On Bowing Patterns and such

Your wish, Jeff, it’s my command -- more or less, and don’t go taking advantage of that, mind. *grin* And after all, I don’t want to go boring the ears off non-fiddlers.

I’m not very good at (among other things I’m not very good at) concentrating on when I’m doing downbows. Joan Hanrahan, early on in my fiddling, told me that you shouldn’t slur across strings, and you rarely change bows while staying on one string -- unless of course you do (she said with a smile and a shrug). That’s made for some very interesting bow patterns. You can’t stick with that all the time, of course, but it does make for some great feel and style bits -- with lots of cross bar bowing.

Hey, what would you guys think about taking some extremely common tune and throwing different bowing patterns at it, similar to what Will was doing with Drowsy Maggie? What the heck, let’s use Drowsy Maggie. Will had suggested the following different bowing patterns for it:

A common type of phrase in reels is (Eminor): |E2 BE dEBE| On fiddle, this usually involves a string crossing and several changes in bow direction. One “standard” way to bow this would be: down-bow the E2 B, up-bow E, down-bow d, up-bow E, down-bow B, up-bow E.

Kevin Burke usually plays this same phrase as: down-bow the E2 B, up-bow E dE, down-bow B, up-bow E, repeat. Note that in Kevin’s approach, he’s slurring the first three eighth note counts, slurring the next three eighth note counts, and then tapping out separate bow
strokes for each of the last two eighth note counts. He does this even if the actual notes change: EGBE dEBE would be played: down-bow EGB, up-bow EdE, down B, up E. (3EEE BE dEBE would be played: (3down-up-down_down, up EdE, down B, up E.

AND

In his book, Traditional Music in Ireland, Tomas O’Canainn examines the playing of Cork fiddler Matt Cranitch. He describes possible bowing for this same “Drowsy Maggie” type of phrase as follows:

down-bow on E2 B, up-bow on Ed, down-bow on EB, up-bow on E to the next bar’s E2 again, slurring across from the off beat to the next main downbeat.
Matt apparently uses a cut note (a tap with the ring finger in this case) to break the slurred E into two distinct notes. Then down-bow B, up-bow EFD,
down-bow A, up-bow D.

I have used that same cut note to break a slurred note into two, but note that I haven’t seen that much in Clare or Galway.

Has anyone any other suggestions for this poor defenseless tune?

Zina

Never slur from one string to another? Ahhh, the fiddlers of Sligo would wonder at your elbow pumping the well water all the time if you always single-bowed those phrases. 🙂

I just winged through poor old Drowsy M and realized that I quite often end up on an up-bow on that initial long E note. And I do different things to get on to the next note, the most common of which is to down bow the B, and go back to that up-bow slur across EdE.

Another part of a tune that might be useful is the first couple of bars of Pinch of Snuff (D major, reel):

|DFAF BFAF|DFAF EDEF|

Again, I follow Burke’s lead on this and usually play it:

up DF, down A, up FBF, down A, up FDF, down A, up FED, down E, up F, and so on. This makes a nice little practice piece that repeats endlessly if you want to work on this shuffle for half an hour straight.

I can imagine the howls of derision about relying on such a “pattern,” but give it a chance. Play the same notes single-bowed and then with the slurring as shown. Which one has more swing? Listen to Burke do it, and see if you can help tapping your toes. Isn’t that the point?

Yes there are other useful ways to bow these sorts of passages, and I use them for variety, but this particular shuffle is indispensible (especially at sessions, at speed, and when learning tunes).

Why do I feel like I have a big red target on my right arm? 🙂
Will

This is very frustrating, because in order to figure this out, I have to get my fiddle, my computer, and me all in the same place with enough time to try all this out, Will…

Zina

Here is a portion of bowing I’m (learning) to do with Cooley’s Reel (you’ll have to paste it into an ABC program to make sense of it).

|v~B2(uAB) vduevf(ug|af)ve(uc dB)vA(uF|1 D)vE(uFD) vE2(uED):|

I notice that when it is bowed this way, it becomes difficult NOT to put the beats in and give the tune it’s lift. I can thank my teacher Michelle Feldman for that one.

