Irish Fiddle Bowing Lesson

Hi! I’m Ian Walsh with OnLineLessonVideos.com. I’m here to teach you a lesson today on bowing technique for the fiddle volume one. In this lesson, I’m going to show you a lot of methods I’ve used over the years to play the way that I do and I’ll break it down for you and we’ll start with how to hold your bow and so a very basic beginner and then we’ll move in to some more advanced moves like we’ll get into a triplet chords into this lesson and I’ll show you some drills that I used for practicing my triplets. So here we go. So I’m going to show you something that I called the A, D, crossover. And like it sounds, we’re going to use the A to D string or middle two strings. And again, we’re using these two strings because it’s a good spot to practice bowing. You have to be aware of your G and your E string on either side. Whereas if we’re working on the E and the A string with the D and the G, we have a lot more leeway that you shouldn’t use but you can. You can go really overboard G and a little overboard with the E coming down. But this is the A, D cross-over and it’s going to be a way to get into planning triplets. And we’re not going to use any fingers on the left hand at first so we’re just going to use an open D and an open A string and this is going to focus mainly on your bow. So, the notes are A, D and then we play a D triplet. So it’s A, D, triplet. A, D triplet, A, D, triplet, A, D triplet. Let me show you what it sounds like. [Demonstration] So that in itself if we slow it down, we just go over. [Demonstration] And playing it slow is going to be the key to building up to get in a good triple. Eventually, when you get to that triple, you’ll find it’s nothing more than really a jerk of the wrist, a very quick jerk at the wrist when you’re playing it fast. [Demonstration] And you can hear my pressure that I’m applying to the bow to give it that really nice crunch. So the A, D, crossover doesn’t stop there really. We’re going to add in those slurs we were talking about. And you’re going to end up doing these four different ways. And if it’s tough to keep your mind focus on this but if you can, you can cycle through these, these fours ways you play at four certain ways and you ‘re going to cycle through that again. So basically what we do is we change it on the very first time we do it. [Demonstration] Everything is down-up-down-up-down. You start with the down bow and then you use an up bow to crossover the D and then you play your triplets staring with the down bow. That sets us up to start with an up bow for the next one. So we start with an up bow and now instead of changing our bows when we go to the D, we slur across the D. So this will be an up bow slur leaving us to do a down bow triple again. With that, now we end on the down bow, starting with an up bow gain only this time, we’re not going to slur, we’re going to change our bows. So we go up bow, down bow, up bow triplet. That sets us up for a down bow and this one with slur so we go down, slow up with the D and then an up bow triplet. It’s really good to practice it this way because then you won’t be playing triplets in just that starting with just a down bow. You can also play a triplet starting with an up bow. It’s good to have both these available. You don’t want to limit yourself by just being able to do it one way. So if I slow that down here’s what it looks like, the A, D crossover with the slurs paying it through the cycle of four. [Demonstration] So I went through the cycles twice there and it’s very hard to notice that detail but when you slur across the A and the D string you’ll find that you’ve wind up starting and playing your triples differently every time. Now, it’s not necessary to try to get it right over every time but if you start practicing this [Demonstration] you can really get in the habit of doing it that way every time. But don’t go nuts with it. Just try to remember sometimes change your bow when you go to the D string [Demonstration] and other times slur the bow setting you up for a different type of triplet [Demonstration]. So let’s work on that a little bit more, let’s pay it together. [Demonstration] We speed that up and again this will take lots of practice but when you speed it up [Demonstration] and you’ll get that fast triplet sound. Let’s move on.