of the expression of the music.

In fiddling, timing is essential, and determines whether a fiddler can play for dancers, move the listeners, or play along with, or be listened to, at a session. Notes could be missed, as long as the beat (and preferably also the correct beat notes) are kept up. For classical players, tone and intonation are primary. I’ve heard some very good classical players who have

Continue reading Fiddle for the Classically Trained

What to do this summer!

Our live workshops on fiddle-online will take a break from June through August, but there’s lots to do here! Don’t forget to consult the Quick Guide at the left of the home page to help answer any questions you may have.

Instead of joining us for the live workshops, why not use this summer to catch up on past workshops? Click on the blue “Workshops” bubble on the home page and then click on the blue button that says “Click to see what’s available.”

There are two kinds — the left column shows buttons linking you to information about 23 regular Thursday workshops. Each has materials from at least 3 workshops, arranged by the topic of the month. Many seem self-explanatory but if you click on them you will be able to hear an audio sampling of the tunes and see a description of them.

Some of the titles of the workshops are not so self-explanatory. For example, “Tunes for Ornamentation” offers two slow airs, a jig and a reel as vehicles for learning and making use of different kinds of ornaments. “Tunes of Love” presents Continue reading What to do this summer!

Finding Articles You Want!

There are some 70 articles in this blog!  Apart from the more recent ones highlighted to the left, you can check out past months in the archive, if you know which month you want, or if you want to hunt through them all.  But the easiest way to find something useful to you is to use the search box at the left.

Here are some keywords you can type into the search box to bring up selected articles you might enjoy.

“advanced” — tips for use of fiddle-online by advanced and professional players

“tuning” — about tuning the violin

“mind/hand/ears” — reversing presumptions on how to learn to play

“playing faster 1”, “playing faster 2”, and “playing faster 3” — three articles setting you up for learning to play faster and understanding how fast to play various tunes

“mapping” — how to “ear-map” your tunes and learn most efficiently

“clarify” — once you’ve “ear-mapped” your tune, how to clarify and embody that map

“troubleshooting 1” — how to handle and avoid various physical problems from playing

“troubleshooting 2”, “troubleshooting 3”, and “troubleshooting 4” — understanding and improving bow control

“troubleshooting 5” and “troubleshooting 6” — addressing left hand problems

“stagefright” — is it learned?  New and organic ideas on how to avoid and handle it

“style” — what are fiddle styles?  how to learn them from within

“nature” — about intonation and mother nature, including a comparison of musical pitches and those of various insects around us

“motivators” — ten aids for motivating your practicing

“brain” — how learning and playing music enhances brain capacity

“musical fork” — how to avoid being derailed by wrong notes

“jokes” — 60 jokes making fun of every kind of musician!  Perhaps the most useful article of all!

**Have any favorite articles you’d like to recommend?  Leave a comment!**

©2018 Ed Pearlman

Charting Your Practice

The word “practice” can be exciting for those who think of it as a chance to nail down skills and improve, or to feel more in control. For others it conjures up ye olden times when parents or teachers forced them to practice as if playing music was just more homework for school.

The bottom line is that the more you play, and the more mindfully you play, the better you get. When you sense your progress, it’s very rewarding. Not that anybody feels they practiced enough — that’s one comment I’ve never heard from a student! Usually I hear “I played it better at home!” — which is what the fiddle-online.com T-shirt says. (In fact, we have a brand new blue design you might be interested in!)

The problem is that many really useful exercises or practice sessions don’t give immediate results, even if you know they’re doing good things for you.

One way to make the results from practicing more tangible is to use practice charts, which can be combined with some nice rewards (some need nothing more than chocolate!).

Practice charts aren’t just for kids, and don’t need gold stars or silly stickers, though making them colorful is a really good idea. What charts do best is Continue reading Charting Your Practice

How music enhances our brain capacity

Learning and playing music is not only enjoyable, sociable, and expressive — it also develops our brains. A quick and fun summary of how this works can be viewed in a short animated video from TED-Ed-Lessons.

The video discusses neuroscientific research from the past few decades, which has revealed connections between activities and brain activity in real time. Scientists have found that each activity seems to have a corresponding location of the brain, where those efforts are processed.

Listening to music, however, appears to fire up multiple areas across the brain simultaneously, and even more brain activity among those who actually play music. The process of playing music results in intricate, complex, and incredibly fast signals in all parts of the brain, especially, auditory, motor, and visual centers. Regular musical practice appears to strengthen those brain functions, allowing musicians to apply them to all sorts of activities.

In particular, playing and practicing music increases  Continue reading How music enhances our brain capacity

Music is Not Alone!

A friend of mine was taken aback when a 4th grader in one of her music classes blurted out, “You’re pretty smart — for a music teacher!” My friend asked the little girl why she said that. “Because you only teach singing and playing instruments. Can you multiply? Can you divide? Can you do fractions?”

It’s pretty cute to think of this feisty little girl holding her teacher’s toes to the fire. But it’s also a little troubling.  Is our educational system so compartmentalized that kids don’t get to see how interconnected things really are? Do our teachers work so hard to teach their own curriculum that there’s no mental space or time to tie the subjects together?

Below is some food for thought about the connections between music and 12 other subjects. I hope you enjoy these ideas — and feel free to add a comment if I missed any of your favorite connections!

