Fiddle Studio
The glasses clink and the talk and laughter grow louder. In the corner of the pub, musicians sit and play traditional dance tunes that make your feet want to stomp and slide. Join fiddler Meg Wobus Beller as she brings you along into the world of fiddling and traditional music, from bow-grips and double stops to Old-Time tunes and Irish jigs.
Fiddle Studio
Frets to Fiddle Pt. 1 (Kaw River)
My husband is learning to play the fiddle, and with Charley's permission I discuss some of the issues he's running into playing an instrument without frets for the first time. This time we talk about left hand tuning issues. Next time will be the bow.
A lovely version of Kaw River, a Texas style reel in D from fiddler Sunita Pathik.
Thanks for listening!
My Fiddle Studio Book 1: Fiddling for the Complete Beginner is FREE on Amazon! It has over 30 easy beginner fiddle tunes with sheet music, tab, and a link to a video for each tune!
You can reach me at meganbeller@fiddlestudio.com.
My website for learning to fiddle is Fiddle Studio which has courses and a mailing list and my Top 10 Fiddle Tunes!
Hello and welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Welbus, and today I'll be bringing you a setting of Caw River. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today is going to be part one of a two-part series on switching from instruments with frets to the fiddle. Coming to the fiddle from guitar, mandolin, tenor, banjo. And today we'll be talking about left hand issue. And then next time I have like a right-hand Boeing issue to discuss. Uh last my last podcast was kind of off topic. Although, thank you. I did hear from some folks musing on the ways that playing music and participating in music can push back against our tech overlords, so to speak. I forgot to say, just briefly, if you want to read like a little manifesto that I wrote about going offline and living offline, I put it all in a book that I wrote recently. It's called Turn It Off by Megan Wolbis. It's just a passion project. The book is free, you can find it pretty easily. The paperback is really cheap. So I wanted to mention that I forgot to say it last time, but let's go ahead and talk about switching from fretted instruments to fiddle. And the issue I'm going to talk about today, which is left-hand tuning, I mean, it goes for everyone. It's not just if you're a guitar player. We all have problems with our tuning, right? It's a never-ending struggle. I don't have personal experience with switching from frets to fiddle. I went the other way. I did fiddle first, and then later in life got more into playing guitar and other instruments. With frets actually really just guitar. I don't play the banjo or the mandolin. The reason that this topic is on my mind is because my husband Charlie is learning the fiddle. We got a fiddle from the estate of a dear friend of ours. It's a sweet little fiddle, and Charlie has been playing it quite a bit. He could get my fiddle out and play it. I wouldn't mind, I guess. I'm a little protective of my fiddle. But it's nice to have this fiddle that came into the family. It is nice enough to have a really lovely sound, but not so nice that we can't hang it on the wall and not worry about it too much. So because Charlie's already a musician, he's got the tunes in his head, and also generally fingering them is not a problem because Charlie can rip off tunes on mandolin or ten or banjo like at full speed. I'd say for folks who haven't played an instrument before, getting that full speed like reels up to speed is probably the biggest challenge, but Charlie has a different issue, and with his permission, I'm gonna talk about what he's struggling with, which is tuning in the left hand. And then next time we'll talk about Boeing. In terms of tuning, Charlie tends to play sharp. Another student that I'm working with now and then tends to play flat. So I see this go both ways, and it's not like everyone who switches to fiddle automatically does one or the other. There's also kind of chaos tuning where things are a little off, but it's not dragging kind of one way or another, high or low. If I say, Oh, you're sharp, he'll fix it for a few notes, but then it goes back to being sharp. When we talked about it, he said, Well, I thought my open strings would be enough. So if you're playing a fiddle tune, you're often playing a lot of open strings. We don't use our fours much for fiddling. And you would sort of expect that hitting the open string would give you like an absolute pitch, and that would guide you towards being in tune with your other notes, especially as a musician with some experience who you know can hear with relative pitch if if notes are out of tune like in relationship to each other. I think because he's pretty new to the fiddle, a lot of notes are slightly off. And so that can mess up the open strings. Like when I play, yes, my open strings are what anchor me to being correctly in tune if I'm playing all by myself. But if everything's a little off, the open string is just gonna sound a little off like everything else, and it's not gonna be that anchor that you need. So I haven't I haven't picked apart Charlie's hand position yet. He hasn't asked me to. Charlie, let me know if you want me to like