Improvisation

Fiddling with life and learning with the occasional dad joke thrown in...  

 

Brahm’s Fiddle Waltz

Did you know that you can take a classical melody like this Brahms waltz and transform it into a fiddle tune?   Further learning Offbeat Accents On The Fiddle Improvisation Workshop Improv Playground   Return to the Fiddlosophy Blog >>

Jamming with the Pogues and the Dubliners

I finally get to jam with these musical heroes on the Irish Rover!   I’m also making some lesson videos for this on my Youtube channel.   Further learning Offbeat Accents On The Fiddle Improvisation Workshop Improv Playground   Return to the Fiddlosophy Blog >>

How To Play Violin In One Minute

 Here’s how to learn a fun song like The Irish Rover.   Play the first note, then Chain the first two…   Now you have the first musical Chunk   Go slow, allowing the fingers to easily reach the destination.   Then Loop on that Chunk until if flows.   Memorize it before you … Continued

Call-and-response Improvisation With Mary

Hey there fiddler, Join me for a short guided improvisation. We’ll play around with Mary Had A Little Lamb, the pentatonic scale, rhythms and call-and-response. This is yet another example of how you can practice advanced skills with simple, familiar songs.  Below you’ll find a simple, plug-and-play routine that you can use with any song. … Continued

Improvising With Rhythms

One way to make music practice fun is to improvise with Rhythms. Start with a long-short-short pattern known as Hoedown or the Nashville shuffle. Play it on scales like D Major Pentatonic: D0-1-2-A0-1 Do it with the Metronome. Alter the rhythm: Reverse it to create a short-short-long pattern Split it across two notes A more … Continued

Guided Practice Session – Hesitation Blues

Here’s a guided practice session on how to take recently learned tunes to the next level. I used ​Hesitation Blues​ as an example. This is an experimental format: part lesson, part open practice session. Some of the practice suggestions: Play a single note, focus on breath, posture, good sound. Plan-do-reflect for different hard parts of … Continued

Play music as a work or study break

  View this post on Instagram   Music breaks: I’m experimenting with short music breaks throughout the day. I’ll be writing short blog posts on Fiddlehed about how music affects concentration, memory and learning (follow the link the bio). A post shared by FiddleHed (@fiddlehed) on Nov 9, 2020 at 10:19am PST Though I’ve been … Continued

Practice Loops

In a practice loop, you alternate between to areas of practice to improve a specific musical technique. Here are some examples: Alternate between a tune and its scale Alternate between listening and playing Fiddling with chords and melodies   For those of you who’ve followed and subscribed to FiddleHed, you know that looping is a … Continued

Danny Boy / Kesh Jig – Electric Fiddle Solo – liner notes

A fiddlehed named Suzanne attended a Diego’s Umbrella show in Fairfax, Ca. and took video of my “solo solo”. This is the part of the show where I create a live looping drone and then play melodies over that. For this version of the solo solo, I start with a G drone. I create this on … Continued

Going Backwards

Going backwards seems like a bad thing. We all want to go forward. Progress and accomplishment! Going backwards means you’re getting worse, right? But wait. What does it really mean to go backwards? It’s really just a change of direction. Recently I went for a run. It was the normal course I usually take, but … Continued