mandolin/fiddle players

[catmandu2]

That is true--I could have done it in about 5 years if I'd have practiced with about twice the frequency ; )

[Han]

I took violin lessons for a year or two when I was a wee lass before picking up the mandolin, and the transition was super easy (same tuning). Apparently the transition from mandolin to violin/fiddle isn't quite as easy :/

[Jim Garber]

I started mandolin and fiddle around the same time. I have been playing for close to 4 decades. I would not say I am a virtuoso with perfect form or intonation but I enjoy playing. I tend to rotate between my main instruments. Lately I have been back into fiddle, primarily old time. Some of it has to do with being asked to sit in with a local group and also playing with my wife who is a solid southern old time player. We have been doing some duo playing and really listening to each other.

I agree that a fiddle teacher is important esp in the early stages but i also feel that playing with others is equally important. I find when playing with another fiddler I listen to what they are doing and sort of try to complement the treatment of the tune, whether with bowing patterns or phrasing or syncopation. Sometimes leaving out the notes (playing the rests) is the variation.

Above all, playing fiddle under stress -- trying to make it sound a certain way -- is very difficult. In the early stages a larger group session is the way to go to sort of loosen the muscles and relax into the groove. Of course, that doesn't mean that that is the only way to approach the instrument, but it is almost as important as working on the nuts and bolts. Patience above all with this instrument.

As far as mandolin, I would not say it was really easier to play but just different. On some tunes I can actually play them better on the fiddle.

[oneeyeross]

I love the fiddle, just wish that my right hand could bow as well as it should. I originally started on guitar when I was a young guy, and didn't pick up the fiddle until my early 20s.

One thing I did was download a copy of "L'art D'archet" which I can't find a link to right now (the art of the bow). It had pages and pages of studies for bowing....now, I need to actually do the practice...

It's just easier with the mandolin, since I started on guitar, picking is more "innate" (although that is just a term for familiar in this case).

[Jim Garber]

If you are ready to work on "L'art D'archet" I would say you are pretty well advanced. There are some acrobatic exercises in that work. Here is the link on IMSLP.

[Jack Roberts]

I have fewer problems with bowing patterns than I do with the left hand (intonation). I got two great videos from Byron Berline, with the catchy titles of "Bowing part 1" and "Bowing part 2" that started me out right, I suppose. So the pattern isn't a problem so much as overall bow control.

My problem with the bow is more hitting two strings when I want just one string and keeping my bowing elbow from getting lazy. Of course, when I go to the opera or the symphony and I see all those violinists bowing properly, I feel really bad...I can do the patterns, but I don't have that kind of control. There are lots of great exercises to improve bow control, but I am trying to concentrate on intonation now.

[Jim Garber]

Some nice intricate bowing on this tune by Brittany Haas. I detect some touches of Celtic playing, certainly not strictly southern old time.

[Jeff Budz]

I started playing fiddle a year ago, and am doing pretty good with it, but have a long way to go. Every time I start to think I'm sounding good enough to play it in my band, I listen to Vasser, Alison or Stuart and get depressed. I think about 10 years of playing is not an unreasonable amount of time to become competent.

[Larry S Sherman]

Some nice intricate bowing on this tune by Brittany Haas. I detect some touches of Celtic playing, certainly not strictly southern old time.

Yes, nice bowing, and Lauren Rioux sitting behind her is no slouch either. Brittany can do a lot, but has at least one foot strongly positioned in the Southern Old Time fiddle camp. She has a pic of her mentor Bruce Molsky in her case, right next to her other mentor Darol Anger.



Larry

[catmandu2]

I started playing fiddle a year ago, and am doing pretty good with it, but have a long way to go. Every time I start to think I'm sounding good enough to play it in my band, I listen to Vasser, Alison or Stuart and get depressed. I think about 10 years of playing is not an unreasonable amount of time to become competent.

No doubt--to sound like Vasser or Allison or Stuart! : ) They say it takes 21 years to become proficient on the pipes...