I think this snippet falls into Will’s camp (or very nearly so). Do you notice how often the slurred notes often crosses the bar? It seems nearly like a rule, unless, of course when you don’t slur across the bar! *laugh*

Here is another one featuring ‘Drowsy Maggie’, with typical Sligo style ‘figure-eight’ cross-bowing pattern. It’s called that because your bow hand does something like a figure eight as you bow it. Technique has to be dead-on though, or you risk botching the second note of each slur. (and I continue to botch it every day!)

(vE2B)(uE d)(vEB)uE|(v~E2B)uE vA(uFDF)|

down 2, up 2, down 2, up 1
down 2, up 1, down 1, slur 3

You know, for a ‘beginner’ tune, I’ve always thought this one was a little weird. I can’t put my finger on it though.

Zina, of COURSE it’s frustrating. Fiddle IS the “road to frustration,” after all. 🙂 And remeber that you started all this by suggesting that we all contribute bowing ideas on Ms. Maggie…..

On the bright side, think of how hard it is to learn all these bowing patterns without someone writing them down for you. I know, because it took me years to figure some of these out.

By the bye, the Lyth book on bowing Coleman etc. is interesting, but I find it far more instructive to shape the bowing to fit my own abilities rather than try to emulate Coleman. That said, I’m enjoying this thread, especially now that Kevin has added his bowing ideas to the fray. If you think that it’s amazing how many thousands of tunes we can get from 7 notes and a handful of different rhythms, just think of all the variations possible when you add which direction the bow is going, and different combinations of slurred notes!

Well, the frustration is just worse when you’re at work and can’t sit down with your fiddle in front of the computer to try it all out…and I’m just about dead on my feet, so it’s not going to happen tonight, either…tomorrow maybe…*sigh*

zls

I’ve often struggled follwowing bowing patterns as indicated, especially with Irish tunes. What I tend to do now is have a go, if it doesn’t feel natural then I change it, after all if you look round at at the fiddlers at an Irish session, they all tend to be doing something different anyway. As an example, I have the transcription of “Strayaway Girl” as played by Kevin Burke, a really good strong tune with lots of energy. I can see from how the the bowing is slurred across the bars how he gets the rythm, but certain parts I could just not do. When I adapted it slightly, and my own bowing, I played it much better (not better than Kevin Burke!!!). I suspect that Kevin Burke doesn’t play the exact same pattern every time. I think that one of the interesting features of traditional fiddling is that your own sound tends to come out, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I didn’t start palying the fiddle until after my 40th birthday and I did get into the habit of starting bars with up-bows, this was pointed out at a workshop by Catriona Macdonald (name dropper), but it can be useful as many tunes have some bars bowed this way.

How some bowing suggestions for jigs? I am a newbie when it comes to fiddling in the Irish style, and really appreciate all the bowing suggestions. More, please….

Daver, one of my favorite Kevin Burke stories is from when he was here in Colorado, teaching a workshop in Nederland. There were a batch of Scottish fiddlers attending, and all through the workshop, they kept asking about his bowing, and whether it was an upbow *here* or a downbow *there*, and why did he do it that way that time, but another way that time?

Finally, Mr. Burke looked at them after another bowing question and gently said, “I’m not sure that you understand -- it doesn’t *matter* which way you bow it!”

Scott, Matt Heaton was just in Galway and took a lesson from --oh, what’s her name -- I think it was Liz Doherty (Donegal player, used to play with the Bumblebees). She suggested that he try bowing jigs down-upup down-upup for a start/exercise, to get the swing of the thing, and then go from there.

Zina

Yes, one the first bits of advice I ever got was to forget up/down bows and not to try and play every tune the same way.

By the way,Liz Doherty was very keen on getting everyone to tap at a fiddle class I went to a year ago. I found it quite hard at the time.

