Harmonizing on the fiddle (Stoney Steps)

Hello everyone , I hope you are well . Today we'll be talking about fiddle harmony playing harmonies on the fiddle . I didn't really grow up playing any harmonies on the fiddle or harmonizing really on any instrument except vocally . My mother grew up in a family she had five sisters and they would harmonize .

So I heard my mom and my aunts harmonize a lot growing up and my parents also sang in a folk music club . There was a lot of harmony . So I was doing that from a pretty early age and I think it helped me a lot get used to harmonizing later when I started to do it on the fiddle .

I mean single note melodies are wonderful but in my opinion when you add a harmony onto that , it can tug at the heartstrings , add a little more feeling into the music . I don't know that it's feeling in the music , but you can feel more .

I will feel more from a harmony will really make me kind of wake up to the music and be like whoa , you know , it grabs me , which doesn't always happen with just a single note melody .

If you're just doing harmony all the time and there's never a change in that , I think it's not as attention grabbing as if you kind of go back and forth and sometimes it's the melody and then sometimes this harmony comes in . It's really beautiful Harmony . Of course are notes above or below the melody that mostly follow the shape of the melody .

So I've taught students to harmonize shape of the melody . So I've taught students to harmonize and usually the first thing I teach them which is what I started out doing for the fiddle , even though I harmonized in singing for fiddling I would generally learn a harmony note by note . If you can learn a tune , you can learn a harmony .

Harmony is just like a tune . It's a little easier than learning a tune if you already know the tune because it sounds kind of like the tune , only a little bit higher or a little bit lower .

It is a little harder than learning a tune because it might not make as much sense as a tune , because you may have to adjust sort of the shape of the melody to fit in with the chords . You can work out a harmony slowly .

I mean , there's been dozens of times in my life I've had to say to someone , to a friend or someone I'm playing music with , can you go through that really slow , note by note , so I can work out a harmony ? And when I was younger I would write it down because I'd be afraid I would forget it and you can check those notes against the chord .

You can't always just go two notes away . You have to . Sometimes you have to be three notes away or four notes away to help it fit with the chord . A different way to come at it is to learn and get comfortable improvising , whether you're thinking about the theory or not .

If you learn to play inside of chords and scales and you know a melody , you can play within those chords and scales and riff on the melody and the shape of the melody and that's going to get you harmonizing as well .

The more harmonies that you play , whether you're reading them off a page or working them out , whether you're reading them off a page or working them out , writing them down or just memorizing them or experimenting with them the more you do with harmonizing it really does get easier and I've seen a lot of people work on it .

I've had students who have gotten better than me at harmonizing and some students who have learned a few . And they have those . They know them , they'll bring it out , you know , for playing Calliope House . They know that Calliope House harmony and they'll play it , but they're not necessarily comfortable like improvising harmony on the spot , which is that's tricky .

I'm not always comfortable doing that either . If I'm on a stage , you know , and it has to sound good the first time . When to use harmonies , hmm , I love using harmonies with two fiddles . I mean , I harmonize these days a lot of singers and other instruments , but if you're playing with two fiddles and you trade off , you can do some harmonies .

Then I also have another podcast on playing backup , where I talk a little bit about harmonizing and then I also talk about other things you can play that are not harmony , different kinds of like backup rhythms or long tones or sort of soaring above different ideas for you . It's very fun to learn a harmony .

I have a little fiddle class right now and we're going to do a performance and one of the tunes is the wren , a couple kids who haven't done any harmonizing before , have learned the harmony for the wren , and when they start playing it and you just see everyone's eyes light up , the sound of it with the harmony is more exciting and really sounds great , gets

the kids very excited . Our tune for today is the Stoney Steps . This is an Irish tune that most folks associate with Matt Malloy . He played it on an album and he called the album the Stoney Steps . So people think about the Stoney Steps , they think about Matt Malloy . I pulled a little . What did I do ?

I pulled a little quote of his about the album from the internet , but I forgot to ask Charley how to pronounce the Irish . So I'll be kind of paraphrasing it . He talks about where he comes from , County Rose Common , and that he had learned his music from his father , Jim , who came from County Sligo . His father played the flute , as did his uncle , Matt .

They learned from their father and so on . So yeah , very long line of flute players coming down to Mount Molloy . He says the area of North Rose Common and South Sligo was and is very rich in fiddle and flute music . Then he adds nothing else mind , and most of the sources mentioned come from this area .

So the sources for the tunes on his album Michael Coleman , James Morrison , Johnny Henry and the McDonaghs . Well , that's about it , so you should look up his version . It sounds fabulous . You can also find it on the album At their Best Sean McGuire and Roger Sherlock . Yeah , so this is a nice little tune . Stoney Steps , here we go .