I practice every day for about 3 hours which is all I can manage these days before I get too tired. I can play most tunes straight off the sheet music, but keeping it the memory is another matter. Of course repetition is the best way to build muscle memory, but if you include the practices of 'visualisation and audiation' this will sped up the process, and you can do both of those when you are not actually playing.

Hi John, I too am new to the fiddle, but not to playing other instruments. I have a family and work full time. I practice about an hour every day, consistently. More on weekends if I have the time. I'd like to play more because it's fun for me, not a chore. I play by ear, but my goal for 2025 is to be able to sight read, for the sake of efficiency with regards to learning fiddle tunes.

I will say this, as a person who plays the banjo, guitar, harmonica, ukulele, accordion and now fiddle...a casual approach to fiddle playing and practice will not be rewarded.

I love your ambition but you're trying to play a pretty complicated tune there, John. I just recently showed it to a player who played violin in school and he struggled to grasp it all. The tune is not a melody that is remotely basic. Try something simple like old Joe Clark, or any bluegrass song melody. "Honey, You Didn't Know my Mind" is easy enough. Really any song melody is going to be easier that trying to play a Vassar tune. Oh, and a song is a song as in, usually sung with words. A tune mostly doesn't have words.

When I was starting out, I kept my fiddle handy and picked it up dozens of times a day and played for 5-10 minutes at a crack. Played whatever I was learning/working on. I still do it like that when I'm working something new. You'll wind up putting in more and more time as you get more comfortable and more tunes under your fingers, and 10 minutes three times is 30 minutes..
At first, maybe you're just playing "Oh Christmas Tree" or "Green Acres" because they are ingrained in you subconscious. It's not a terrible idea to find a teacher for some beginner friendly tunes and advice, but if you can't find one in your area, YouTube is full of great instructional material. Red Desert Violin has some good stuff, I hear good things about Bluegrass Daddy.

I started back in late December. Santa bought me a used fiddle for Xmas. I play/practice about an hour to an hour and a half most days. That time is roughly split between --

Working on whatever exercises I'm up to on my method book (Essential Elements for Strings - Violin Book 1).

Playing rhythm along with a backing track on Strum Machine.

Working out a few fiddle tunes based on how I remember them from other instruments.

Working out / playing very simple breaks to some bluegrass standards along with a backing track on Strum Machine.

Angelina Baker in D, Cripple Creek in A or G are good beginner tunes, by the way

Forgot this question's answer: I've never really used sheet music for anything but to slow me down. Learned fiddle like I learned guitar, played what I hear over and over until I got it. These days takes way less time to play it if I already know the melody in my head.

I wish there was a graded method book for learning to play the fiddle with exercises and tunes, but I don't know of one. Most beginners here seem to use a very scattershot approach. In any case, its unrealistic for a novice to think they can learn a tune like this in 24 hours. As Billy said, you have to walk before you can run, (and crawl before you can walk). Many, many fiddlers today started with the Suzuki method, and I looked at Book One the other day, and you could do a lot worse, even as an adult.
I don't associate this tune with Vassar though. It was written by Bill Monroe, and the best known recording has Kenny Baker playing fiddle. I think Bill regarded Kenny as the best interpreter of his "old" tunes, including the ones he said he learned from his uncle Pen. Here it is:
youtu.be/dkICo3FohQ4?feature=shared

I guess I was thinking of "Lonesome Fiddle Blues." Doesn't matter really, still a cookie jar on the fridge as far as "toddler fiddler" is concerned.

"I wish there was a graded method book for learning to play the fiddle with exercises and tunes, but I don't know of one."

I have played a bunch of other instruments. I've found that exercises to learn technique and learning tunes to be different paths. I started playing dobro (square neck resonator) six months ago. There isn't near as much learning material for dobro as there is for violin/fiddle. A tried a couple of books. The first few pages are easy and then there is a full tune with all the ornamentation and complexity. It's like being thrown to the wolves.

In the complete opposite direction is the violin method book I'm using. It has simple exercises, often 4 or 8 bar, maybe 16. They are quite contrived but they take itty bitty baby steps. Exercises start on one string, the D string, in the key of D. Then introduce the A string, still in the key of D. An example of progressio, one exercise does a string change with open strings; a later exercise has a string change from an open string to a fingered string; then later has a string change from a fingered string to a finger strings.

