Category: Exercises

Staying Strong

Playing an instrument is a physical activity, so you need to stay strong, balanced and flexible.  There are five areas to be aware of in order to stay strong —  general health and exercise; muscle movement vs tendon use; rest bstrengthreaks; varying our positions; and maintaining natural positions.  Here are few tips about each of these, plus some book titles at the end.  I hope you find this helpful!

1. Getting general exercise is key to avoiding problems due to specific musical activities. The fiddle requires some unbalanced movements — for example, Continue reading Staying Strong

All Music Is Improv!

Improvisation is about finding a path to get to the right note at the right time.  Composers like Beethoven improvised all the time, and managed to write down some of what they created.  When we play those compositions, they should sound as fresh as when they were written.

Too often, learning music seems to be about perfecting the playing of a sequence of notes.  It really should be about appreciating the way a tune (or composer) arrives at its musical destinations–the next beat, next phrase, next theme.  This is how the tune makes musical statements.  This is what the tune has to say, and what you have to say when you play it.
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To focus on the perfection of each note is like focusing on each letter that spells each word you say as you speak.  Ultimately, you want to spell well, and say everything the way you want it to come across, but getting each detail right is not your first priority.  That would be like not seeing the forest for the trees.

Here’s a basic exercise in improvisation:

Continue reading All Music Is Improv!

Expression and Dynamics — not icing on the cake!

Dynamics in music is about expression — loud, soft, warm, cool, wispy, gutsy.  In classical music dynamics are often marked on paper — crescendo, pianissimo, forte, mezzoforte, accents. They give us a good sense of what the composer wanted, or what the editor suggests. In classical music, it’s important to know how to honor those ideas and do them justice.  In fiddle music, the same kinds of expression come from the heart and make the tunes really worth listening to.
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How do we include dynamics in our playing? Are they like clicks on a volume-control knob? Do we play at a particular volume until a new symbol appears?  Do you treat expression as a higher level technique, something that is only added once more fundamental techniques are mastered? Or do you regard expression as fundamental?

These questions struck me suddenly one time when I was judging a high-level fiddle competition.

Continue reading Expression and Dynamics — not icing on the cake!

Playing Faster 2

In Playing Faster 1 we talked about priorities.  Notes or beats?  If you want to play faster you will do best to focus on the beat and the beat notes, rather than on getting all the notes.

Here are some games to help you play a tune faster.  It’s best to do tfast-speeding-carhese on small, manageable parts of a tune, not the whole thing.  Start by working only on a phrase, or if need be, a half phrase.  A phrase is usually four beats — all the learning materials on fiddle-online.com break tunes down by phrase, both in the audio and the sheet music.

 

Continue reading Playing Faster 2

What’s in a Scale?

Scales are probably the most useful note pattern to become familiar with.  Scales are simply all of the notes played one at a time up Scaleand down.  On the fiddle, one note per finger plus open strings will generate a scale.  All of the white keys of the piano form a scale of seven different notes before reaching the octave, the eighth note.  If you start on the A (220 beats per second) just below middle C, then the octave note is also an A because it is precisely double the frequency (440 beats per second) and sounds to our ears like the same note but higher.  (See article on the frequencies of nature in archives at left, from June 2015.)

If you are familiar with scales you can much more easily learn by ear, as it will help you group notes as you learn a tune, so that you don’t have to think about each note individually.

For beginners, scales serve many purposes, including  Continue reading What’s in a Scale?

Writing a Tune

You can learn a lot from writing tunes.  It doesn’t matter if you think you can or not.  Just do it!  Allow yourself to write a few musicconstructionbad ones before you make a gem of a tune.

Here’s why you should try writing a tune:

  • It’s fun.
  • It’s easier than you think (see below).
  • You get a better sense of how tunes are constructed, by phrase and part.
  • You learn a lot about why tunes are written down the way they are, and why there’s always more to a tune than can be written.
  • You get to name your tunes after somebody or something important to you (or name it something silly).
  • You learn about how music is written down.

Here’s how:
Continue reading Writing a Tune

Avoiding injury and stress

Practicing and performing music is a very physical activity.  In spite of all the mental and emotional exertion that goes into it, we must always remember how physical it is.

Below are some thoupainghts about avoiding physical injury and stress while playing music, and here’s a website link that can give you lots of information about this subject, including practical tips, anatomical information, and a list of excellent books.

The exercises in the Technique Video Groups are based on the idea that building awareness through simple physical exercises teaches muscles new movements that can then find their way into your playing.  They are not exercises to do and check off your list, but more like rituals that continue to help your playing at any level.  For example Continue reading Avoiding injury and stress