Brittany sounds Southern old-timey to me...for my money her left hand is providing the real pleasure here

[John Duncan]

Personally, I'm a fiddle/mandolin player. What I realized was hanging me up in the transition was trying think fiddle on the mando or vice versa. I had to approach both as two totally different instruments with no carry over except sharing the same tuning.

My left hand doesn't even play the same notes the same way. I fret the mandolin with pad of my finger tips and play the fiddle more closely to the tips. How I approach the same tune with the same notes on a fiddle tune or melody is totally different. On the mandolin, I might need to play with a lot of volume and a very direct approach to a specific note or phrase. On the fiddle, with the bow I will approach that same note completely differently.

If I was to give advice to my younger self as I was picking the mandolin up it would be: Approach this instrument as a totally different and new instrument. Its not a fiddle with frets.

[Jim Garber]

Its not a fiddle with frets.

Definitely. OTOH I do notice that I borrow some left hand phrasing from one instrument to the other. If I work on the same tune on both instruments I do find myself combining some appropriate aspects of each.

BTW I would also say that a fiddle is not a mandolin without frets.

[maj34]

I started playing the fiddle a few years after starting the mandolin, and I think of fiddle as more my main instrument these days. I haven't had any formal fiddle teachers, but I have paid attention. The two things that helped me the most with learning to play the fiddle have been 1)spending time backing up old-time fiddle players on guitar and really listening and watching what they're doing and 2)playing the fiddle in jams with other fiddlers. If you play a tune 5-10 times through in a jam, you're bound to stumble on to a bowing pattern that makes sense for that tune. Jim Garber makes a great point about "relaxing into a tune" above.

Specifically on bowing, I think there are great fiddlers who really study bowing patterns (Bruce Greene and Jimmy Triplett pop to mind) and great fiddlers who don't study bowing (James Bryan is a good example). I fall in the "don't study bowing patterns" camp, but I usually fall into some sort of pattern for each tune I learn. A couple simple pieces of advice I use: 1)for the majority of tunes, I like to start the tune on a downbow. That means I have to finish both the A and B parts on an upbow, so I have to figure out a way to make that happen. 2)for string crossings, I like the feel and sound of playing the higher string with a downstroke and the lower string with an upstroke. Gives a nice "chugg-a, chugg-a" feel.

That's my 2 cents.

[John Duncan]

I guess I should also throw out there as a big disclaimer that my huge motivation as a fiddle player has always been backing up a singer in a BG context.

I have worked on fiddle tunes along the way and jammed on them, but I am not an old time player by any stretch of the imagination, and do not always focus on learning instrumentals. Same goes for my mandolin picking.

I really think the genre of fiddle playing you want to do has a big impact on how you practice, what you learn, and the techniques you focus on.

Just for total transparency, here is a video of me playing fiddle with the 3rd place BG band at Galax 2012:

[Jim Garber]

Nice playing, John. I always admire folks who can play that nice clean bluegrass style with chordal double stopped harmony. One of my very favorites fiddlers is Kenny Baker.

However, I am primarily an old time fiddler and currently play only in jams and for the occasional dance, but I used to be in various bands and backing up vocals is a real art that I try to aspire to. More than not, tho I discovered years ago that, to truly support the vocal you sometimes have to back off playing behind the vocals and add some simple fills in the rest areas.

[farmerjones]

Found it! ! !
Yes indeed. Kenny Baker is/was the fiddler's fiddler.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twkj7wBfHWA

[mandocrucian]

I had to approach both as two totally different instruments with no carry over except sharing the same tuning.

If I was to give advice to my younger self as I was picking the mandolin up it would be: Approach this instrument as a totally different and new instrument.

Not that it's worth a mando-anything, but it's been diametrically the opposite for moi.