I'm finding learning technique via a very linear progressive approach while taking some time to just work out stuff for fun to be an enjoyable way to progress.

Veering just a bit, here's where I first encountered the advice to "Walk, Don't Run." youtu.be/j81sy1Ibf9M?feature=shared
This was one of the first three albums I ever bought on my own, the others being the Kingston Trio's first record, and one of amall group jazz by members of the Duke Ellington orchestra. I struggled to play this on my $29.95 Silvertone guitar, not knowing there was such a thing as a Bigsby tailpiece.
I eventually did meet the Kingston Trio, and we once played at an elegant event that also featured the Duke Ellington Orchestra, by then led by his son Mercer. But I never did meet Barbara Grimes, according to Wikipedia the model on that Ventures cover!

I play music pretty much every day. It may not be fiddle. When I started fiddle in 2003, I had a highly nurturing environment where I could play 18 hours a week. Playing with others mostly was a definite springboard.
Fisher's Hornpipe is the only tune I've learned by notation. I'm glad I did, but I really haven't found it necessary, otherwise. I found it similar to a lyric sheet. If you get a song in your head, you have to remember it, but if you have it printed out, I don't seem to 'want' to remember the words. "After all, I have a sheet. Why should I memorize it?" Now, if one's memory is not so good, it makes sense. My memory is getting diminished, but it makes me work all the harder on the music. It helps if one is good at pattern detection. Dissimilarity makes things interesting. But early on, one needs to recognize similarities in melody.

What was the question? "Yeah, it's like petting a cat." In all the times I've read this, I wonder if you're not a cat person, does one still need to develop affection for cats, or can you just fake it? What do you think?

learn2tune - Sounds like those dobro books are poorly written. The idea is to introduce certain techniques with the exercises, and then provde a tune that uses those techniques. Looks like that's what the Suzuki method does, probably to keep the interest of youngsters, but don't think I'd slog through a bunch of exercises without a little reward either. Everyone learns differently though, and some books of etudes are written in such a way that they're interesting to play on their own.

If you want some concurrent development you might choose a mandolin. I did for awhile. I still have one. Played it yesterday. But compared to a fiddle they're is no comparison. A fiddle is ten times easier for me to play, now.

I hope you will meet some other fiddlers :-)

My goal is to play 1 hr per day (I work full-time, and try to exercise daily too.) it’s usually something like, warm up with old tunes, then focus on learning a new tune and practice some technical stuff, then play a few more favorites, then done.

It usually takes me 1-2 weeks to nail down a tune (as in, able to lead it in a group at speed while tracking repeats, saying “hup” while playing, etc).

I learn tunes by ear, but check the sheet music if I can’t figure out exactly what notes they are playing.

Lastly, I agree with “graded” step-by-step learning!
( In guitar, I knew a fellow student who badly wanted to play Misionera but she was only 2 years in…and that’s a pretty advanced piece. She worked at it tenaciously for months! Then she got frustrated, hurt her thumb, and quit guitar. I think that’s the danger of launching at pieces you love regardless of level. If she had started with easy beginner etudes, she would probably be whizzing through the Misionera now…)

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Originally posted by ChickenMan

I love your ambition but you're trying to play a pretty complicated tune there, John. I just recently showed it to a player who played violin in school and he struggled to grasp it all. The tune is not a melody that is remotely basic. Try something simple like old Joe Clark.......

Thanks all for the replies.  All very helpful.  ChickenMan.... your post was kind of eye opening.  I didn't really know if Lonesome Moonlight Waltz was "interpreted" as a difficult song or not (seems pretty challenging to me).  It is a beautiful tune and thought I'd give it a try. I look at my struggling with it as building moral fiber but perhaps another song won't seem quite as challenging.  I did learn Old Joe Clark (the first song I learned) and that was less challenging although I still just play single notes (no layers, double stringing, shuffles quite yet).  I always thought I'd try and practice/play 6 hours a day (now that I'm retired) and hopefully in a couple of years I'll be able to play a few tunes while playing clearly without hitting stray notes or more than the strings I'm intending to bow...... and have fun with it.  Thank you, all, again.

John

Learning to play by ear and reading are two skills you can develop, and the more you put time into them, the more adept you will become.

