Introduction

Fiddle players have many advantages over guitarists in negotiating the quick arpeggios and intricate melodic lines inherent in most fiddle tunes. After all, why do you think they call them fiddle tunes? First of all, violins are tuned in fifths, while guitars are tuned mostly in fourths, thus requiring guitar players to travel across the strings more than fiddle players. For instance, a one-octave D-major arpeggio in first position requires the use of only two strings on the violin, while the same arpeggio requires three strings on the guitar. Similarly, a two-octave G-major arpeggio in the first position requires the use of four strings on the violin and six on the guitar. The violin’s shorter scale length gives the fiddle player a similar advantage when moving lengthwise along the string. A fiddle player can easily reach the interval of a fourth from index finger to pinky, while a guitarist is limited to a minor third (or major third with some effort) using the same fingers.

Violins, despite their smaller size, are louder than acoustic guitars and can therefore project the melody over a band or the din of a noisy club. The violin’s lack of frets, while a definite disadvantage for beginners, allows the player a range of expressiveness and a vocal quality that is difficult to achieve with a fretted instrument. The use of a bow on the strings, rather than a pick, gives the fiddle player a wider variety of ways to attack the strings, the possibility of much longer sustain, and a more varied approach to rhythm.

Well, now that I’ve gotten all this complaining out of the way, let’s look at some of the ways we can get around these problems and learn something from fiddle players.

Interpreting a Tune

One thing to keep in mind is that most great fiddle players do not simply have one concrete version of a tune. Their concept of a tune is not that it is 16 bars long, but that it starts when they start playing and ends when they stop. This gives the music a more fluid, organic quality. For most fiddlers, there can be any number of ways to play a particular passage, and certain phrases will be played differently each time. Try asking a fiddler to play a tune exactly the same way twice, and you are likely to be met with anything from a blank stare to a string of unprintable abuse. This is not to say that fiddle players are ornery or stupid, but that a fiddle tune should be viewed as a whole performance and not chopped up into little eight-bar segments.

This notion is illustrated in the two versions of "Sandy River Belle" shown in Examples 1 and 2. The first version is by Buddy Pendleton, a tremendous southern-style fiddle player from southwest Virginia, and the second is by Ruthie Dornfeld, a nouveau old-time and contra-dance fiddler and the leader of the American Café Orchestra. Their versions, while very different from each other, both display a fluid quality. The shape of the tune remains the same, while the details are constantly changing.