It has always been about the sound of what I liked. Always about trying to get to the essence of whatever and whoever really grabbed me, whether it was fiddle (Dave Swarbrick, Sugarcane Harris, Mike Doucet, Martin Byrnes, Byron Berline etc.) or electric guitar (Richard Thompson, Jerry Garcia, Peter Greene, John Cippolina, John Lee Hooker, BB King, Hendrix, Albert Lee, Ry Cooder, the rockabillies...) or acoustic guitar (Martin Carthy, Clarence White, Renbourn, Thompson, Tony Rice, piedmont blues fingerpickers) or "other" (Mike Auldridge, Billy Pigg, Alastair Anderson, John Kirkpatrick, Flaco Jimenez, Dr John, various pedal steel players, clawhammer banjoists...). Which meant acquiring the chops to emulate fiddle bowings, string bending. vibrato and various other elec guitar techniques, pick+fingers/fingerpicking, facility all over the neck in order to transpose the vocabulary from other instruments to a position(s) where the slurring/bending/across-the-strings sound and phrasing "sounded right" instead of rinky-dink and corny.

Funny thing, one of the ways I was really able to get much closer to play rock/blues/R&B electric guitar vocabulary convincingly was the several years I spent studying under Nick DeCollibus, a violinist of some international reputation. Adapting (onto mandoin) all those bowing, shifting, fingering, and double/triple-stop violin etudes of Rovelli, Kayser, Kreutzer etc. on mandolin gave me the technical ability to (eventually) do Clapton, Hendrix etc. solos without dumbing everything down. And it really helped prepare me for revelatory one-on-one time with Richard Thompson.

The one-big-instrument approach originates in the brain and the sound. When the sound is in the head, then it is merely a puzzle/game of figuring out how to get that/those same effect(s) on whatever instrument is in hand.

If I play something like "Bank of The Sweet Primroses" it will invariably emerge with a sonic Swarbrick (fiddle) template - it's what's in my ear and memory and what "sounds right". "Oye Como Va" ----- the Santana-isms are going to appear no matter what instrument - mando or flute or - is in hand; same for any stuff I associate with accordionist John Kirkpatrick - it's going to have that feel.

Conversely, when I now pick an Irish reel/jig/slip jig on mandolin, especially one that was learned on (or played primarily) on flute, all those type of flute articulations/ornamentation (cuts and strikes) have crept in without much conscious thought. (and it sounds good too). Or, if I pick up the viola, the bow movement echoes the phrasing that is in my mind/ear, even if it is hampered by my lower technical limitations of speed. And if Swarb would trill or slide into particular note and that's in my head, my hands respond to that as well.

I have come, over the years, to 'dislike' (mild term) and reject the "every-note-with-a-pickstroke" sound and approach. (With a few exceptions, i.e Mick Moloney, Irvine...; or if I'm playing left-handed mandolin...but that's only because my reverse handed technical abilites are limited.) It just can not compete with the richness and lyricism of "I Am A Pilgrim" (Clarence), "Little Wing" (Hendrix), "Carthy's March" (Swarb on fiddle). If I have to deal with the "every-note-with-a-pickstroke" sound, I might as well play it on tenor banjo - at least then I'll have a lot more volume. And I also hate being chained to the strict 12-tone-equal-temperament of the fretboard sans microtonal inflection and bendings. It's like having to listen to a stiff midi-file replication of an Etta James (or Ralph Stanley) vocal line instead the actual vocal performance.

And as far as jumping into the DeLorean to give my younger incarnation some advice......It would be something like:

"You need to really go buy a Strat and/or SG, and a fiddle and/or viola and put most of your time and effort in on those. (Keep the mando around for an additional instrument to triple on if you want.) And if you come across a B3 organ and/or a decent flute at a really good bargain price, BUY them. .....And get your butt to an aikido/karate studio now instead of waiting 15-20 years."

Yeah, I'd definitely tell myself to do things much differently.

Niles H.

[John Duncan]

Thanks Jim.

Not to get too side tracked but, I do love Kenny's fiddlin, his sense of musicality and his composition ability.

That being said, the way he backed up Bill Monroe's vocals was very unique and sometimes Kenny did not back off the vocals with his fills.
I have a tape of Kenny at the Philly Folk Fest with Roland White, James Monroe and Vic Jordan where Kenny plays melody on Willow Garden about the whole time the singer is singing.

