This summer I adopted a puppy. If you’ve every raised a puppy you know that your life changes significantly. Sleep becomes a luxury, paper towels a must, and you’re prepared to buy new slippers once a week because your favorite ones just became a delicious chew toy. Needless to say, my fiddle collected dust.
Now that my puppy is enjoying his teenage years and we’ve past the peeing-in-the-house stage, I can finally dust off my fiddle and get back to playing that beautiful instrument.
A few years ago, I committed to learning a tune a week for a year. Not only did it force me to learn some new tunes, it forced me to see and hear myself play. There is nothing so humbling as recording yourself and then watching it. You find things you can’t while you’re playing. Here are some of the things I found out about my own playing:
- When I draw the bow across the strings, sometimes it’s not straight. Ideally, for the best possible sound, the bow should move straight up and down the strings in the sweet spot between the bridge and the fingerboard. My bow was not so straight on many tunes which forced the sound to trail off unintentionally.
- Sometimes certain notes are just slightly out of tune. That damn F#!
- I am not always consistent in keeping time. I seem to speed up when the “hard” part comes and then slow it back down to tempo.
- I need to smile more. My mom used to tell me this all the time.
As I’m constantly trying to hone my skills, I thought I would once again, record myself playing a tune a week for the next year. Not only to force myself to keep learning tunes (and share them all with you) but also, to get back to working out the kinks so I sound my best.
I hope you’ll join me and follow along. Feel free to comment below and let me know what tunes I should include.
Stay tuned (pun intended)!
Session Obsession 