The Essential Elements books have become especially popular among teachers of new players and they’ve replaced the Suzuki books in many cases. A lot of public school programs have adopted them.

Mark O’Connor developed his own set of instructional books in response to the Suzuki program. They incorporate more American music into the repertoire. A lot of teachers use them in conjunction with more in-depth methods as a way to broaden the scope of musical styles that players experience as they learn the instrument.

If you want to develop your skills at playing by ear, play along with other musicians a lot. There are various methods to learn that you can try, but most boil down to breaking things down into small sections that you can learn and then put back together.

To develop your sight reading, singing can really help, as can simply going through a lot of material. Start with things that aren’t too challenging (standard time signatures, minimal shifting, easy key signatures, moderate tempo, etc.). Method books tend to be designed with this in mind, and the melodies progress in complexity. Some were even written with an accompaniment line so that a teacher could play along and make the exercise more musical. If you want to learn to sight read well, play in an orchestra—that will push you to learn, as orchestral musicians often have to read on the spot, and the trial by fire of playing new music with a full section of other violinists who are listening to each other as well as a conductor who can tell who’s playing the wrong notes forces you to learn quicker. Just like reading books, there is some difficulty at the early stages and it takes time to progress to the point of reading everything with ease, but within a relatively short timespan most readers become comfortable reading anything in front of them. As you develop the ability to read, you can learn to hear music in your head by looking at what’s on the page and without even touching an instrument.

If you want to get fluent reading standard musical notation, there's probably no better strategy than to use an instrument with a piano style keyboard. There's a one-to-one correspondence between the notes written on the page and the piano keys you need to hit in order to produce them. To be sure, things can get awfully complicated as theoretically you can play ten piano keys at once, but if you start out with a beginner's piano book in front of you it won't be long before you're at least modestly comfortable with what melodies, harmonies, chords, and rhythms, etc. look like on the page.

Self taught, by ear only player here, since 1972. Played guitar and bass before that. Took me the better part of a year, practicing daily, before anyone could stand to listen to me for more then a few minutes. Back then, while in college, every spare minute was spent practicing, anywhere, anytime. In the stairwells, in my bathroom, in my cab while waiting for fares - every opportunity. Scales, scales, scales and little exercises I made up that sounded like some of the fiddle tunes I listened to. Oh yeah - important to me - listened 100% of the time to fiddle music. I fell right off the rock-n-roll cho cho back then and missed most of that music from the 70's and 80's too. Back then, pre Internet, I played along with the records or tapes, endlessly, getting the melody to sound closer and closer to the recording. So thats how I started/learned. Easy? No! Figured out a lot of stuff on my own that a good youtube video or in person lesson could have shortened the learning curve. But the basics - hitting notes in tune, cleanly and not others inadvertently, not sounding scratchy, making the bow behave how you want it to - that's a slog every new fiddler has to go thru.

IMHO - fiddle is ear, brain and fingers. Not eyes. Too many times I hear folks who learned tunes from written sources and it sounds mechanical, stale and rigid, and while the notes may be right, its decidedly not very fiddle-y. Know a fiddler who's a high school music teacher that whips out the paper to play Bill Cheatum and Blackberry Blossom; its almost painful to listen to. Sheet music is OK to get the bones of a tune, but the ears have to transform it into fiddle music. And you can get hooked on sheet music, like a crutch you cant seem to throw away.

Capefiddle - you CAN do this! If it was easy, anyone could do it. Gotta LOVE fiddle to play it. Good luck! Lots of good info and help from folks above.

Being even more of newbie, I haven't gone to any events yet. That might be something to look. This one is next week end -- bbu.org/events/jamval/ I was going to go just Saturday but I'll be away skiing. This is coming up in April - fiddlehell.org/ My teacher said it's a great event. Not sure I'm ready for that but if I'm still enthused in a year, I'll definitely do it next year.

April FiddleHell is an online event. Just FYI. The one in Nov is in person, in Mass.

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Originally posted by wrench13

April FiddleHell is an online event. Just FYI. The one in Nov is in person, in Mass.

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Thanks for pointing that out.  I might actually be ready by November.  Yeah, after not quite a year, I'll still sound like a beginner but I suspect I'd have enough experience to get something out of it.

