Playing Since: 2003
Interests:
[Jamming] [Socializing] [Helping]
Gender: Female
My Instruments:
fiddle, five string fiddle
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Profile Info:
Visible to: Public
Created 9/7/2007
Last Visit 3/29/2020
As far as my fiddling life goes I'm still a kid. When I was about the age my fiddling life is as I write this I wanted a violin. Seen someone play one on tv and wow, that's what I wanted. Mum told me violins are really expensive and really difficult to play, and then went on to argue that piano's are really nice too, and that since we already had one of those that'd be a good place to start. So I stuck with that and sort of forgot about the violin, esp. since I never was really much good at piano and mum had said violin was ever so much more difficult. I stuck with the piano for an impressively long time, seeing as how much I didn't REALLY like it. But I did love making music, or at least trying to, and sometimes for a few moments succeeding. After a couple of failed attempts at learning guitar by myself I tried again and by that time intyweb had come about and all of a sudden there were a lot more resources to learn from, so this time I didn't give up. After a couple years of strumming chords and noodling bits on guitar and trying to think of where to go with it (as in, I needed to get out and play with people but didn't know where to start looking) I was surfing the web looking at little amps and came across a dirt cheap fiddle complete with bow and case and rosin and everything. Only 106 euro, so I asked my husband to spend that money and after he said ok I told him what I'd be spending it on, hehhehe. I still remember the date, June 13th, that the package arrived and I sat out back unpacking it on the step, not even bothering to walk indoor, so eager to take a look. Had to put the bridge up on it and then the bugger of a chore to get it tuned up. Took a while, but I managed and didn't even break any strings. Then the scraping started and the hunt for the notes on the fingerboard. Then the finding stuff to play while getting the hang of it all a bit, and stumbling on an old booklet with irish tunes I had in my sheetmusic pile from my way back long ago recorder playing days. Somehow those tunes made more sense on the fiddle then they did on recorder even though I couldn't actually play them yet. Since then most tunes I try are Irish ones, but I don't hesitate to play stuff that's from different traditions. I'm pretty sure I'll never sound like a native speaker, but I hope to be eventually fluent enough to be not laughed to hard at for my funny accent. When playing stuff from other places I prolly have a funny enough accent for non native speakers of that language to have a chuckle at it.
After getting that first fiddle I've been on my own with it for quite a while (that is, no lessons, reading loads on line at fiddleforum and some other sites) and then went to some workshops and found there's a group at the local music school who play "world music". Playing in a group setting has been a really big help in learning to play, it's really completely different from playing by yourself. I've since then had a bunch of lessons with a fiddler who lives not too far from here, only a couple hours to get there, and since then I've been going to a session about once a month. At first I did a lot more drinking and listening then I do these days, now there's more time spent playing.
'Snowflake Blues' 18 hrs
'Bob Kogut Violin' 4 days