I second Zina’s anecdote from Kevin Burke. For any given note in a tune, there are only two ways to bow it: up or down. Whether you use a separate bow stroke, or slur onto that note, your bow will still be going only one of those two directions. It really isn’t any more complicated than that as far as bow direction goes. Many people find it easier initially to give a note emphasis by hitting it with a down bow, but part of our apprenticeship as a fiddler is to learn to give the same emphasis with an up bow, and to deliver emphasis to one or more notes in the midst of a slur, regardless of what direction our bow is moving.

Eventually you’ll find the bowings that work for you. Use them.

The difficulty comes, I think, when we hear another player with great lift or pulse or swing or whatever, and we imagine that we could sound that good if we only knew the bowing sequence s/he uses. Yes, some patterns will help, and we’ve been illuminating them here. But show me a pattern and I’ll find you a fiddler who does the opposite, or (as Monty Python liked to say) something completely different, and yet they’ll sound just as good. “Lift” has little to do with down bows and up bows, and a lot to do with (1) how smooth you are at the changes (from down bow to up bow and back); (2) where you leave little bits of empty space between certain notes; (3) which notes you emphasize or accent with volume, ornaments, attack, etc.; and probably most importantly, the TIMING of the notes--those small but critical differences in the length of one eighth note to the next. Ideally, we all hope to be able to control each of these factors regardless which way our bow is traveling.

Kevin Burke brought this home to me some years ago at a one-on-one lesson. He played the Silver Spear, bow flying back and forth, that trademark swinging and spot on Burke rhythm cutting through. Then he played the tune again, using one bow stroke for two or more bars at a time. He had such good bow control that he could produce the same accents and lift in one long bow as he could in a series of strokes and slurs. It was utterly convincing.

As I play around with different bowings for a given tune, I often notice how one approach will give a Martin Hayes sound (well, in spirit if not actual quality), another will echo Burke, another sounds like Mairead ni Mhaonaigh, another like Bobby Casey, and so on. I also think about how some fiddlers are clearly influenced by other instruments--Tommy Peoples by the uillean pipes, say, or Hayes’s concertina-like quality. That’s worth trying to emulate too, and most of the differences come in your approach to bowing.
Will

Which leads me to think that it might be helpful to take a tune and walk through it note for note to show which notes want to be emphasized, where the ornaments fall, note length, bow attack, etc. I’m tempted to do Bobby Casey’s Reel, a tune I posted here a couple of weeks back. It’s an easy enough tune to play. Focus on the first half and take a look at everyone’s ideas/interpretations. Anyone interested in this?

Will

I guess that I will have to keep ‘pumping water’, or try experimenting.

Since you’re all at work or dinner and quite defenseless to my mid-day machinations….

Here’s how I hear Bobby Casey’s Reel, just the A Part for now. ABC doesn’t have a mark to indicate the different ways to accent or emphasize a note, so I’ll use the period ( . ) before the note I would normally emphasize. This translates as staccato in most abc converters, and that’s not my intention, but it will have to do for now.

In D major, 4/4 time:

|.DFAB (3BBB .AB|d2 .fd .edBA|DF.AB (3BBB .AB|df.af ed.BA|DF.AB (3BBB .AB|dc.df ed.eg|fg.af .g2 fe|de.fd .edBA|

Mind you, this is just ONE way to interpret the tune, and all I’m saying is that this approach gives me the lift I look for in a typical Irish reel. I tend to vary where the accents fall as I repeat the tune, and this can change the degree of lift--perhaps contrasted to a less heavily accented flow. But the variety is also important, at least to my ear, and the rhythm still grabs people by their toes (you can tell it by their tapping 🙂)

What jumps out at me as I look at where the accents fall is that they tend to be on the 1st and 3rd beats of each half of each bar, but they do vary. Sometimes the first note in a group of four is accented, sometimes not. Some accents come in pairs, as in the second measure, where they emphasize the d to f to e jumping around (the d is accented not by volume but simply by its length compared to the eighth notes that follow).