-Ken  (my moniker "learn2turn" is from being a ski instructor for 20 years.  But someone above used "learn2tune".  Totally apropos. )

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Originally posted by learn2turn

. This one is next week end -- bbu.org/events/jamval/ I was going to go just Saturday but I'll be away skiing. This is coming up in April - fiddlehell.org/ 

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I was not aware of the BBU.Org event Learn2Turn mentioned, looked it up and might try to go for the Saturday session, maybe without my fiddle just to see what it's like and then next year do the whole weekend.  I was aware of the Fiddle Hell event Learn2Turn and wrench13 mentioned (online and in person) events and I'm thinking about attending those as well.  So thanks for mentioning them.  All these responses to my original post have been really great and appreciated.  Thanks!!

John

-How long do you practice daily/weekly? Every day, some days??
Ideally? About an hour every day. In reality? 3 hours one day, 30 minutes the next, no practice at all for the following three days, a month of practicing every day followed by two months of barely picking the fiddle up for anything other than performing

-How long does it take to be able to play the melody/fingering of a new song you’re learning?
I could tell you how long it takes me to learn a tune, but that's not really the answer you need because that's not really the question you're asking. The question you're asking is something along the lines of "am I normal? Am I wasting my time? Am I talented enough?" But how you compare to other players is irrelevant. You don't need to be better than everyone else; you only need to be better than you were yesterday. Back when I'd been playing about a year or so, I had one particular tune that I enjoyed playing, but I could never play it at the speed I heard it played at on a recording that had inspired me to take up the fiddle in the first place. After a couple months of trying, I was having asking the same questions you were. I went to a festival and watched someone play the fiddle and her fingers were just flying across the strings, and I almost cried because I couldn't even imagine playing at that speed. I figured I had started too old for my nervous system to be capable of anything like that.
So I gave up trying, but I didn't give up practicing and playing because I was enjoying that part. And a year or so later I decided to try playing along with that recording I mentioned earlier. And I discovered that to do so I had to play slower what had become my usual tempo.
So yeah don't worry about it, just practice and you'll be fine.

-Do you learn by ear or by reading music/notes/score?
By ear. You remember tunes better that way because you're using the same part of your brain to learn the tune as to play it. But it's more frustrating at the start because you are literally reshaping your brain and that's not comfortable.

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Originally posted by capefiddle

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Originally posted by learn2turn

. This one is next week end -- bbu.org/events/jamval/ I was going to go just Saturday but I'll be away skiing. This is coming up in April - fiddlehell.org/ 

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I was not aware of the BBU.Org event Learn2Turn mentioned, looked it up and might try to go for the Saturday session, maybe without my fiddle just to see what it's like and then next year do the whole weekend.  I was aware of the Fiddle Hell event Learn2Turn and wrench13 mentioned (online and in person) events and I'm thinking about attending those as well.  So thanks for mentioning them.  All these responses to my original post have been really great and appreciated.  Thanks!!

John

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I did just Saturday at Jamvember it is was worth it.  If you go, bring your fiddle.  You'll find something to do with it.  There are numerous beginner jams.  You could simply play chords and not try for any rhythm or melody.  So if the song has three chords like G,C,D (Two Dollar Bill, Circle Be Unbroken, etc.) simply drone G and C on the G string.   For D, play the open D string or 2nd stop, A, on the G string if you don't want to change strings. 

If you want basic melodies and can learn from notation, get "Bluegrass Fakebook: 150 All Time-Favorites Includes 50 Gospel Tunes" - Bert Casey. It's only $16 and has many of the standard bluegrass tunes with the most basic of melodies written down, essentially what the singer would sing.

On every instrument I've played -- guitar, mando, dobro, and now fiddle, I've found it very tedious to learn an embellished melody from notation. I find much more enjoyable to learn the very basic simple melody and get that absolutely nailed in my head. Then add ornamentation the way I feel it, not the way the guy that wrote the book feels it. That's why I like the BG Fakebook as the melodies as written are simple simple simple.

There's also the "The Real Bluegrass Book" -- Hal Leonard. That has 300 songs and is about $40. The melodies in that are more complex. Whatever you do, do not google "Big Bluegrass Book" as you might run across a scan of The Real Bluegrass Book in six downloadable .pdf files. :wink: