Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling . I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of John Blessing's Delight from a session at the Art House Bar in Baltimore , Maryland . Hello everyone , I hope you are well .
Today we're going to be talking about the five-string fiddle , but first I would love to reach out and thank a reviewer . Fiddle Fiend One left a lovely review on Apple podcasts and I really appreciate it . Thank you so much . I also have a small reminder that my new course , which is called how to Play Faster , is available on Fiddle Studio .
You can go there , you can purchase the course or you can become a member and then you have access to all the courses . Moving on to the five-string fiddle , here's my secret . I don't play the five-string fiddle . I have almost never . I think I tried one out at a folk festival like 25 years ago and it was fun .
Yeah , I don't have experience on the five-string fiddle , but we are in luck because my guest from last week , Jenna Moynihan , has played five-string fiddle for years and years .
So as a special bonus , today we're going to hear kind of a cut scene from the interview Jenna and I talked for a while , but interviews are , I guess for me , they definitely take the most time and money in terms of preparation and all of the work that goes into editing it and then finishing them and hosting them . They're just .
They're a lot and I don't always get to include everything , but we're going to hear Jenna talk about the five-string fiddle and if you haven't heard the interview from last week with Jenna , please go back and check that out . It was so fun to talk to her . I wish she could be on the podcast every week .
We had a great time really , kind of diving into how to find your own voice as a musician , about carving out time to work on projects that speak to that voice . Yeah , we talked . We talked about a bunch of stuff . So , without further ado , here is the five-string fiddle . So , Jenna , you play a fiddle that has five strings . So what are the strings ?
Yes , five strings . So it has an E , a , d , g and it also has a C . A C , like a viola .
Yes , when did you start playing five ?
string . I got that fiddle in 2013 . It was new and I never , I have to say I never thought that I would be playing five strings , because four felt like plenty . But it kind of came into my life and now I can't really switch between . It's a little confusing for me to go back and forth between four and five , and it's been pretty fun .
I think I've also feel like I've really learned how to play my fiddle . I can't , you know , picking up another five string fiddle doesn't necessarily feel good . This was made by Barry Dudley . He makes both four and five string fiddles , but a lot of five strings near Atlanta , georgia .
Yeah , and how would you use the C string for because fiddle tunes are mostly written with G as the lowest note ?
Yes , so it depends . I use it a lot , a lot , when I am not playing the melody , If I'm for sure . If I'm playing and supporting a singer , it's great to be even lower . I also play a melody like down and octave , which we can do on many fiddle tunes but some of them you can't .
So it gives me that extra real estate down there that's usually not occupied . What else do I do that ? Yeah , I mean when I'm being in a supportive role , which is a lot of what I do actually feel like in a lot of the projects I'm in . It is totally , totally handy . I don't usually play like a blazing fast melody down there , it's just a little clumsy .
But if I tune it differently , if I cross tune my fiddle , then also it kind of opens up a whole new world . I think it's some lower drones . Yeah , yeah , exactly . Sometimes that C string will . Just what would I do Make it ?
Sometimes I think I do some ill advised tunings so I'm like embarrassed to say but yeah , I've made it like a super low , like floppy A yeah , which is you can't really play on it , but you can drone on it . If it's a cross A tune , that's pretty fun . It sounds great .
Tuned up to a D , yeah , those thicker strings are a little slower to respond so it's harder to play just like a real up to tempo . Yeah , it is .
But I love the way it resonates . You know , even just like playing in the key of C never go into the C string , but yeah , it's pretty it is . Do you use it on the albums ? Yeah , both of the albums , that's all it is . There's a couple things on there that I tune differently .
Yeah , maybe I mean cross A on some of those , or cross G , something like that or both , and then it feels like you're playing like a different instrument . It's like a new lease on life .
So check out the albums Woven and then the newer one . Yeah okay , indeed , our tune today is from a session my local session at the Art House Bar on Wednesday nights . This was a session led by Matt Mulqueen , who is a local Irish piano player . Yes , there are Irish piano players , it's a thing .
And there were two players in from out of town who were awesome . One was Sean Gavin , who was playing the flute . I believe he also plays the pipes , but he had his , his flute . There was another pipes player there , so it's probably good . There weren't two sets of pipes .
If you play with your own pipes players , you know what I mean , if you know , you know . So Sean was playing the flute and he sounded great . He was there with Colm Gannon , and Colm Gannon is a box player . He had a . He had a BC box . He actually had brought several accordions and melodians .
We had sort of a show and tell , because there , of course , there are a bunch of box players in Baltimore and when you get them together they love to talk about gear . I thought that was only a thing with flute players , but we talked about gear . Of course .
I've been learning it , so I found it all fascinating and this is one of the tunes that they led at the session . It's a nice little jig in G , john Blessing's Delight . I did find it on the session you can look it up there and someone had posted a link to a kid playing it in A .
So I don't know if anyone else plays it in A , but this kid sounded good . I guess you can play it in A . We played it in G . I'm going to play it in G here . It's similar to Monster Jig . There's a couple of little shapes in the melody that are different , that make it a little bit unique From that other tune .
But Charlie and I are going to play it for you now . Here we go , you . You Thank you for listening . You can find the music for today's tune at fiddle studiocom , along with my books , courses and membership for learning to fiddle . I'll be back next week with another tune for you . Have a wonderful day .