Bow Practice

[Joe Taylor]

Anyone ever use Celtic or English fiddle tunes to work on bowing and phrasing.

I've been transcribing old fiddle tunes and working on them to give me something diffrent to play. I have be real happy with the workout the tunes give me. They have helped with bowing, intonation, and rythem.

[myrick]

Sounds kind of interesting. Might be a nice change from Sevcik.

But I've scarcely ever heard such music (call it a deprived upbringing)

Any artists or CD you could recommend ?

[Joe Taylor]

I don't have any recomendations for CD's.

What I have done over the years is look for music books with "fiddle tunes" in the title. Lately I been looking on the web for Fiddle Tunes There is a ton of them mostly in the UK English. Irish, and Scots. For here in the States look for blue grass fiddle tunes. All of these can be challanging because of the speed they need to be played, the bowing and the size of bass. Also, the doubble stops will dirve you nuts untill you get them right on.

If you want a nice tune to start with search for "Keswick Bonnie Lasses" I found a version on a Viola web site and several other versions here and there. I will post my rendering of it if I can figure out how to. It was collected back in the 1800's in Keswick.

Here is the URL for Keswick:
http://www.folkviola.com/Writing/Bowing/Keswick.htm

If you go up the url tree there is an interesting article on bowing and how to phrase music diffrently. Yes, I know it a Viola page but the idea is the same, (I'm married to a Viola player what can I say.)

Joe

[David Abrams]

Jason Sypher recommended playing Appalachian fiddle tunes, which he says have, "been great for my bowing, partly because in order to get a fiddle sound you must play very light on the string..." I've wondering why no double bass players have ever, to my knowledge, played jazz with a bow using the particularly very light bowing and very swinging style of violinist [b]Stephane Grappelli[/B.

[Wil Davis]

"O'Neill's Music of Ireland" - Edited by Miles Krassen (ISBN 0-8256-0173-8)

- Wil

[Shlomobaruch]

"Mark O'Connor: The Championship Years 1975-1984" published by Mel Bay, catalog number MB94585 Forty-something tunes (some are variations) of competition hoedowns, hornpipes and waltzes. That should keep you busy.

As far as strictly Irish/Celtic fiddle tunes, I've never bought books of any, though I'm sure they exist in the dozens. I've either d/l'ed transcriptions after searching on Yahoo! or worked on ear training by transcribing them myself. Nowadays I imagine you can go to sheetmusicplus.com, type in "Celtic" and let the fun begin. If a title interests you, go to the publisher's site, see if you can find the list of tunes. Good luck.