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Fiddling
I've played violin for a bit more than 30 years -- except that for about 20 of them, I wasn't playing violin. Suzuki lessons from about 5 years old to about 14 years old, quit in disgust, took it back up when I was 35. I have a lot of fun with it nowadays.
If you're looking for abc notation of fiddle tunes, be sure to check out The Fiddler's Companion.
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Lots of stuff going on this weekend! Sylvia (a child of the millenium, a dragon baby) is as of today, no longer able to write her age with a single digit (assuming of course that she is writing in decimal notation). We are having a birthday dinner with some friends this evening, and tomorrow afternoon her party will be at the Raptor Trust in the Great Swamp.
The other big activity for me, outside of celebrating Sylvia's birthday, is fiddling. Barbara Lamb is in town this weekend, she's giving a concert at Menzel Violins tomorrow afternoon -- I can't make it because of the party, alas, but I've arranged for a fiddle lesson this morning. Really looking forward to it! I've learned her jig "Twisty Girl", I'm hoping she'll teach me "Älgen på taket". And the fiddling continues this afternoon, when Mountain Station (i.e. me and John) will have its first gig, at John's neighborhood block party. I'm pretty shocked at the amount of music we are comfortable playing -- we didn't work out a set list exactly, but we have enough songs to play for an hour set easily, and the order of the songs will determine itself...
posted morning of September 18th, 2010: 4 responses ➳ More posts about Sylvia
A great lesson with Barbara -- primary areas we covered:
Bowing -- begin bow strokes with more force, get a percussive effect at the beginning of the stroke. If I am more conscious of keeping a healthy dollop of rosin on my bow, this will be easier.
Vibrado -- Barbara gave me a woodshed exercise for learning how to do vibrado and told me that if I practice it diligently for a week, I will get it. Probably not going to do this very immediately, but I will keep it on hand... Part of the trick is not to touch the neck with the base of your index finger when you are doing vibrado; the other part is to work on having a very even rhythm to the motion.
Positions -- Barbara gave me a nice straightforward woodshed exercise for moving between first and third position..
"Moose on the Roof" -- we worked on this song for about half the time of the lesson; I'm convinced I could play it pretty well with some practice. It is in cross-tuning (EADA) -- I have never played violin in non-standard tuning, it is a lot of fun.
posted morning of September 18th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
This is the sketched-out notation of a melody I was working on the other night. (The focus is not right, I can't seem to take a picture of the page in focus; not sure why. The unreadable text is "slow walking tempo" and "(let ring)" -- the â…¤-shaped symbol above the staff I think means to stress the marked note; in any case this is my intent where I've marked that symbol.) An interesting aspect of writing this out was trying to justify writing it out, trying to explain to myself why it's not a waste of time, what's useful about it...
Writing the melody out ends up being useful to me as a way to let myself improvise -- my favorite thing to do when I'm practicing is to take a short melody and repeat it with variations. I had been trying recently to improvise the melodies "from scratch" but the problem I run into is not being able to keep them in mind long enough that the structure of the melody repeats among variations.
While I was thinking about this I got a message from Vance Maverick that he had written out a transcription of the recording which I'd posted on YouTube. (The images of my and Vance's output are linked to the YouTube video.) The recording is my eight bars repeated three times with variations, plus a measure of intro and one of outro. Vance's transcription is the full 26 bars. This is fun: he has transcribed what is in many ways a completely different song than what I wrote out -- what is certainly a more readable, more accurate representation than mine of what's on the tape -- but which I would have a hard time using to produce what's on the tape.
There is a metric rule we both followed, which makes the notes on the page different from "what's on the tape" -- we both represented metrical values as eighth-notes throughout the song regardless of whether or not they're swung. And as Vance points out neither of us writes out the double-stops -- I think of these as a form of improvisation on top of the written melody -- or is precise about writing out the occasional flat fingering that slides up.
I'm fascinated and impressed by the notion of being able idly to jot down the melody one is listening to -- I am not at all fluent in musical notation, producing it is for me a very clumsy, mechanical process. I'd love to get better at it.
Another example of woodshedding a melody with variations. This is "Amazing Grace" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." (I noticed the other night that the two songs are extremely similar to each other -- you can tell the difference between them by the rhythm, but it would be very easy to sing either song to the other one's melody.)
