Improving tone and rhythm

Tonight we worked on techniques to help us with our tone and rhythm while playing.
We started the evening by going over the second part of Gordon Duncan’s reel Ramnee Ceilidh. It has a syncopated rhythm. We talked about different ways to tap our feet to help us keep in time when we’re playing syncopated rhythms. We also spent some time working on playing triplets. We were playing the three notes in the triplets starting on a down bow. The action comes from the wrist. The second and third notes are created by bringing the down bow to a very sudden stop. If the wrist is relaxed enough then the bow ‘judders’ up then down again.

Grace notes

We also tried out playing a grace note on the F# (the crotchet) near the start of the B part of the tune. We’re aiming to flick the finger quickly on and off the string to play the grace note. When you’re playing a reel at speed, you won’t hear a note as such where a grace note is played, so it doesn’t matter whether you use the 2nd or 3rd finger. The action of flicking the string briefly ‘deadens’ the F# that we’ve been playing, as it stops the string resonating. You can play the grace note at the start of the F#, in the middle of it, or at the end of it. Each will have a slightly different effect on the sound.

How to improve tone on the fiddle

There are several things we can do to help create a good tone when playing the fiddle:
* Keep a relaxed bow hold. It’s particularly important to make sure that the thumb doesn’t ‘lock’ in a tense position.
* Keep the bow close to the bridge throughout the bow stroke.
* Keep the bow at right angles to the fiddle’s strings throughout the bow stroke. We looked at the importance of having a flexible wrist. If we play with a rigid wrist, the bow will tend to skew on the strings at the start and finish of the bow stroke.
* When playing on the E string, we worked on keeping a slightly lighter touch with the bow.

We had a go at playing rhythm on percussion instruments. We all started off by playing on the beat. Once we had a steady rhythm going, some people moved to playing the offbeat, and then upbeats.

At the end of the evening we played through Roxburgh Castle again, and reminded ourselves of the chord accompaniment that we learnt a couple of weeks ago.