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In order to ease the education of a beginning fiddler,
I needed to locate where to mark "fret positions" on a fiddle.
I wrote a REXX EXEC to tell me where. This form uses that program to
give you the same information. Measure the distance between the
bridge and the nut, fill that number in below, and then click on
"submit".
Another challenge facing someone trying to teach a beginner is suggesting
songs for the beginner to learn. Here are two lists which might help.
First the songs, in order, learned by my beginner
in the first nine months:
- Mary Had a Little Lamb
- Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (children's version, not western
swing)
- Jingle Bells (G)
- Shenandoah (G)
- Go Tell It on the Mountain (G)
- Yankee Doodle (G)
- Buffalo Gals (D)
- Papa Joe's (A)
- The Grinch Song (G)
- Take Me Back to Tulsa (G)
- Janice (G, D, A)
- Down Yonder (G)
- Turkey in the Straw (A)
- Rubber Dolly (G)
And here are some other songs I recommend for the purpose of learning
various techniques:
- Peek-A-Boo Waltz (G) -- Waltz time, includes rests.
- Kentucky Waltz (C) -- Many sharps/flats.
- Tennessee Waltz (Bb) -- Challenging key, key makes for unusual
harmony.
- Cindy (B) -- Challenging key, use finger as capo. Can also be
used to practice switching between shuffle and rocking the bow.
- Old Joe Clark (A) -- Easy to convert back/forth motion to
rocking the bow.
- Bile Dem Cabbage Down (A) -- Easy to do with shuffle.
- The Bucking Mule (G) -- Trick song, uses finger slide.
- Maiden's Prayer (G) -- Calls for plucking G, D strings.
- Pop Goes the Weasel (G) -- Calls for plucking E string.
- Ragtime Annie (D) -- Easy crowd-pleaser with rocking the bow,
finger slide, and a bit of use of two fingers at once.
I also suggest learning to chord on the mandolin in order to get ideas
for where to plop down spare fingers for harmony.
Finally, if you want to know about good technique, don't ask me, but
check out the
String Pedagogy Notebook.
On the other hand, you can sometimes get good music and jokes from a
band
that doesn't even have a fiddle player!
Return to the author's home page.
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