Playing with rhythm in reels

We went back to the tune Da Merrie Boys of Greenland tonight, and had a go at playing with rhythm in different ways.

We played around with several things, with individuals listening to a phrase and then trying to play it back exactly as they heard it. We looked at:

• How to make notes louder or quieter, experimenting with bow speed, pressure on the bow and double stopping. We put pressure on the bow by ‘digging in’ at the start of the bow stroke with our index finger on the back of the stick of the bow.
• Playing on the beat really loudly, and all the other notes in a bar as quietly as we could, to really make the notes on the beat stand out. We were using very small bow strokes for the quiet notes.
• Getting bounce and definition into individual notes by using the weight of our arm through the index finger on the bow to ‘dig in’ to a note and give it a clean start. The spring in the wood helps the bow to ‘bounce’ out of the bow stroke when we do this.

 

Adding emphasis to help with phrasing

We tried playing the first part of Da Merrie Boys of Greenland with the emphasis in different places.

And we learnt the first part of a new tune – the waltz My Cape Breton Home, by Jerry Holland. We’ll learn the B part next week.

This term runs until the end of March (the last night is on Tuesday 27th). The summer term will run for 10 weeks starting on 17th April.