In my case, I emphasize these notes by playing them slightly louder than their neighbors, typically either with a little more bow (a slightly longer stroke) or a touch of staccato--letting the note ring by leaving the string abruptly after hitting it, and weighting some notes by playing them a smidgen longer--a nanosecond really--than the notes immediately after.

I’ll suggest some bowing after I get back from catching up on my real job….

Will

WILL, STOP it…I’m NEVER going to catch up experimenting with all this stuff at this rate! hehehe

zls

JUST FOR ZINA, here’s a great little approach for bowing slip jigs:

D major, 9/8

|u.cvBA .FvDE v.F2 uG|v.Audvd u.fveud v.cuBvA|u.~c3 v.k_ud"v.qs2|u.lvmun .vo3 up.vq.ur|… 😉

Will

Sorry…just couldn’t resist. Are we at risk of elevating cyber slagging to new lows?

W

Will,

The ‘Pinch Of Snuff’ bowing snippet you posted is dead on, as is the ‘Three Points Of Lift’ you posted. Great stuff!

I know it’s hard to say that ‘this is the right way’ to bow when we have so many examples of good musicians who do their own thing. However, I tend to believe that most people (especially those just learning) it’s best to say ‘this is the right way’ to bow. It’s not that it’s the ONLY way to bow, but this bowing makes it effortless to hit the beats as needed. Later, if you find other ways to bow that allows the same general feel, go for it.

No doubt, Kevin Burke is a great trad musician, but asking him “How exactly do you bow that?‘ is like asking ’”How exactly do you walk?" I think it’s very frustrating for him because he can’t really explain it. Sure, a master fiddle player can bow any way he wants, but is that really true for a beginner?

And last of all, the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy or Roman or an Empire. Talk amounst yourselves!

Yes,Caoimghgin, I really think it is true for a beginner.If you can get the ‘feel’ of a tune early on it really does n’t matter where the down/up bows fall at all.I think!

I know I’m just back from a session down the pub and might not be at my most alert but where did that Holy Roman Empire thing spring from? If I missed a bit,sorry, but talk about cans and worms! 🙂

Just to get you going, I will say that I will never go to Canossa, so there.Yaa Boo sucks. Smart Alec…
Yours,in a not very Holy Roman Empire sort of way, Dave

Is it just that you hate me, Will? hehehe

zls

No, I knew that a veteran as yourself wouldn’t feel welcome if someone weren’t slagging back. What worries me though is somebody else is out there right now trying to make sense out of |.vxl ~!r.uvr .%8ue F2|…. and succeeding!

BTW, how’s Joe Burke’s pulse doing these days?

ViolaDave and Kevin, your comments are like buddah (’cept we can tell that ViolaDave has been spared the Mike Meyers telethon).

And too think that I could be enjoying the cran thread, reading dahblahblahs instead!

:0)

Will

Hey, Will, my abc software keeps saying that .vo3 up.vq.ur|… 😉 is invalid code…

Jeff

“And too think that I could be enjoying the cran thread, reading dahblahblahs instead!”

Ha! If you think that you can hide in a bowing thread (and dreary stuff it is, too), you are wrong. I heard that about dahblahblah. Don’t knock it, it’s great stuff and it comes from a fiddler originally. See, you actually *can* learn from a fiddler.

And the Holy Roman Empire [of German Nations] was an Empire, Roman, and… well, forget it.

I’m sorry, it just sounds like Barbara Walters pronouncing her own name…. 🙂

I’m just humiliated because I’m not the mult-instrumentalist that many of you apparently are. (I can’t count mandolin, five-string bluegrass banjo, or guitar because I don’t play Irish music on them.)

Jeff, you must have the Microsoft version of abc….

Will

LOL - Will, in Microsoft that would probably be valid code - generated by FrontPageABC, of course…

Jeff

Somebody slagging me back? Excuse me? You think *I* have a lack of people slagging me on this list?! What color is the sky in YOUR world? hehehehe

zls

This thread from 2001 deserves fiddlers’ attention - thanks CheshirePT for the link. I found it interesting and useful