Irish fiddling on fiddle-online

One of the most fascinating parts of learning fiddle is how it varies from culture to culture, from region to region, from player to player. People might think they know about Irish fiddling but it varies quite a bit depending on county, and ultimately on the influences of individual players from each county.

On fiddle-online, we have a number of Irish concert/workshops representing different styles, including the legendary James Kelly, Liz Knowles, Alden Robinson and Grainne Brady. We also have a Tune Group of 12 Irish tunes and many regular workshop materials — see the bottom of this message for details.James Kelly’s online concert/workshop for fiddle-online presented a style he learned from growing up in Dublin. His father was a well-known fiddler and concertina player from County Clare who played in a band that was the precursor to the Chieftains, and their family home hosted countless great Irish musicians for sessions and stories. James himself is a prominent fiddler, having hosted an Irish TV show and having toured with the legendary bands Patrick Street and Planxty. Listen to James’s performance and stories, and learn two tunes from him, a jig and a reel. Click here for audio and signup info.

Liz Knowles has performed with Riverdance, played the soundtrack for the film “Michael Collins”, played with Martin Hayes Quartet, and tours worldwide with Open the Door for Three and other groups. We’re fortunate to have materials available to you from Liz’s online workshop (this one’s only 5 credits because it’s focused on the workshop and not a mini-concert). In this workshop, Liz teaches a jig, with plenty of chances for you to learn the notes, the ornamentation, bowing, variations, and even has two variations written out for you to work with. Click here for audio and details.

Alden Robinson is an American fiddler who studied traditional music in County Cork in Ireland, does solo tours and has played with several bands, including The Press Gang. He did two workshops for fiddle-online, one including a concert, and the other focusing on the interactive workshop. Learn a great jig in the one, and learn a slide (and what a slide is) in the other. Click here for info and audio about both of these offerings.

Grainne Brady is an Irish fiddle player from County Cavan in Ireland and currently based in Glasgow where she leads sessions and plays with Top Floor Taivers, string group The Routes Quartet, and Gaeilge/Gàidhlig supergroup LAS. Her concert and the tune she teaches feature original compositions she composed for an album that illustrates an Irish novel about a young woman who travels from Donegal to Scotland 100 years ago in search of a better life, and has to come to grips with many realities. Click here for audio and info.

Many other Irish tunes are available to you on fiddle-online via Ed’s workshop videos and our unique interactive sheet music, with self-repeating audio by phrase. Tune Group 5 is devoted to 12 popular Irish tunes, and you can explore triple tune workshops laid out in the Irish section of Ed’s regular workshop materials, including a group of tunes by Turlach O’Carolan, and various jigs, reels, hornpipes, waltzes, and a group of swingy Irish reels, which allow you to learn some great and challenging tunes at a reasonable pace.

In Ed’s Mixed Tunes and Topics you’ll find a number of Irish tunes taught and discussed — just look in the following topics: Tunes by Ear, Tunes for Ornamentation, D & Dm Jigs, Holiday Tunes, Spooky Tunes, Marches & Polkas, Slow Airs, and Flowing Tunes.

©2022 Ed Pearlman

Spanish Colonial fiddling

Did you know about Spanish colonial fiddling, which came into southwestern U.S. starting in the 1600s? Not long ago, it could still be found in Colorado and New Mexico. Now it has been preserved by musicians in New Mexico, including Jeanie McLerie and Ken Keppeler, who perform as the duo Bayou Seco. They present a concert/workshop on fiddle-online to play this music, and to teach one of the tunes. Their focus is music they learned from one of the last masters of this style, Cleofis Ortiz, who died in 1996.

This kind of music is mostly dance music based on Spanish music brought in from Mexico since the 1600s, combined with traditional influences from other European styles which came through the area when the Santa Fe Trail opened up in 1821, connecting the Southwest with Missouri.

Mexico had lots of music in the 17th and 18th centuries, including baroque classical music, a variety of folk music, and many influences. Jeanie suggested an interesting influence on one of the tunes taught in Ed’s workshops on this style of music, Emilano’s Waltz, which Cleofis Ortiz learned from his much older cousin Emiliano. This tune may have had Sephardic origins. In the 15th century, the Sephardic Jews comprised 10% of the Spanish population and were well integrated into society when the new Catholic royalty kicked all the Jews out of Spain. Their deadline to leave was in 1492, on the very day that Christopher Columbus left for the new world. Their language was Ladino and can still be heard in various places, such as in Turkey where descendants of the 1492 exiles still live.

Learning tunes from various cultures teaches us historical connections we might never otherwise come across!

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*About the Past Workshops page of fiddle-online

  • On the right are concert/workshops presented on one Sunday each month by experts from each tradition. Just click on a name to learn more and hear a sample audio of the tune being taught. In addition to the tune is a 15-minute performance as well.
  • On the left are workshops by Ed Pearlman, from our regular Thursday live events, each workshop presenting generally 3 different tunes to learn, with sheet music marked by phrase, self-repeating audio by phrase, a playalong track at a moderate pace, and a listening track up to tempo. Click on the options to see descriptions and hear audio samples.
  • Once you select a workshop, you’ll need 6 credits to give you 2 weeks of access to the materials. If you ever wish to revisit the materials or need more time, the site knows you already used the materials and will charge you only 4 credits for 2 more weeks.

