If you are an advanced, even a professional player, there are many uses you can make of the fiddle-online.com site! Below, we’ll take a look at what you can get out of the following offerings — 
- Concert/workshops with world-class guests in various fiddle styles
- Advanced ideas about bowing, ornaments, and stylistic timing
- Audio and video about various fiddle styles
- Articles on the blog, many of which have food for thought for advanced players and teachers
- Technique videos which can fill in gaps or provide new perspectives
- Teaching support in the form of techniques, concepts, tunes, and styles
Read on for details!
Concert/workshops with world-class guests in various fiddle styles
— Each month on a Sunday afternoon we offer a live online concert/workshop with a guest who is expert in their own style. The event starts with 15 minutes of performance to get a feel for the player’s music, followed by learning a tune for the rest of the hour. Fiddlers of any level can get a good feel for their playing and also gain a good sense of how a “native speaker” in that style approaches the tune they teach. The workshop page presents interactive sheet music so you can hear our guest playing not only the whole tune but also each phrase, and a video will be posted after the class to go into more detail. The materials are available from the moment you sign up until 30 days after the event.
Advanced ideas about bowing, ornaments, and stylistic timing
— There are many videos on the site in addition to the live weekly classes or the monthly guest workshops, and all levels are addressed, from basic tunelearning to musical and technical ideas. The concept here is that there should be something for everyone, and that less advanced players should always have exposure to more advanced ideas to strive for. Tunelearning videos, a separate category of offerings, all have two videos per tune — a basic and an advanced one.
Audio and video about various fiddle styles
— Advanced players are not likely to know very many fiddle styles; sometimes they know classical, or one style. Other styles are like other languages, and as an advanced player, you can observe and learn and hear a great deal about styles you’re not familiar with, as well as pick up pointers and perspectives you didn’t think of or took for granted in styles you do know. Note that in the Workshops section there are many past classes which are grouped by topic, so for example you can get special pointers and examples of great strathspeys that lead into reels, or learn a selection of Gaelic melodies.
Articles on the blog, many of which have food for thought for advanced players and teachers
— The articles on the blog are definitely geared toward all levels. If you are a member, you will see a link to the index by topic, so you can look up past articles more easily. Or you can hunt for them via the archives at the lower left. There are many articles suitable for advanced and professional players; some are about research on learning or on brain function, some about connecting music to other topics, about harmonic series, about hosting sessions and lots more.
Technique videos which can fill in gaps or provide new perspectives
— Even for advanced players, there are always gaps and perspectives that can be enriched via the technique video groups, which contain 10 videos in each group. Even the one about note patterns and scales presents a concept that many find new, prioritizing the most common finger spacing patterns. There are also ornamentation videos that could offer stylistic techniques unfamiliar within an advanced player’s particular experience.
Teaching support in the form of techniques, concepts, tunes, and styles
— As a teacher, I find many of the technique videos to be very helpful for my students in between lessons. Of course you’d have to view them to see if they suit your teaching concepts, but if they do, these videos allow a student to spend a little time going over unique exercises/games which improve physical awareness in the hands and ears. Teachers may also enjoy working with students on some of the tunes. Having a student subscribe to a Tune Group, which presents interactive sheet music for 12 tunes for 3 months, allows the student to have access to all 12 tunes so they can choose the tunes they most want to work on, and have the sheet music and audio by phrase, which you as teacher can help them with. The materials alone are never enough to really master a tune; a teacher can really polish it up for them, and introduce various ornaments or techniques as well. If you wish to make fiddle-online a regular part of your teaching, contact us for ways to make it more easily available to your students.
©2017 Ed Pearlman