I have other tapes of Kenny with Bill where he does not just fill in the blank spaces but plays with whole vocal lines.

He was an intensely creative fiddle player who did so much for BG and one of my absolute favorites.

[Jim Garber]

Thanks, Niles, for another of your always thought-provoking posts.

Just wondering, tho... who is this mando-dictator that is telling you to play with that "every-note-with-a-pickstroke" sound and approach? I always try to follow my own rules for pick patterns but will break them if it means a way to phrase and express what I want musically.

Someone many years ago told me that to put feeling in your phrasing you should really be singing with your instrument as if it were an extension of your voice. That holds for any instrument, mandolin, fiddle, glockenspiel, etc. Another wise person told me that the best musical expression tells a story, even if it is instrumental. I try to incorporate those things into all my playing, whatever the genre.

[mandocrucian]

Just wondering, tho... who is this mando-dictator that is telling you to play with that "every-note-with-a-pickstroke" sound and approach? I always try to follow my own rules for pick patterns but will break them if it means a way to phrase and express what I want musically.

Nah, there is no "mando-dictator" telling me how to play it. But it does seem like the "every-note-with-a-pickstroke" sound is what the overwhelming majority of listeners and mando player want to hear or do.

Yeah, I agree, real playing is singing-on-the instrument. But some instruments are just inherently better for singing potential. And if that "singing" aspect is a high priority, jumping ship to one of those instruments seems to make more and more sense. (But, all those freedoms for full dynamic, phrasing and pitch choice, make the beasts much more difficult to control and master.)


Factor A: Continuous control of volume and tone and connectiveness (slurring) control of notes
Factor B: Freedom from preset intonation/ability to play between the notes.

Instruments with both factors A and B:
Bowed strings (violin, viola. cello, etc.),
Wind instruments (open holed flutes, trombone, saxes*, closed hole flutes*, ; *not sure the degree of bending abilites of other horns /reeds are)
Harmonica
Electric guitar, pedal steel (with use of volume pedals/knobs)

Instruments with factor A
Bellows driven instruments - accordions, bandoneons, etc.
Organs

Instruments with reduced factor A
various bagpipes
reed organ

Instruments with factor B
Dobro, slide guitar

instruments with reduced or nonexistant capabilty for A and B
all percussive stringed instruments (with low sustain instruments at the bottom)
pitched percussion (vibes, mallet instruments)
pianos, acoustic keyboard instruments

[catmandu2]

Conversely, when I now pick an Irish reel/jig/slip jig on mandolin, especially one that was learned on (or played primarily) on flute, all those type of flute articulations/ornamentation (cuts and strikes) have crept in without much conscious thought.

Someone whom I've been interested in lately is Tony McMahon (box) who apparently was highly influenced by Seamus Ennis. Myself, I'm highly inspired lately by Liam O'Flynn. It's been said that lots of folks commonly listen to pipers

[catmandu2]

Yeah, I agree, real playing is singing-on-the instrument. But some instruments are just inherently better for singing potential. And if that "singing" aspect is a high priority, jumping ship to one of those instruments seems to make more and more sense.

Has been my experience too. I transitioned to winds/reeds, and fiddle, for these reasons. For me--more inspiring.

I've offered lots of commentaries on these aspects previously. One thing that occurred to me the other day is: when playing woodwinds (and melodeons), I never look at my fingering--as one probably never does, even when learning these instruments. I believe this is another contributing factor in minimizing the "brain"/mentation/cognitive/patternistic approach of much of my fretted strings playing--enabling a more direct expression, which feels to me much more like singing, and playing what I "feel"; I can play one note for a very long time, on a woodwind, and be very interested in that...while with a fretted string, I'm just not that captivated by a single note (it is, after all, essentially a rhythm instrument)

[catmandu2]

I have come, over the years, to 'dislike' (mild term) and reject the "every-note-with-a-pickstroke" sound and approach.

