How to Use FiddleHed

Here’s a video tutorial to help you navigate the site. I’ll talk through the main elements of the home page as well as the menus.

You may be wondering, “what does it actually mean to be and advanced beginner?” Go the Getting Started to assess your skills.

I want you to start at a point that’s challenging and fun, but I don’t want you to have gaps in your FUNdamental skills.

In general, I suggest you start at a more beginner level than you think.

Core lessons

Bonus lessons

Note-reading lessons

There are four ways that you can find tune lessons.

• The Main Search Bar (upper right-hand corner)
• TuneFinder
• Tune Index
• Course Modules

I go into more detail below.

Main Search Bar

You can use the search bar at the upper right hand corner to find ANY PAGE on the site.

TuneFinder

The TuneFinder is an interactive database to help you find tune lessons. Find it from the main menu by clicking Library > Tunes:

You can search by title, genre, form, scale or skill level. There’s also tab and sheet music snippets as well as full tune audio.

This is a good way to preview tunes you want to learn, or review tunes you’ve already learned. You can almost use this as a flashcard system. See if you can remember the whole tune from the first quarter snippet.

I made a short video to show how the TuneFinder works.

Tune Index

In the Tune Index you’ll find tunes listed by genre and root note. It’s a good way to browse different lists of lessons.

Both the Tune Index and TuneFinder can be found by hovering over Library under the Tunes header:

Course Modules

If you simply work through the course, you’ll encounter lessons listed in each module. Here’s an example from Module 1.6.

If you want to steadily build your FUNdamentals, then I recommend working through the course. Even if you’re an intermediate player, you might find that you benefit from the progressive design of the courses.

Track progress

You can track your progress by clicking the “Start Lesson” button at the top of lesson pages.

Next, you’ll see a yellow “Complete Lesson” button. Click that when you’ve finished with it. (Remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect. You can return to it later):

When you’re done with the lesson, click it again to complete it:

Video tutorial

See your progress

See your progress for each module page on its home page. Here’s an image from the middle of Module 1.4.

Finally, look at the “Your Course Progress” tab in the “Practice Toolkit” at the bottom of any lesson page. There you can see the last lesson started, last twenty lessons started, and total lessons started (organized by module). This is also visible on the Home Page.

Favorites

You can mark a page as a favorite. Use this to keep track of completed lessons you want to return to in the future.

Just scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Favorite button.

All your favorite lessons are listed under the “Favorites” tab in the “Practice Toolkit” at the very bottom of the page.

Or you can favorite pages as a Fiddle Tune Bucket List (things you want to learn later).

If you pause/cancel your subscription, rest assured, your course progress and saved items will remain on your account for continued use.

If you have questions or problems with this, just send me an email.

The course is self-paced. I recommend 3-4 weeks per module. But some people practice more or have more previous experience, and so they can move through things more quickly. You can use the core tunes and skills as a test. If you can easily play them, you may be ready for a higher module.

Generally speaking, most students tend to rush or skip around, both in how fast they play new tunes as well as how fast they move through the course. I wrote an article about this: The Ultimate Beginner Pitfall.

I recommend picking a starting point and working forward from there. If you need help finding that start point, then go to this page: Getting Started

Don’t stress if you don’t finish a module in three weeks. The most important thing is to practice consistently. The next most important thing is to practice well using Deliberate Practice, Desirable Difficulty, Looping, Drones and the other practice techniques I teach.

If a module is too easy for you, don’t feel obligated to stick with it for three weeks. 

The goal is for you to have fun and productive practice sessions…not to check off boxes.

Here’s a suggested weekly practice plan from module 1.3:

The idea is not to hold you back but to help you get established in good practice and learn the FUNdamentals. If you do this, then you ultimately will be able to learn more quickly and will enjoy your fiddle journey more.

Here’s a tutorial on how to use Your Practice Journal. I’ll start with basic instruction on how to create daily entries. Then I’ll talk about how you can accelerate your learning and have more fun by taking notes on what you practice.

Basic usage ⚙️

• Find Your Practice Journal at the bottom of any lesson page (including this one), or the Home Page
• Click the orange ⊕ icon to create an entry.
• Click “Submit” to save the entry.
• You can edit an entry at any time. To do that:
  1. Click the entry
  2. Click the three dots in the lower right-hand corner
  3. After editing, click “Submit” again
• Click the ✏️ icon to add journal prompts.

Practice Journaling for “Power Users”

Here are strategies to make the most of Your Practice Journal during your sessions.

🎶 Tunes

For each tune you practice, I suggest you keep a list of the hard parts below the title. This is the process of Deliberate Practice.

