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.