All blog posts, articles and tune tutorials
Here is one of my top tips for practising Irish fiddle ornaments. This is a trick that I suggest to many of my students for building up confidence and speed in playing Irish fiddle ornaments, but it can also be used for practising all sorts of other techniques that you are working on. Watch the video below for my suggestions.
For lots more Irish fiddle lessons and tutorials, check out my Irish Fiddle Lessons Online, or subscribe to my Youtube channel.
This is a video lesson for intermediate players, who would like to learn and Irish jig on the fiddle, ‘by ear’. This slow playthrough of an Irish jig, Timmy Clifford’s jig, is a good chance to practice learning tunes by ear.
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Here I’m playing a really popular Irish jig, Garrett Barry’s jig — fiddle players will really enjoy learning this tune! In this video I am just playing through my version of the tune, but if this tune video proves popular then I will make a full tutorial of this tune with my suggestions for ornamentation, bowing and so on.
It is a well known tune that you will hear in traditional Irish sessions all over the world. If you would like to learn this great Irish jig with me on the fiddle, check back for a full tutorial soon, or sign up to my mailing list to be notified when I post the full lesson.
The tune is named after, and probably written by, Garrett Barry, who was one of the last great travelling uilleann pipers, from Inagh in County Clare. He was born during the Great Famine, and lost his sight as boy. He died in 1899.
For lots more Irish fiddle lessons and tutorials, check out my Irish Fiddle Lessons Online, or subscribe to my Youtube channel.
Here is a video taking you through one of my favourite jigs, by the great Paddy Fahey, Paddy Fahey’s jig #4. You’ll also find my transcription of the sheet music below as well. If you find the video useful, please do subscribe to my Youtube channel for more tutorials.
Ornamentation is fundamental to getting that authentic fiddle sound. If you want to make your fiddling sound like real traditional Irish fiddle playing, you really need to learn to play with good ornamentation. So here are my tips for practising fiddle ornamentation.
Especially when you are starting out, there’s a danger that as you start to play with more ornamentation, the rhythm and flow of the tune can be disrupted. So it’s important to find some ways to practice your ornaments that keeps that rhythm and fluency – that all important ‘lilt’ – in the tune.
In this short video, I share some of my top tips for practising fiddle ornamentation.
The key to playing with good ornamentation is to practice your fiddle ornaments with good rhythm. You don’t want your ornaments to break that foot tapping rhythm of the tune. So I recommend the following method as a great way of practicing fiddle ornamentation:
Take a short phrase that includes some ornamentation that you want to practice. This could just be a single cut, or a long roll, or it could be a phrase with more than one ornament. Keep it to one or two complete bars or measures (i.e. the phrase starts on the beat, and ends at the end of a bar or measure).
Play the phrase through without any ornamentation at all. Just the notes, and the bowing if you are already comfortable with a bowing pattern for this phrase.
Then practice ‘looping’ the phrase. As soon as you get to the end of the phrase, start it again without stopping the beat. You want to be able to play the phrase over and over without stopping or changing the beat. Try tapping your foot as you play it over and over with no pauses.
Once you are happy looping the phrase, try this: Play the phrase, slower now, once through with no ornamentation. Then when you loop back, immediately again this time with ornamentation. Once without, once with. All the time keep the beat going and don’t allow the beat to pause or ‘hiccup’.
If you need to go slower, go slower. You are trying to make sure that the rhythm is exactly the same whether you are playing with ornamentation or without. This way, when you play with your ornamentation, the beat of the tune will stay strong and consistent.
BONUS: You can use this same practice trick with bowing as well! If you are struggling with a bowing pattern, loop the phrase alternating between playing with a basic bowing pattern (e.g. all separate bows), and then playing the bowing pattern you are learning.
Fiddle players, if you would like to take your fiddle playing to the next level, take a look at my online fiddle courses, including my free Irish fiddle course.
In this tutorial, we will learn a Scottish reel on the fiddle, a tune which is also very popular in Irish sessions. This reel is called Frank’s reel, and was written by fiddler and tune writer John McCusker.
It is a really fun tune to play with a slightly funky rhythm in the B part, which is worth taking some time to get right.
