Improvising on Fiddle Tunes in A

A lot of fiddle tunes are like Kitchen Girl in that the first half starts with A major, and then goes to the G so you get a kind of myxolidian modal sound, and then in the second half they start in A minor and also go to G and other chords which I think makes them have a dorian modal sound. And then also in each part you can play pretty much straight A or A minor and G scales over the appropriate chords, plus you can play A blues scales over everything. All around there are a lot of options for improvisation - here's me messing around with some of those ideas over the chords to Cattle In The Cane, another very similar tune. You can probably hear shades of Cold Frosty Morning and Jerusalem Ridge in here too.



and here's the actual Cattle in the Cane, which I learned from the Bluegrass 95 CD:

Kitchen Girl in AEAE Tuning

Here's a new way to play fiddle tunes in A that is surprisingly easy to do. I've only just started so I'm no expert, but tuning your two bass strings up a tone to A and E means you can play a lot more open strings on A tunes, which sounds nice. Some people call it cross tuning or sawmill tuning. Also because the tuning is that same as the top two strings just an octave lower, you can use the same scale patterns you use on the top two on the lower two, so it's very easy.

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Or frankly any kind of musician. Never before was it possible to go online or onto iTunes and buy just about any tune you wanted. And then to get hold of a piece of software like Transcribe! or any of a dozen other applications that allow you, for little or no money, to play along with the finest musicians in the world on any tune you want to play at any speed you want to play it.

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Note that although a lot of music on iTunes is not copy protected, some of it is, but in that case you just need to burn it onto CD in order to be able to slow it down with the software of your choice. A lot of people use Audacity, which is free. But really, pay these developers, it's so little for creating such a world.

Kitchen Girl

Here's a tricky little tune that has a lot in common with other fiddle tunes like The Growling Old Man and the Grumbling Old Woman, and also reminds me a little of Jerusalem Ridge because of all the A minor possibilities.

Speed 2

The more I work on this and think about it, although it does seem to help a little to develop speed technique by working on things I can play well at high speed, it's counterproductive for more difficult material, which I have to play slowly until I have the technique down smoothly enough. So I think to expand a little on what I said in my first speed post, what I'll try to work on now is bringing up speed only in things I can play very easily, and keeping it very slow on anything more difficult.

It's more like an iterative process - working on a tune at speed shows me where the problems are, slowing it down lets me try to solve them. Speeding it back up again tests my solution.

Speed

You often hear the advice that playing something slowly is the key to being able to play it fast. I would certainly agree that if you cannot play a tune well slowly you will not be able to play it fast, so sorting out all of the difficulties of playing a particular piece and really getting it down at slow speed is a prerequisite of playing it fast.

But having done all that does not mean you will then be able to get up on stage and blaze that song at 150bpm. Even if you have worked on it at slower speeds for months, or years.

The problem is that in order for the advice about playing things slowly to be true you already have to be capable of playing at high speeds. I believe that's why you will quite often hear professionals recommend this 'play it slow first' method - they know it works for them. And it does, because they already have the technique they need to play fast.

So, at the moment I can play pretty well up to about 110 to 120bpm. By that I mean I'm able to play a lot of tunes cleanly and be fairly comfortable improvising up to that speed. But a lot of bluegrass songs are played at speeds of 135 to 155 bpm, and banjo instrumentals may go even higher. Bill Monroe played Rawhide up to about 195bpm when he was in the right mood.

So I guess my next project is to figure out a way to bring what I can do at 110bpm up to 130bpm speeds. My assumption is that the more time I spend playing well at speeds above 120bpm, the more likely I will be to achieve my goal. So in the hopes of tackling this, I'm going to work over some fiddle tunes I know pretty well, and see if I can get them all up to about 130bpm. I'm also going to try pushing my technique exercises up to those speeds and see if that helps.

Just to be clear what I'm intending here, it's not that I can't play at all at these speeds, just that I don't have the kind of control over tone and rhythm up there that I do at slower speeds. Here's an example

Temperance Reel

Here's my version of Temperance Reel, with some stabs at improvisation. They don't all work but you get the general idea.