Uncategorized

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

 

 

Mistakes And Discoveries

For all my talk of playing every day and focusing your practice, I still fail to do these things at times, even after almost forty years of playing music. For instance, I set a practice challenge goal of an hour a day, and have stuck to it except for last Saturday. I spent the morning … Continued

Branching Streams

On the first day of the Fall Practice Challenge, I wrote a new tune which I called Branching Streams. It seemed like a good way to practice certain intervals, like A0-D3, D0-G3 and A0-3 which are challenging but good practice for students. So I’m sharing a recording and TABS below:   Branching Streams A PART: … Continued

Keep Your Brain In The Game

Adding variations is a way to keep your brain in the game. The body needs to do things over and over in order to learn, but the brain gets bored. Variations are a great way to keep the mind engaged in repetitive practice. And variations also help your arms, hands, fingers and ears learn music … 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

Social Music

Traveling through Ireland I’ve come around to a more primal and pure way of doing music. Making music here is a social activity. This is probably so obvious to people here that they don’t even think about it. Instead of being on a stage in front of an audience, the audience is on the stage, … Continued

What The Heck Is A Polka Anyway?

The polka is a Central European dance and genre of dance music familiar throughout Europe and the Americas. It originated in the middle of the 19th century in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. Polka remains a popular folk music genre in many European countries, and is performed by folk artists in Germany, Austria, … Continued