This equates with "shuffle" or saw strokes on fiddle...and why when one starts experimenting with the many ways to break it up, it opens up worlds...(and what makes fiddling sound so great--as evidenced by Brittany above)


*It's also why the devil loves the fiddle--it possesses the lyrical capacities of both A and B as Niles innumerates above, but also has the rhythmic capacity of the percussion instrument (where winds inherently do not)--the stick, enabling fast articulations, like a drum stick

[Jim Garber]

Boy are we getting away from Bill's original posted question... I hope he doesn't mind but in some ways it all applies IMHO.

As for Niles' Factor A & B. I definitely agree, however, true virtuosic playing on even the "impaired" instruments such as our beloved mandolin can overcome the obstacles. In some ways, it is quite easy for even a middling violinist to evoke emotion with his/her playing whereas it is more difficult with those less evocative instruments. I do recall Carlo Aonzo's playing of a simple aria bringing me to tears and this was on a mandolin. So it can be done but it takes an extra heaping of soul.

Still it is what I strive for and probably rarely achieve.

[mandocrucian]

I definitely agree, however, true virtuosic playing on even the "impaired" instruments such as our beloved mandolin can overcome the obstacles. In some ways, it is quite easy for even a middling violinist to evoke emotion with his/her playing whereas it is more difficult with those less evocative instruments.

That is true on both counts. On the purely individual, self-driven level, seeing just how far you can stretch the capabilities of the instrument has its game/puzzle-solving "rewards". But, when you have to work two to three times harder to do something a less acomplished player (of a different instrument) can do and still get only half (or less) the acknowledgement in comparison to that other guy, you've just got to ask the question "Why am I (still) beating my head against the wall?" (And even moreso when that response (or lack of) comes from players of "your instrument" who ought to appreciate, or at least recognize, how damn hard it is/was to pull that stuff out of this instrument.)

One thing that occurred to me the other day is: when playing woodwinds (and melodeons), I never look at my fingering--as one probably never does, even when learning these instruments. I

Yes, running the "visual program" takes up processing space within the brain. "Not looking" frees up limited power/resources to be detoured/reapportioned to the sonic program instead. (It's kinda like in Star Trek where everything, except for life-support, gets shut down. Even if you are not visually perusing and monitoring the fretbord or hands, it's still eating up RAM. I know that when I'm really stretching things to the max with something quite difficult (mandolin + bass pedals + drumkit - maybe even vocals, simultaneously), the only way to pull it off is to shut down all visual input alltogether by closing the eyes. Even some momentary visual distraction can be enough to throw you off while juggling 3 or 4 balls at once.

If you watch any of the great instrumentalists who "trance out" - Thompson, Santana etc., chances are the eyes shut (or roll back into the head) when they are going into the "flow/zone" state. (An interesting aside - the rolling the eyes up into the forehead is one of the things that is supposed to activate the 3rd eye. - perhaps yogis can comment on this?) "Having to look" (at the neck/hands) is just a big distraction and impediment from projecting/immersing your thoughts into/through the sonic flow; it just gets in the way.

....enabling a more direct expression, which feels to me much more like singing, and playing what I "feel"; I can play one note for a very long time, on a woodwind, and be very interested in that...while with a fretted string, I'm just not that captivated by a single note

As far as the most direct mind>sound "singing" on an instrument, I don't know if you can come closer than playing a wind instrument (imo). (and that is pretty damn hard to resist or ignore if you're after that instrument-mindmeld) The breath is involved just as it would be if you were vocalizing. And your "bowing" is coming from your lungs - again, more "vocal" than mechnical. (In martial arts, synching up the breathing with the physical movements is one of the major components).

I would also surmise that drumming on a full kit can provide a similar level of immersion into the instrument (especially when there is 4-limbed independence), though different in nature because of the pure physicality involved. I know that playing playing pedalbass and drums (with the feet) under the mandolin is a whole/total body experience. and, I don't know that I will ever be able to do this in conjunction with playing flute - as it requires maintaining stability on the lip-plate when your legs are rocking like Ray Charles --- maybe on a mouthpiece instrument (sax, recorder...) but it may well be impossible with a transverse flute.

NH