Help in Bristol

On Nov. 23, I travelled through Bristol, TN and took a fiddle lesson from Jane MacMorran, who was my fiddle instructor at Swannanoa. Jane is a former US Scottish Fiddling Champion and she is a superb teacher. Jane helped me to solve the main problem I had been struggling with: correct left hand position.

Due to incorrect hand placement on my part, I had developed a big callous on my left hand at the 'contact point' for the instrument and I was sore from playing. Jane moved my left elbow farther to the right, which caused my fingers to come farther up and my thumb to drop down a bit. She also moved the contact point farther up the neck, so that my fingers could drop straight down into the starting point for the "first position". Jane told me that she will be back at Swannanoa in 2006, but I plan to visit her before then for additional lessons, if possible.

Encouraging developments

Since my recent return to fiddling, I have discovered that I no longer struggle to play my French fiddle. It has a rich, sweet tone in all registers and I appreciate its beauty. Although it is more difficult to tune than my Doetsch, which has fine tuners on all strings, I will still enjoy using the Boulangeot more frequently than before.

Today, I accompanied the Old Blind Dogs CD, "Gab O' Mey" as it played "Lochanside" on my stereo. Although I stumbled a few times at different spots, I thoroughly enjoyed playing along with the dogs at concert speed and repeated it several times. This is the first time I have ever tried doing such a thing and it was great fun.

Goin' with the Doyen

On Saturday, I had a fiddle lesson with John Turner. He is a 10-time winner of the US National Scottish Fiddling Championship and has been teaching people to play fiddle for quite a number of years.

He played many tunes during our one-hour lesson (with great skill!) and I played only one and a small part of a second, but I hope that we can reverse that trend next time. John admired the tone and appearance of my Boulangeot and showed me two Scottish fiddles which he uses. One of them is a fairly rough instrument made by the well-known Hardie family of Luthiers in Edinburgh. My instrument sounds noticably better than either of his, although his are certainly nice and of interesting antiquity, particularly for Scottish fiddling purists.

John seemed incredulous that I had been playing for only five months (counting time out of commission), complimenting me on my accurate tone and my bow technique. He doesn't seem like the type to give out compliments too glibly, so I felt good about that. He helped me to understand that whatever classical technique I can develop will be very helpful to my Scottish fiddling career, such as it is.

He prides himself on approximating as closely as possible the sound of Niel Gow, with a very slight Northeast (Scotland) influence. We discussed the history of Scottish fiddling and he explained the importance of ornamentation within this modality. He assigned ten tunes as a starting point and I will begin the memorization process, aided by PrintMusic software.

John is expensive, but worth it.

At long last

Today, I had my first violin lesson since July. Keadron was a little unhappy with both my left & right hand technique and assigned remedial exercises. I suppose that the fiddling has changed the way I play, particularly as fiddle bowing is lighter and quicker than on the classical violin.

I did not explain to her that my arm still hurts some when I try to play. Instead, I will do the best I can to improve in spite of the pain. The main damage to my left arm before was a pinched or "pinged" nerve and I have about 85% use of my left hand now, enough to play a little.

In any event, it is wonderful to feel the vibration of the fiddle on my shoulder once again.