Tune archive

Adjunct fiddle instructor at Amherst College, Donna has been recognized by New England arts councils, NPR, Smithsonian-Folkways Recordings and the independent recording industry for her fiddling and cultural contributions. Teaching for schools, universities, conferences and ASTA chapters, she also directs Fiddling Demystified Camp, a five-day August intensive for fiddlers and string teachers, and The Great Groove Band of school-age folk musicians every year at the Old Songs and Philadelphia Folk Festivals. She also co-directs two summer camp weeks at Old Songs, one for children and one for adults. A fiddle master, Donna has performed in the US, Canada and France with Josée Vachon in Chanterelle since 1993. Since 2002, she has worked with Franco-American fiddling apprentices from Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. With Beaudoin family members and fiddler George Wilson, she also performs with The Beaudoin Project, presenting the family's music at the Lowell Folk Festival, Champlain Valley Festival and others. Donna is currently working with teachers in Massachusetts to design and test fiddling curriculum for elementary through high school strings.

About Fiddling Demystified for Strings . . .

Among a host of fine fiddle tune collections available today, what makes the entire Fiddling Demystified series stand out? It has to be the level of detail in Donna's transcriptions and CD lessons and her analysis of style. Her primary focus is on "cranking out that rhythm!" says Darol Anger in his foreword to "A Practical Guide" Says fiddling colleague Jane Rothfield, "Donna has written a veritable encyclopedia of fiddling. She cracks the codes of fiddling rhythms, styles and techniques with an easy-to-understand right and left-hand method."

Jane Ezbicki, 2006 President of the Massachusetts String Teachers' Association, hired Donna and Groovemama in 2006 to work with the Wayland MA High School Orchestra and remarked,

"Donna and her colleagues changed the way my students and I think about fiddling. They actually helped us to feel confident enough to turn our music over, close our eyes and play independently."

Says Dr. Alan Jabbour, Director (ret.) of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress,

"Donna is an outstanding performer and a world-class teacher of the art of fiddle. I consider her at the forefront of the developing field of fiddle pedagogy."

String wizard Darol Anger in his foreword to A Practical Guide for String Players:

"Donna gets it all right! I suspect that the general level of fiddle knowledge and playing will take a major uptick soon after [Fiddling Demystified] is published, just as other great music books such as Earl Scruggs’ original banjo book, O’Neill‘s great Irish fiddling reference and the infamous jazz Real Book influenced the course of musicians’ lives and work."

A Practical Guide for String Players Table of Contents & Lesson List Sample lesson: Swallowtail Jig ORDER FORM pdf 70 pages, 31 Celtic and North American tunes with chords, bowings, style lessons, 20-page left-right hand guide to fiddle techniques, two 65-minute lesson CD