Rita Hamilton wrote:
> ...snip...> Laura Risk taught for the San Francisco Scottish Fiddlers, and she
> took some time to demonstrate various styles (highland, lowland, Shetland). I
> started
>
>>realizing there's a lot more complexity there than I thought! After that I
>>started listening more closely to some of my favorite recordings vs. my own
>>playing and I realized that in reading the music, I tend to play it too much
>>like it's written and not enough like it should be played. As I listen more
>>it seems to me to be a fairly common problem with the SCD fiddlers here,
>>since a lot of us are coming from either a classical background or a
>>different fiddle style and don't have a lot of "pure" Scottish fiddlers as
>>mentors. I guess that's one problem with living halfway around the world
>>from the source of these tunes! -Steve
Just get recordings of who you really want to sound like, and listen to
them over and over. Break it down into little pieces and think of it
like words and phrases that when put together form sentences. Think of
the written music as really a rough guide to the tunes.
I've always thought one of the problems with the fiddle is that it is
actually the same instrument as the classical violin, which means that
alot of people bring alot of baggage with them from other genres of
music when they cross-over to play Scottish music. So you end up with
some pretty stiff or strange sounding stuff. Concertina players don't
have that problem :-)
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