©2022 Ed Pearlman

Bowing Lively 1: Jig Bowing

Video #2 in Technique Video Group 3 provides backup for this article and gives you a nice excuse to practice these jig techniques so you can incorporate them in your playing!

Your bow can bring your jigs to life, give them a lift, keep the beat, and help you remember the tune. There are various ways to play jigs, but here’s a basic pattern you can use as a solid foundation.

Think simple — downbow for the first note of each bar, and upbow for the second beat of every measure. If all the notes of a jig bar are eighth notes, the first note of each triplet is the beat note. You can either play all three notes on separate bows, or all three on one note — either way, you’re using an odd number of bows, 1 or 3, for each beat, and that allows you to alternate downbow and upbow for each beat.

This applies also if you don’t have all eighth notes in the measure. If you have a dotted quarter note, it takes up a whole beat with one bow, and fits the pattern perfectly. If you have a quarter note plus an eighth note, slur them into one bow, and you’re all set.

Using this pattern allows you to focus on the simplicity of Continue reading Bowing Lively 1: Jig Bowing

Using Our Self-Repeating Phrase Audios

A Unique Feature

One unique feature of fiddle-online is the self-repeating audio for each phrase of a tune. I call it “interactive sheet music.” Fiddle-online went live in 2015, built on ideas such as this one, which I developed as early as 2007. Why is it unique on the internet? I’ve often wondered, but I suspect it’s simply because it takes too much work to provide this service for every tune. One character amiss in the code and it won’t work! In any case, I believe it’s super helpful for learning tunes, and I hope you make full use of it as you go.

Phrases vs Written Music

On fiddle-online, the written music is parsed by phrase, using colorful boxes, with the same color used every time the same phrase appears. This structure of phrases is how we hear and play music, but it’s not how we write it down. Music is written down so that we can easily see the beats and the divisions by measure and by part.

Phrases, however, are more organic. They include pickup notes, and represent the rhythms we feel as our tune goes through a call and response. Often phrase A1 and A2 are like question and answer, followed by another instance of phrase A1 plus the End phrase. It’s like asking the same question (A1) twice but having an initial answer (A2) and then a better, more settled answer (Ending, or A-end).

Using Phrases

Phrases are the building blocks of a tune. Sometimes you can even learn a tune up to tempo from day one, as long as you break it down into manageable pieces — phrases — instead of trying to play too much at a time. Phrases in music are like phrases in English, or more to the point, lyrics in a song. They are what the tune is trying to say. Learning them and putting them together is the language of music. Learning just the notes is like thinking of all the letters that spell the words you are saying. To clarify your understanding of phrases, take a look at the phrases of song lyrics. or write your own lyrics for a tune you are learning!

Using the Phrase Audios

The self-repeating audios are the orange buttons that say, for example, “Play A1” above the A1 phrase. You click there and it will play the A1 phrase slowly enough for you to learn it; it’s the first building block of the tune. Since the audio automatically repeats itself, Continue reading Using Our Self-Repeating Phrase Audios

“When Should I…” (#2) — Get Help Learning Fiddle

(Note: This series of “When Should I…” articles, each with seven tips for you, began with #1 in May about equipment, and will continue now — enjoy!)

7 ideas on getting help with your learning

Are you wondering when you should…
1. Try private lessons?
2. Take a class?
3. Take a workshop?
4. Use online materials?
5. Find a new teacher?
6. Try a new learning style?
7. Find new tunes for yourself?

When should I…

1 …try private lessons?

Short answer:  if you feel a) inspired to move quicker in your learning, or b) routine frustration without understanding why or how to progress.

A good teacher provides perspective on how you can best prioritize your energies.  Some learners, for example, may focus entirely on Continue reading “When Should I…” (#2) — Get Help Learning Fiddle

Natural Ornaments

When we listen to music played or sung, ornaments are everywhere, but we barely notice. Stop and listen to a singer on the radio. Nobody sings without a slide or grace note note here and there, going into or out of a note.

That’s because ornamentation is part and parcel of the language. The use of these musical decorations varies depending on the dialect (the fiddle style), but it fits right in effortlessly, at least when you’re listening to it. In fact, most people hardly pay any mind to ornaments until we actually try to play them. Then we wonder how it’s done, and if we’re looking at it on paper, we struggle with making those grace notes sound like the ones we’ve heard.

Grace notes are not only integral to musical language, they’re also built into the way we speak. If we write lyrics to a tune, each note could be a syllable. But the grace notes, triplets, and slides are the consonants. Let’s take a look at some examples of this.