This is the first recording I have made with my new chin rest. It comes off of the lovely old, broken violin which Eric (guitarist for the Lost Souls) bought at a garage sale for a couple bucks and keeps on his mantel. It's got an extremely low profile, just what I've been looking for -- chin rests are generally too bulky for me to find them comfortable. The edge of the rest is inscribed "Becker's chin and shoulder rest" which appears to date it mid-to-late-19th C. Frederick Douglass' violin, pictured to the right, has the same chin rest.
A new look: I shaved off my moustache and am digging the way the air feels on my upper lip. Also: changed my E string last night -- listen to that thing ring!
Thanks to Rex Broome and to neighbor Dan Rosen for introducing me to House. My recording with Dan of Saint Etienne's "Stoned, to say the least" will appear on Rex's 39-40 Covers project tomorrow. A lot of fun playing and recording this, it seems like almost the perfect music for me -- repetitive improvisation over a fixed beat is about my favorite violin activity...
What a fortuitous coincidence, to have connected with Dan at the same time Rex asked me to cover Saint Etienne! I met Dan last December, at Woody and Lisa's Solistice party; and two weeks ago we started taking the same train in to the city for work, and talking about music as we ride in. So it seemed like a natural thing to ask Dan for help with this cover; he came through in a big way!
(Update: Post #2500 for this humble blog! Halfway there, woo-hoo!)
Well out of a year and a bit of jamming together, John and I have put together something worth listening to (IMO obviously). You can download our demo tape from box.net if you'd like to check it out. (Click the "Download Folder" button to get the tape as one big .zip file.) Streaming here:
Track list
"Highway 61 Revisited" by Bob Dylan (with a bit of fooling around with the lyrics from yours truly)
"NJ Transit" by Jeremy
"Dancing Barefoot" by Patti Smith
"Revelator" by Gillian Welch
"Shady Grove," traditional
"California Stars" by Woody Guthrie and Wilco
"St. James Infirmary," traditional
Mountain Station is John Hicks on guitar and vocals, Jeremy Osner on Stroh fiddle and vocals. Follow us on Facebook to see new songs when we record them, and works in progress...
Update -- I am thinking with this post I'll be taking a brief hiatus, a couple of weeks. Thanks for reading, those of you who stop by regularly -- I'll be back, just want a little time off.
Please help us find our audience! If you are reading this post and you like the music, I would greatly appreciate links back, from your blog or your rss reader or Facebook, whatever. Help get the word out...
This is my grandfather's violin, which I've been playing (with significant interruptions) since I was 12 years old or thereabouts. Today I gave it away, to my daughter. A couple of thoughts --
Wow, Sylvia is playing a full-size violin now! It seems like the transition from ¼-size did not take a very long time.
I have really switched over pretty completely to the Stroh fiddle in the year or so I've had it. It feels like my native instrument now. I was playing this violin with Bob and Janis earlier today and noticing it felt a little foreign, the sound was not the Stroh sound which I have acclimated to.
I took the pickup off; if you're looking for a cheap Barcus Berry transducer to mount on your violin, give me a holler. It is nothing fancy but it served me well. Of the two stickers on the case, Sylvia will be keeping "Katze und Mädchen, ein komisches Paar" and getting rid of "Future Corpses of America" -- probably a wise decision. Need to get a better bow for Sylvia as I cannibalized the good bow for my Stroh fiddle.
Sylvia was going through the stuff in the outer pocket of the case and found sheet music for "Old Joe's Hittin' the Jug", which I had forgotten I had, and the dvd of Elixirs and Remedies. (Which, nice, I'm watching now.)
Jonathan Ward of Excavated Shellac has a bunch of great new music posts up;* old recordings of flamenco, Turkish music, West African pop... particularly up my alley is a guest post from Swedish psychotherapist Tony Klein. A few years ago at a flea market in Uppsala, Klein found an old record of Signe Flatin Neset playing the traditional Norwegian tune «Skuldalsbruri» ("The Bride from Skuldal") on Hardingfele, a Norwegian fiddle with four resonating strings under the melody strings. Listen to the recording at box.net, and read Klein's post about the music and the artist.
*(Hmm, no, this is not correct. They are a bunch of old posts from the archives that Google Reader and/or WordPress decided should be reported as new today. This is a good thing as it exposed me to some fine music; but if you head over to Jonathan's blog the latest post you will see is from a couple of weeks ago.)
(Oh and speaking of great music to listen to, NPR's First Listen is now streaming Gillian Welch and David Rawling's new record, The Harrow and the Harvest, for free. Thanks for the link, cleek!)