Arkansas Traveller

• A Part, Fourth Quarter: 75 bpm – transposed to G major (starting D3) – skip tomorrow
• B Part, First Quarter: 60 bpm (same as yesterday) – repeat tomorrow
• B Part, Second Quarter: 63bpm – repeat tomorrow

That way you can start with those parts each time (until they’re no longer hard 🏆).

Keep track of:

• Tempos
• Practice strategies used (like transposition)
• Progress (do you need to do this tomorrow or take a day off?)

Learn more here:

• Fiddling With Deliberate Practice

Resources

• Deliberate Practice Planner pdf
• Deliberate Practice Planner (just table) pdf

🪜 Skills 

“Skills” includes scales, bowing, ear-training, note-reading etc. You can also mention practice strategies you learning, like Interleaving, Desirable Difficulty,  etc.. Document practice of skills in the same fine-grained way you would a tune (described above).

🧠 Review (Review & memory practice)

In this space, keep track of things you’re reviewing.

Take tunes and skills you’ve already learned and put them back on the workbench. You’ll be surprised at how you continue to improve anything.

The other reason to review is to strengthen mental retrieval of tunes. Create review sets of 4-6 tunes. For example:

Review set #3

• Arkansas Traveller
• Your Song
• Swallowtail Jig
• Game of Thrones Theme
• Blackest Crow
• I’ll Fly Away

Once you can retrieve each piece, then switch to a different review set. Or build a new one.

📆 What you’ll do next

In this space, take note of things you know you want to practice tomorrow. Or you can even create a practice entry for tomorrow at the end of today’s session and list your “next” items there.

🤓 Make it your own

Each time you create an entry, you’ll be working from a template. This is meant to guide you in your practice. But you can tailor this to how you practice. If you don’t want to use the template, just erase it (or any part of it) and take notes as you like.

Tips 👍

• Open Your Practice Journal in a separate browser tab. Use other browser tabs to take lessons on the site or use the practice materials.
• You can add links (to FiddleHed pages, Youtube versions of tunes, online sheet music, etc.) using the link button.
• Use the 🔎 icon (top right hand corner) to search for your previous entries. This is a great way to find out all the times you’ve practiced a tune.
• Let the journaling process to be interesting and fun – don’t see it as a chore. Journaling will actually enable you to be more creative. 🕺🏾

Add links to lessons

You can add links to lessons to your practice journal. FiddleHed Deb asked about this, so I made a quick tutorial.

Questions or comments? Just email me.

No. FiddleHed is designed to be an all-inclusive educational system to teach you the fiddle.

What if I already have a teacher but I want to use Fiddlehed?

Fiddlehead works great in conjunction with other teachers. Jason can meet with you or your teacher to design the best learning strategy for you. If you’re interested either email Jason or set up a zoom meeting.

What if I’d like to find a teacher to teach me fiddle using the Fiddlehed system?

Jocelyn Martens is a fiddle teacher teaches zoom lessons for Fiddlehed students. Click here to learn more.

You may want to download content if you are going to go somewhere without internet access. Or you might want to download audio to your phone so you can easily listen in the car.

Watch this instructional video and/or read text instructions below.

Download audio

To download audio:

1. Right-click on the red arrow to the left of any audio track. It will turn green when the cursor hovers over it.
2. You should see a pop-up menu. Click on “Download linked file”.
3. The audio will be found in your downloads folder.

Download sheet music

To download sheet music:

1. Scroll down the page until you see the full sheet music.
2. Click the PDF link below that.
3. Select the download button to the right.
4. Find the downloaded sheet music in your downloads folder.
5. Return to fiddling!

Download videos

Right now, only newer videos have a download link.

Did you know that you can change the speed of videos?

Here’s how.

• Hover the cursor over the settings wheel.
• You’ll see a popup window.
• Click Playback speed.

You can choose a pre-set speed. I recommend starting with 0.75 for learning parts of fiddle tunes.

By clicking custom in the top right corner, you can play back the video or loop at the tempo which is most helpful to you in your practice. Awesome new Youtube update 🥳.

Can the playback speed be changed on any Youtube video?

The answer is…🥁… Yes.

This is done with your own device.

For Macs and most PCs, you can click either command & + , or click control & +  to make the font bigger.

• Go to Settings ⚙️ > Accessibility > Display & Text Size.
• Turn on Larger Accessibility Sizes, then adjust the text size using the Font Size slider.

MetroDrone helps with timing and intonation. But more importantly—it’s just fun to play with backup.

Here’s how to find the MetroDrone:

• Go to any lesson page
• Scroll to the Practice Toolkit
• MetroDrone is right at the top

Tutorial