A
former banjo student of mine recently turned to the
blood sport of fiddling, and for a newcomer he is pretty good. He gets
the core of the tune down. Sure, he
might be hunting and pecking at the start but he’s got good bowing as far as I
can tell, and he’s a spirited, inquisitive student.
I think half the
challenge now is stepping away from the sheet music. We made a “play date” last week, and sat and sifted
through his music, trying to figure out how to make the two instruments, his
fiddle and my banjo, work together. I
think we were able to find some common ground and identify tunes on which to
focus. Picking a select few tunes might
make it easier for him to fix on the task of “memorizing,” and might help him
step away from his sheet music.
From my perspective, there’s
nothing worse than being tied to a sheet of music, or a sheet of tab. I have nothing against tab. I have nothing against musical notation. Every once in a while, I find myself going
back to Pete Seeger’s book, Henscratches
and Flyspecks: How to Read Melodies from Songbooks in Twelve Confusing Lessons
With the Help of Some Old-Fashioned Songs, to refresh my memory and to
re-equip me for making sense of a particular tune.
I look at musical notation
and banjo tab the way I look at roadmaps.
It would not make much sense to paste a highway atlas to one’s
windscreen while attempting to drive to a destination of choice, but it would
be rational to consult a roadmap, to look to a map as a tool that can help
shape a course of action and chart a path towards one’s goal. To me, notation and tab are tools.
In old time music, these
tools ought not to stand in the way of playing.
Though they can help one learn a tune, once a player is up and running
these tools can be constraining, and they can make playing music seem more like
work than play. They can get in the way
of musicians sitting, knee to knee, watching and listening to one another,
playing off the cues that come from the close proximity of musicians sitting together in jams.
While I don’t want to
pretend to know how one must learn to play the fiddle, I also don’t want to be
stuck looking at my buddy scrunched over his music book, bending forward and
squinting to see his way through a tune displayed on his music stand, instead
of focusing on the moment, on the here and now as we try to figure out how to
make the tune work between our two instruments.
My problem area is
figuring out what fiddle tuning goes with which banjo tuning. So far, I’m navigating this terrain by
relying on trial and error. In my
understanding -- and I’m prepared to stand corrected on anything and everything
I say about the fiddle and fiddling -- "cross tuning" simply means a
non-standard GDAE tuning on the fiddle.
My problem is that I’m never sure when to reach for the banjo I keep in
standard G tuning or the one I keep cranked up to A. I can get from G to sawmill to Double C
quickly on each of them, but I find it pretty hard to hear which banjo, and
which tuning, works best with my fiddling friend’s instrument which he tends to
keep in GDAE in this learning start-up phase.
It has been many
years since I worked closely, on a weekly basis with a fiddler. Probably since the mid or late 1990s. Then she fell in love and moved to
California, and friends and family discouraged me from kidnapping her to get
back my fiddler.
My new fiddling
friend and I are starting with some of the predictable tunes: Cripple Creek and Buffalo Gals and Old Joe
Clark. Focusing on those tunes for a
month or two or whatever it takes, that’s the recipe, at least in my view.
I’d love to hear some
advice and guidance regarding the challenge of putting the banjo and fiddle
together.
Play hard,
Lew
1 comment:
Great post, Lew. BTW, I've been enjoying your blog for a while now. I've been playing banjo for going on six years next month and just started on the fiddle last winter. Like the banjo, the tunings add great texture to the sound.
I pretty much stick to ADAE (D tuning) and AEAE (A tuning) for the most part. For banjo, just regular DD and aEAC#E works for me, though it depends on the tune.
You might take a look at Brad Leftwich's Round Peak fiddle book, which has a bunch of common tunings for the different keys. Now, that I think of it, his banjo book might help with the corresponding tunings on the five-string. Just my thoughts. Thanks again for a great blog.
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