Bellingham Fiddle

Mel Bay’s Fiddle Sessions has published the third and final installment of my article “Chords: What To Play When You Don’t Know What To Play.” In this series I lay out how to figure out which chords to play, how to play them, and what to do for different types of music.

What Do I Do With These Chords Besides Droning?

Here’s an excerpt from the new article (I’d include the whole thing, but Mel Bay might get mad at me):

Off beat chucks are a common pattern for bluegrass, polka and other songs in 2/4 or 4/4 time. This is how to do it:

- Place the bow close to the frog.

- On beats two and four (the offbeats), play a short stroke, aiming for maximum crispness and punchiness. Most people do down bows; I prefer up bows because I find I can play more precisely that way. Try both and see which you prefer, or whether you like them both but in different contexts.

- If you’re confused about which beats are the offbeats, and there’s a bass player, see if s/he’s playing beats 1 and 3 and leaving the others empty. (Usually, the answer is yes, unless s/he’s getting really fancy and non-folky.) Your notes will happen between the bass notes. You are essentially providing two halves of the same rhythm part; the bass does the “boom” and you play the “chuck”. There’s no shame in watching her/his rhythm hand!

You can read the rest of the article here: What Do I Do With These Chords Besides Droning?

This is the final installment of a three-part series on chordal accompaniment that I wrote for Fiddle Sessions. If you missed the first two parts, here are the links:

Chords: What to Play When You Don’t Know What To Play
How Do I Know Which Chord To Play?

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I got this message in my email today. Who wants to get paid to do children’s theater in Bellingham?

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Auditions for “Goodnight Moon” a musical by Chad Henry (“Angry Housewives”, “The Hoboken Chicken Emergency”, “Pinocchio”) will be:

Sat., Feb. 11th 10:30-12:00 with callbacks 12:00-1:00

Bellingham Theatre Guild

Runs May 5th-May 13th at the Firehouse Performing Arts Center (unless an offer of a donated space comes through!)

Rehearsals Feb. 21st-May 4th (Tuesday evenings and Saturday morning/early afternoons) with a short performance for Children’s Gallery Walk on

Fri., May 4th downtown after our tech.

Please go to our website for some more information and to sign up for an audition slot. I am hoping to see you there!

Character Breakdown is 6 actors who sing and move well (one of which is pre-cast). Pay is $250 for rehearsals and run.

Bunny (male/female) impish, doesn’t want to go to bed

Old Lady (female) stern with a bit of whimsy.

Mouse (male/female) sidekick to Bunny. Silly and sweet.

Ensemble (male) plays Dog with Dish/Spoon puppets and dancing bear, some tap or soft shoe

Ensemble (female) plays Cat with fiddle and dancing bear, some tap or soft shoe (hopefully plays the fiddle)

Tooth Fairy (precast)

Puppeteer (may be precast)

All characters sing well, so if you are not a singer, I apologize for sending this!

I so hope to work with you one of these days (in some cases, AGAIN). Please let me know if you have any questions –

Stay warm!

Lizanne Schader, Artistic Director
THE NEIGHBORHOOD PLAYHOUSE
www.theneighborhoodplayhouse.net

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Do you pay attention to the direction your bow is traveling?

Fiddle music relies very much on specific bowing patterns, meaning sequences of up bows and down bows, to get those danceable rhythms.

A down bow tends to create a natural accent (meaning you stress the beat, rather like accenting a syllable when you speak). This happens because gravity is helping you pull the bow across the string. An up bow, by contrast, is weaker.

Different types of tunes use accents in different places, depending on which beats need to be stressed to support the dances that go with them. This is what makes a jig sound different than a rag, and what makes a reel sound different than a waltz. But if you’re not used to paying attention to your bow direction and accents, those distinctions between song types probably aren’t so clear to you.

If you haven’t been working to keep your downs and ups in order, or if you’re used to ignoring slurs because they’re hard or because you’re just not used to looking for them, go back to the songs that you know and really pay attention to which direction your bow is going. This’ll be easy if you’ve got sheet music. If all the stuff that you know is by ear, then you’re going have to pay that much more attention. Take your songs, slow them down, feel where you tap your foot. Usually you should be down bow when your foot taps; jigs and waltzes are more complicated exceptions. Are you consistent?

The more you can say, “yes! My bowing is consistently strengthening the beat!”, the dancier your playing will be. Master this and your playing will light people up even if your intonation and tone aren’t perfect. Ignore this and your fiddling will be kinda flat even if your technique is otherwise impeccable.

Want to really dig into the different patterns and techniques for bowing different types of tunes? I’m offering a class this month:

Fiddle Tunes Lab: Bowing Styles

January 9 – January 30, Mondays, 5:30 – 7pm
Learn some new tunes and flex those bowing muscles. How do bowing patterns and articulations affect the feel of a song? How do you make a rag sound raggier and a jig sound jiggier? Georgia bow, hokum, rah rah rah! Recommended for lower-intermediate to advanced fiddlers, and classical violinists new to fiddling.

Location to be confirmed depending on how many people register (no more than 10), but will be convenient to downtown Bellingham.

Class fee: $50

Class + one 1-hour private lesson: $90

**Is this way ahead of where you are? Don’t worry! I’m offering a beginner’s class in the spring; stay tuned for details.

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Some weeks this is just how it is.

One of my teenage students walked in the door today, obviously frazzled. I asked how she was doing. “Tired!” she said, with uncharacteristic force.

“Are you tired from good things or bad things?” I asked.

“Good things. But they’re wearing me out.” She went onto explain: she’s just joined a gymnastics team. Their first meet is only a few days away. The team has only a few practices to learn a lot of moves and put together an entire routine. Most of them have never done gymnastics before, including her.

As we settled into the lesson, it became obvious that this situation had taken a toll on the amount of time she’d been able to spend practicing this week. That’s natural enough. It’s not that she’s losing interest in fiddle; she’s just engaged in an intensive project right now in another part of her life.

I see this all the time with my teenage students; they have so many opportunities available to them, so many adults in their lives encouraging them to express themselves creatively and athletically and to do it all right now. Hey, I’m one of them! We adults like to enable kids to overcommit themselves with fun stuff since we know they won’t have as much time to pursue these opportunities later. Of course, we need to be careful to avoid burnout, and we need to teach kids how to set boundaries that will support their emotional and physical health. But that’s a different article.

This busy-busy theme is obviously not limited to the teenagers I work with. My adult students are even more likely to come to their lessons buzzing with stress: “I’m sorry I’m late; my business meeting ran over time and then I hit all the red lights! They’re restructuring my department and now I’m doing the jobs of two people, for three-quarters of my old pay!” And then “I didn’t have time to practice,” often followed by “I’m sorry” or “I know I should be practicing” or some other self-deprecating comment.

Look. We are all going a mile a minute. Want to know a secret? There are weeks I don’t practice at all. And I’m a full-time musician! The important thing is to know what our priorities are, and to live according to them. Some weeks, music and the personal growth it facilitates are top priorities. Some weeks, they aren’t. And that is okay.

But we also know that we do need to practice regularly if we are to keep making progress. A day we don’t take a step forward is a day we take a step backward. What we need is a way to be kind to ourselves by continuing to press forward in our music projects at the same time that we allow ourselves the freedom to respond to the rest of life as it happens dynamically around and within us.

We need to practice efficiently.

We need to know what the bare minimum is that we have to do in order to keep moving forward, even in baby steps. Or at the very least, we need to know what we have to do to stop going backward–even if we’re just treading water.

So, okay: how to do that.

Read more »

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