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bj |
I'm still working on my Nashville Shuffle. It's really hard to get it sounding natural and with some swing in it once I bring it up to speed. I can get it up to around 80% now though and sound okay, though there is still room for improvement.
I'm glad I started working on it, frustrating as it is. I'm finding that, now that I'm working with it, I'm seeing it everywhere when watching fiddlers whose fiddling I respect a lot. For instance, here:
www.fiddlehangout.com/myhangout/videos.asp
I've also been listening to Bill Huber's stuff a lot, and I really can see now that he was a master at working Nashville Shuffle into his playing and making it sound fun and putting lilt and lift into it. Geez, he was a fine fiddler.
A weird side benefit to my Nashville Shuffle work is that my sawstroke left/right hand timing/coordination is improving, even though I'm not spending as much time on it. I do still do a couple tunes sawstroked every evening though. I think that both Nashville and Sawstroke are very important to have in the playing arsenal. I wish I'd started on these sooner, though my Georgia Shuffle is so instinctive that it's an easy fallback position. Someday I hope I'll have the other two down just as well.
In other news, I had to miss a jam in Belvidere Thursday night due to a spider bite right in the inside dimple of my bowing elbow. It was pretty swollen and ugly, and I didn't know that's what it was, thought it was my arthritis or a sprain or something, until I felt it and realized it had a hard bump there that was very hot to the touch. I then looked in the mirror and saw the bite mark. There were actually two, but the second was much smaller. FYI I managed to self-treat with a slice of onion on the bite itself every few hours to draw the venom out (garlic works the same way) then goldenseal internally, and some antibiotic cream topically the first day, then tea tree oil topically from the second day on. I also used a topical pain relief that I usually use for sunburn, which helped, but for a couple days the pain was pretty bad, and kept me from fiddling for more than a few minutes at a time. Considering that I've heard of people ending up in the hospital for spider bites, I think I'm pretty lucky that I caught it in time, and that my home remedies seem to be doing the job. These bites have a way of going septic, and necrotic. I'm keeping a watch on it, but things are a whole lot better. Only sore now to the touch, and not very much, and all the swelling and redness is gone, just looks like bruising. But I'll probably be treating it for a couple more weeks at least.
I really missed fiddling those two days I didn't fiddle much, but only mentally missed it. The minute the bow got moving, the elbow started screaming at me to stop. Very uncharacteristically for me, I listened. Just goes to show how bad the pain was, since I have a high tolerance.
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