Class signup • Free fiddle stuff • Books & CDs
Do you want to . . .
- Enjoy your playing more?
- Use your bow more intentionally?
- Sharpen your ear for tunes and chords?
- Find a better internal groove?
Join our weekly Fiddling Demystified class on Zoom. Since 2020, we’ve gathered across time zones to learn and analyze tunes from Celtic, French-Canadian, New England, Appalachian, Texas, Scandinavian, and Cajun sources.
Melodies in hand, we play with rhythms, chord patterns and backup styles, explore composition and improv, write variations and harmonies, and then help you connect left-and-right hand technique to your feelings about the music to enrich your playing pleasure. Co-teacher George Wilson and I have more than a hundred years of fiddling (!) between us and we’ll help you:
- Style your favorites and simplify the hard ones
- Build a template for learning new tunes
- Find solutions to your fiddling problems
- Learn backup, harmony, and arranging skills
Class meets every Wednesday at 5-6 pm U.S. eastern time and is also available a day later as a download. Generally, we stay with one or two new tunes and related techniques for up to a month. Class and teachers nominate tunes and the teachers choose equally from difficult and easy tunes with no limit on regional styles. If you can play and learn by ear, you’ll be at home and we also provide sheet music with lesson notes. Class size is 10-12 people; guest teachers have no attendance cap. Class members are welcoming and the class is very affordable. Send an email to sign up.
FEES: $10/class, $8/night (10 classes for $80),$20 guest fiddler events
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“. . . there’s so much valuable insight into fiddle technique that I’d missed. I’ve been here since the first class and I have no intention of backing out now!” Jon Davis, long-time class member
“Five days with Donna at the 2019 Festival of American Fiddle Tunes taught me more than two years of conventional theory courses! ” Mikela Valenzuela, Oregon string teacher and fiddler
“You taught me to listen differently and hear more, connecting me to my core, to an unspoken knowledge or internal feeling that I hadn’t heard anyone else put into words . . .” Tom Van Cleve, long-time class member