Math — The little girl asked whether a music teacher can do fractions, so let’s start there! Music divides and subdivides constantly along a timeline. We work with whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth notes, and multiple ways to combine them, using triplets or adding a dot next to a note, to increase the note’s value by 50%. Music makes counting physical. Many musicians do not actually count numbers while playing but rather feel and work with beats, and fractions of beats, in a more sensory way. Maybe this is why many musicians are so intuitively good at math.

English — Musical expression matches up well with the study of linguistics — the structure of words and phrases in language. This is most obvious when there are lyrics to a melody. Shifting note values from one verse to another help the music express different ideas through words, with changing rhythms from syllable to syllable. This connection between language and music is also

Continue reading Music is Not Alone!

Playing those higher notes

Most fiddlers leave their left hand in the same place all the time, in what classical players call “first position.”  You can get by very well this way, but there are some great tunes that make us play higher up the neck.

Let’s take a look at several different ways to play those higher notes. If you already have a way to do it, this article might give you a few new ideas to try, and if you tend to avoid those higher positions, read on — it’s not that hard to play higher if you find an approach that suits you, and practice doing it a bit. We’ll be talking about ways to “crawl” up the neck as well as exercises for learning to shift positions.

Before Louis Spohr invented the chin rest in around 1820, I suspect that violinists and fiddlers held their instruments the same way. According to the great violinist Ruggiero Ricci, they used to hold the neck with their hand, with the thumb partway up the neck. They had to reach back to play the normal first-finger notes, but they were able to crawl up the neck with their fingers and play high notes without moving their thumb. Apparently the virtuoso Niccolo Paganini once said his secret was that he had only one hand position.

After the chin rest was invented, violinists held the instrument with their chin or jaw, which freed up their hands to shift up and down the neck by bending at the elbow and keeping the fingers and thumb always in the same relative position. But I suspect that most fiddlers continued with the old way of holding the neck with their hand, and moving their fingers around while their thumb stayed put. This might have required that their left hand collapse at least partway at the wrist in order to reach back to first position — a position classical teachers frown on mightily these days.

Whichever way you hold your left hand, the old idea of “crawling” up the neck with the fingers is very useful and worth learning. “Crawling” refers to  Continue reading Playing those higher notes

Play Higher! Play lower! Can you?

Can you instantly play higher or lower when asked?  Some beginners start off with a sense of high and low on the fiddle that is visual instead of aural, and it can cause quite a few troubles.

If you find yourself (or you have a student or friend) hesitating or reprocessing when someone says to play on a higher string, or to play a lower note than the one you’re on, you may find it really useful to rethink “high” vs “low”.

The only useful meaning of “high” and “low” on the fiddle is based on sound. Does the note sound higher, or lower? Does the string sound higher, or lower?

Some people start learning the fiddle visually, so they look down the fingerboard from the vantage point of their chinrest, and they see that technically the G string looks higher up than the E string. Don’t look! Listen! Clearly the G is lower sounding than the E, and that’s the only thing that counts.

One student I had was an architect, and he unfortunately started off by Continue reading Play Higher! Play lower! Can you?

Do We Do It for the Applause?

Those who watch performances, and those who do them, often have very different ideas of what’s going on. I remember one woman who was convinced that the reason musicians get on stage is for the applause. She felt that musicians play in front of people because they are basically egotists, or narcissists.

If you are working hard learning to play music, you know otherwise. Applause is not much of a motivator for playing music. It’s nice to get applause as appreciation, but it’s not what gets us on stage. In fact, for some sensitive souls, applause is what keeps them *off* the stage! Some have a bad case of stagefright. Oddly enough, stagefright, a fear of how you come across to listeners, a fear that you might screw up in front of them, is in a sense based on a certain kind of egotism, a focus on oneself instead of on the music. I find that people who love he music they’re playing, who know all about who wrote it and what it’s been used for and what it means to them, who really want to convey their enthusiasm for the music to their listeners — these are people who rarely have stagefright.

Let’s go to the extreme case for a moment, and take a look at a survey of one kind of performer — celebrities. Dr. Drew Pinsky managed to get 200 celebrities to fill out a “Narcissism Personality Inventory” survey. The results showed that those who had the least skills — reality TV stars — had the highest scores for narcissism, while those with the most skills — musicians — were the least narcissistic.

This survey suggests that the more actual content, discipline, and skill your work requires, the less narcissistic you are. Some aspects of the music biz can involve hype, buzz, connections, or status, but the bottom line is an inescapable reality check: How you sound. It’s very real. The skills of musicianship and of communicating to listeners are hard earned.

And those hard-earned skills are fun. It’s fun to make progress, to be able to play music you couldn’t play before, to be able to play a tune for people just the way you want to play it.

I remember introducing a group of kids to the violin for their first time. They worked hard, and every one of them had a grim and determined face. They didn’t sound so good. But when it came time to find out how they liked it, all of them loved it and said they had great fun trying out the instrument!

I thought of this when a man came up to me after I had just led a big fiddle orchestra concert, and complained to me that nobody was smiling while they were playing. He said people should be having fun playing fiddle music. I assured him they were having the time of their lives.

Fun isn’t just about smiling and relaxation and games. Working hard to learn a piece of music, and performing earnestly, is fun because it’s so rewarding — even without the smile!

And that reward doesn’t need applause, though it’s nice to see the smiling faces of the audience telling you they enjoyed the music!

©2018 Ed Pearlman