Fiddle technique class starts a new term

Tonight was the first night back for another year of the String Circle class. It was lovely to see some new faces in the class (and the more established ones too!). We’ll be continuing to focus on technique in the class. We’ll work on a few common session tunes which we’ll learn  by ear throughout the term.

We started off talking about what particular aspects of technique each person in the class wants to work on with their own fiddle playing. Some topics came up for  several people in the group, so we’ll be working on bow holds, tone, how to play competently when we’re playing faster, accenting tunes, ornamentation, double stopping, and tuning … in amongst plenty of other things!

We began playing open strings, and thinking about various ways we can improve the tone of a fiddle.

* Keeping our bow hold and arm relaxed throughout the bow stroke. It’s important to keep the thumb slightly bent to avoid tension spreading up the muscles of the forearm. The fingers of the right hand should be relaxed as well.

* Keeping the bow’s movement perpendicular to the fiddle strings. It can be difficult to see whether your own bow is at right angles to the strings when you’re playing. It’s helpful to use a mirror to check what’s happening.

* Keeping the bow in the area on the strings where the fiddle sound is ‘sweetest’.

Beats and offbeats

Then we moved on to playing a D scale. We used the scale to start thinking about how a reel is broken up into beats and offbeats. We tried tapping our feet and emphasising either the beat or the offbeat while we played.

After the break we learnt the 2/4 march Campbell’s Farewell to Redcastle. The written music for the tune is on this website’s music page. We’ll do some more work on this tune next week, thinking about some possibilities for ornamentation and double stopping that we can play.