Fiddlosophy

Practice tip: Remember to Breathe

Are you holding your breath while you play? If so, take a break and focus on your breath. Then play an open string, then a simple scale or tune while keeping your attention on the breath. Don’t try to hard, just be aware. This practice will relax you and improve your performance. Remember, you can … Continued

Passive And Active Listening

To be a musician you need to do two things: Play every day. Listen every day. You can listen either passively or actively. Both approaches are useful and necessary. Passive listening Passive listening happens while you’re doing another activity such as cooking, cleaning or driving. Just let the music play. Don’t try to think about … Continued

Do You Play Every Day?

I recently made a post to a forum called FiddleHangout with some practice questions: Do you play every day? If so, do you have to discipline yourself somehow? Or do you do it simply because you love it? How did you successfully become a musician (someone who plays every day)? There were a lot of great … Continued

Student Stories: Fiona Higgins

Here’s a short video of my student Fiona playing, Uisce Faoi Thalamh, a tune she wrote while playing around with triads. Fiona started learning fiddle as an adult. Now, she plays regularly in beginner Irish sessions and with a group of some of my other students. I learn a lot from good students. At the … Continued

Easy And Hard

Some things are easy to understand but hard to practice. Perhaps you are learning to play double stops on the fiddle. You understand that you have to play two strings at once, and that it doesn’t take more energy than playing a single string. But you can’t seem to make it sound nice. Or, you’ve … Continued

How Did You Start?

An online student recently wrote in asking, “How did you start with fiddling?” One day while driving to the beach with my family, I was staring out the car window and said, “I want to play the violin”. I was ten. I can’t remember why I wanted to play or what inspired me. I didn’t … Continued

First Things First

They say, “First things first.” But who are they? How did they come to know so much? What do they eat for breakfast Sorry, I have no answers to these deep and important questions. But cliches are cliches for a reason (even if we’re sick of hearing them). First things first is a useful approach to … Continued

What Can You Do Today?

There’s so much I want to do with FiddleHed, and so this week’s practice tip is helping me to be patient. When I started to build FiddleHed, my friend Grady advised me to approach things this way. See what you can do in a day, in a week. Little by little things get done. The … Continued

Play it clear

Towards the end of my trip I played an afternoon session in Galway at a place called Tig Choili. A lot of people were in town for Race Week and so it was crowded and noisy in the pub. I had a hard time hearing and picking up the melody.  One of the fiddlers was … Continued