take a close look at your left hand and give you a bunch of information about it. But I did one thing I did last night was I just played bass along with him. So adding an extra anchor of tuning in, and that worked great. By a couple of tunes in, he was playing in tune, the tuning issue went away. So this is how I would address out-of-tune playing when I could with my students. Unless there's something really obvious about the left hand. I hate to go and like nitpick somebody's left hand if they're playing in a way that's like intuitive and comfortable for them, unless there's something really obvious that is affecting their tuning. I feel like a lot of tuning work is done subconsciously, which was certainly the case with me playing the bass with Charlie, because he wasn't trying to play out of tune, and he wasn't necessarily trying to play in tune, just having the bass there giving him an anchor where his he was hearing his notes in relation to something at the same time, if that makes sense. So he's hearing something to compare his notes to, and that was enough for his hand to gradually correct the problem because he could hear if it's out of tune. He was playing fast enough that he wasn't really thinking about it, but it was starting to fix itself gradually. When I work with students in a lesson, like as a Suzuki teacher, I had a whole like hierarchy that I would bring people through. So first it was like playing in tune in unison with me, and then after that, the next rung on the ladder would be playing against a drone, which I would often just play the drone. Then we might play in harmony together. I might play if they're playing Suzuki, I might play one of the Suzuki harmonies with them, but to work on tuning. If that's in tune, then we would go to me just playing like a rhythm accompaniment on guitar or piano, and then work towards playing completely in tune when you're solo with no one else playing with you, which is the hardest thing to do. If you don't have like a Suzuki teacher walking you through these steps, you can improvise solutions at home to work on your tuning. I mean, one way is to like slow way down and put a drone on and think about your tuning. But if you want to just play tunes for fun, fun and enjoyment, and you don't want your tuning to come like unmoored. You want to have something anchoring you to the correct pitch, then you can try playing along with a recording. You can use one of those backing tracks. There's a lot of, I think there are apps, there's YouTube videos, there's different ways you can do a backing track. You can have a friend play with you or a family member. You can use a drone, just run a drone on something electronic and play along with it. I've done that. I brought the first movement of the Scottish Fantasy, um, which is a very difficult classical piece to a teacher a few years back when I was an adult, and it's an E flat minor, which is a crazy key to play in. I don't know if I've told this story before on the podcast, but she was like, You're out of tune, and I could not hear it, which is, you know, was crazy to me, but like, be humble. Like, we all have times when we can't hear when we're out of tune. If we could hear it, we would play in tune. So she had me play it against an E-flat drone, and that fixed it, you know. And the final thing I'll say about tuning is that I wouldn't let, if you feel like you're a little bit out of tune, don't let that stop you from playing with other people. Because probably if you're at a slow jam and you're playing along with others, that's gonna be an anchor that will pull you gradually back into being in tune. So just encouraging you that way. Next time we're gonna talk about the bow and about bow control on the string. Our tune for today is called Caw River. This is a tune I'm working on. I am working on some old time tunes. I will probably have some more after tonight. I'll be playing some old time tunes with friends tonight. So, my tunes for the next little while, if I'm just doing the podcast myself, will be old time, but never fear, I'm going to Fiddle Hell next week, and I will also be on the lookout for some good Irish and like New England, French-Canadian tunes. I'll try to make some recordings. So, Kaw River is, I guess, a Texas-style tune. It's in D, and there is a recording that a lot of people reference on Slippery Hill from Norman Solomon, recorded in 1966. Texas Fiddle Favorites. I assume that's the name of the album. The version that I do is a little different. I got it from a friend of mine, Sanita. It's a little how do I describe it? It's a little more swishy, a little less straight ahead. I guess the Kaw River is another name for the Kansas River. And Kaw was a community, a name for a community of Native Americans. There was like an indigenous tribe called the Kaw Tribe. And this was a river that a lot of people crossed on their way west. You know, on the Oregon Trail, they had their wagons and they would load them onto boats, have the oxen and horses swim over, and then have the boats like kind of pushed across the river. The folks kind of helping and handling with that crossing, it was like one dollar to cross, were members of the Kaw tribe. So this is Ka River. It is in D, and I hope you enjoy.
