The Fakebook game

There's often 3 or 4 tunes visible when you open up the Fiddler's Fakebook and take a look. Sometimes I play a little game. I open up the Fakebook randomly and make myself play one of the tunes. I might play some same old favorite one each time I hit a particular page. But, often this maneuver sends a new tune out front and I stretch a little to figure out a brand new tune.

That's one of my credo's, if you will. Always learn new tunes. Always. Have a place where you jot down tunes that are on the back burner, so you'll keep better track of them. If you're only playing tunes that you've grown comfortable with, you're not growing. Some folks seem to think that they have a limited capacity for learning new tunes. It's not like a hard drive that's going to run out of space. There's lots more memory available in the human brain.

Housekeeping note - Check out the right hand margin of this blog. There are links to festival recordings, podcasts, archived posts, and helpful links.

Real music

I posted a batch of festival recordings today.  Enjoy.

Workshop handouts

What a nice gathering of folks in the Fiddle Crosstuning workshop this past weekend at Yarra Junction in Victoria.  Thanks for stopping by.  Many folks tuned their fiddles up to ADAE and AEAE, and not a string was broken.  :-)  

We started out by playing Maire's Wedding in G, just to get a feel for open drones on a lower toned string using a more-or-less familiar tune.  Then, we played Muddy Roads.  

Moving along quite quickly, we tuned up our G strings one whole step to A.  Usually, that puts a little different tension on the other strings, so we did some fine adjustment on all 4 strings.  Ready for D tunes, we played Old Grey Cat on a Tennesee Farm.  Talked about some typical drones and double stops, some fancy slides, and just brushed on shuffling.  

As long as we had some time left, we tuned up for A tunes by tuning the D string up a whole step to E.  AEAE has an extra advantage of being able to play in 2 octaves with the same finger patterns.  We played Old Yeller Dog Come Trottin' Through the Meetin' House, mostly because I love to watch the Aussies laugh at my accent on that.    And, racing to the end of the one hour workshop, we learned a simple version of My Little Doney.

Couldn't have been better planned, when Craig showed up for the next bowing technique workshop and he'd planned to use Doney as his example.  He offered the group a chance at a different tune, and most said to go ahead with Doney.  Serendipity curriculum development worked really well.

Of course, traveling light, I hadn't brought an excess of handouts.  So, if you're reading this to find out where the workshop handouts are, click here.