Continue reading Natural Ornaments

Finding the Beat, part 1

The heartbeat of music is, you guessed it, the beat.  Learners often focus on trying to play or memorize the notes of a tune and sometimes make the mistake of taking the beat for granted.  It’s a mistake because the beat holds all those notes together and turns them into music.

How do you find the beat?  Below, we’ll take a look at how to figure out where the beat is in a tune, whether 1) by feel or 2) on paper, with illustrations.

(Intermediate and advanced players may also find the next article thought provoking.  The beat is anything but a click on a metronome.  Where is it located, exactly, and how can we make the most of it?  This is something we’ll take a look at.)

1. Where is the beat, by feel

It is very common that a learner may focus so much on playing the notes of a tune in sequence that they don’t think about which notes are the beat notes, and may get confused as to how to find them.

Continue reading Finding the Beat, part 1

Covid Meets Online Fiddling

For years, we have been meeting online at www.fiddle-online.com to bring together learners from all over, people who have no teacher, or who like what we do, or who need to or prefer to stay home, or who want to meet and learn from great players from afar. Now the Covid virus is forcing us to stay home and do just that.  We’re responding by offering a new feature:  live concerts!

Fiddle-online.com is a great resource for those who need to be home, those who play or want to play fiddle music. Over 100 blog articles about a huge variety of topics to do with learning the fiddle, over 100 tunes to learn, over 60 technique videos, over 100 workshops with Ed Pearlman, some 20 guest fiddlers presenting concert/workshops — and all of these events have materials that are available to everyone — performance and teaching videos, audio, and fiddle-online’s unique interactive sheet music.

Of course we also feature unique live workshops, where learners can meet each other and the instructor, play with and for the instructor, and earn lots of points (you’ll have to attend one to understand about these!). There are also weekly online classes progressing from fiddle basics to intermediate level. If you would enjoy such a class, get in touch with me to learn about what’s available. If enough are interested in a beginner class, we’ll start one!

Now we offer a new resource — live concerts. In response to the Covid19 virus, and the cancelling of all gigs and income for so many musicians, we’re trying a series of concerts featuring many of our guest instructors. They’re free, and yet they allow those who can to donate to the musicians who are so hurting for income in these strange times of a pandemic. As I write this, the Covid Concerts begin tomorrow, with a daily fiddle concert online and free to all, from March 23 to April 4, 2020.

I hope you’ll listen to some or all of these concerts, and let them lift your spirits! If you can, please support the musicians who are donating their time to play for us.

If you would like to hear about future live concerts on fiddle-online, join our special concert email list, and feel free to pass the word to friends who might not be learners but enjoy hearing the music!  Just use or pass along this URL — http://eepurl.com/bifEmD — to subscribe to this special list, which will be used only for concert announcements.

We’re here 24/7 with lots of resources for you to enjoy, as well as fun live workshops where you can meet and get to know other learners from near and far.

Stay safe, stay healthy, and keep up your music!

©2020 Ed Pearlman

5 Most Popular fiddle-online posts!

Launched in February 2015, fiddle-online explores ways that the internet can best help learners, players and teachers of the fiddle.  About two articles per month have been posted to this blog since then, adding up to over 100!

Here are five of the most popular articles over the past five years.

1.  “A Treasury of Techniques, in short video form” —  click here
This article outlines the five different Technique Video Groups available on fiddle-online and describes how you can make use of these 62 short videos (about 10 in each group), plus the sampler that allows you to try one video from each of the five groups. These cover physical and ergonomic warmups, games to improve efficiency, expression and control, bowing techniques to bring your tunes to life, finger patterns, and ornamentation.

2. “When Push Comes to Pull … a New Year’s Resolution” — click here
Starting from the research that New Year’s resolutions don’t work unless they remove obstacles to your goals rather than impose wishful demands on yourself, this article focuses primarily on how to remove obstacles from good bowing technique by visualizing properly how your bow arm actually works. Did you know the downbow is a push, and the upbow a pull? Read this one to get a grasp on a way to improve your bowing instantly.

3. “Auld Lang Syne, the song and tune” — click here
Learn a bit of the history of this very popular song written by Robert Burns, who chose a different melody than the one popularly used every New Year’s Eve. To see both melodies, check out the link above, and to see the melody the popular version appears to be based on, read this one!

4. “Medleys 2: Compatible Tunes” — click here
This article gives you six approaches to finding tunes that are compatible with each other in a medley, and then tells you how to break the rules!

5. “Finding Your Style among over 150 tunes!” — click here
Here at fiddle-online there are well over 150 tunes available with videos, interactive sheet music, and more learning materials that were offered in past live online workshops. You have access to them all, and this article allows you to find tunes based on the styles you’re interested in exploring. One article gives an intro to these offerings and gives you links to the Scottish tunes and guests; the next article provides links to tunes of many other styles: Irish, Old-timey, American, Jazz, Scandie, Quebecois, Cape Breton, Klezmer.

Enjoy exploring these articles and the links they provide!

©2020 Ed Pearlman