In this tutorial, I’ll play the whole tune through for you, and then break the tune down slowly, so that you can work out the melody.
This is an intermediate level tutorial, aimed at fiddlers who already have some experience of learning tunes by ear. You may need to repeat sections of the video until you are familiar with how the tune goes.
I hope you enjoy learning to play this Scottish reel on the fiddle.
In this 30 minute fiddle tutorial, I’ll take you through a popular Irish polka on the fiddle, called The Britches Full of Stitches. You’ll learn the tune first, and then some ways to add some spice to your playing of this great tune.
This is a really popular session tune, which you can include in any set of polkas. It goes particularly well at the end of a set. In this lesson we will learn the tune in the key of A major, but you’ll also here it played in G major as well as other keys. I just happen to think it sounds best in A – really bright and bouncy!
We’ll start out by learning the melody, by ear, working phrase by phrase. We’ll discuss polka rhythms, and some ideas for practicing them. Then we’ll learn some simple bowing patterns to make the tune flow a little better. Then for improving and more advanced players, we’ll discuss some possibilities for ornamentation, chords, and so on. We’ll finish by looking at a possible variation for the melody in the B part to really jazz things up!
I really hope you find this lesson useful, and that it sets you on your way to playing this Irish polka on the fiddle. If you enjoy this tutorial, please do subscribe to my channel, and sign up for my mailing list, for updates on new lessons and other information.
Here you will find guides to the techniques of Irish fiddle ornamentation. I will take you through some of the most important Irish fiddle ornaments: long rolls, cuts, slides, bowed triplets, crans, casadhs, short rolls, joint short rolls and more.
Playing with good ornamentation is key to getting that authentic Irish sound. I sometime talk to my students about true Irish fiddle being made up of: MELODY, RHYTHM (which includes lilt) and ORNAMENTATION in basically equal parts. Remove any one of those, and the tune is incomplete.
The most common ornaments for Irish fiddle are rolls, cuts, slides and bowed triplets. Chords and drones are also used as a form of ornamentation. Crans and casadhs can also be played on the fiddle.
Different ornaments will be used more or less by different fiddle players. There is also variation between the different regional styles. Donegal fiddle style for example, uses many more bowed triplets, and fewer rolls.
Rolls on the Irish fiddle can also be separated into 4 (or perhaps more) subtly different techniques: long rolls (most common in jigs), joint short rolls (more common in reels), short rolls, extended rolls.
Rolls (especially long rolls) are often the first ornament fiddle players want to learn. But I always suggest getting really confident playing good cuts as a solid foundation for playing other ornaments.
Playing with good Irish fiddle ornaments is really important. The melody is often possible to work out on your own from recordings or other players, especially once you are confident learning by ear. The rhythm likewise you should be able to feel. But working out how people are playing the ornaments can be really difficult. Even if you use a slow-downer tool to try to work out what is going on, sometimes it is impossible to tell what the correct technique is for each of the ornaments that you are hearing.
A good teacher will show you how best to play each of the ornaments. But there is also a lot of really dodgy information out there! So here I am putting together detailed guides to each of the important pieces of Irish fiddle ornamentation.
Below is a guide to playing the Long Roll, to give you an idea of what you can expect from the video guides. Check back here for more videos, or subscribe to my mailing list or to my Youtube Channel for notifications of new videos.
Can you learn the fiddle without reading music? Absolutely! You can certainly play the fiddle without being able to read sheet music. In fact, I’d go further and say it’s best if you don’t learn to play the fiddle by reading sheet music! I’ll explain why.
Fiddle players have learned ‘by ear’ rather than from sheet music for hundreds of years. Fiddle music is part of an ‘oral tradition’, meaning that the music passes from one player to the next by playing and listening.
Until quite recently, many tunes would never have been written down. Instead, players would learn how to play tunes from each other, with tunes and techniques passing from one generation to the next.
So you certainly don’t need to be able to read music to learn to play the fiddle. In fact, there are advantages to learning tunes ‘by ear’.
The most important reason, is that much of the spirit of the tune, can never be written down. The phrasing, the ornamentation, the subtleties of rhythm – you have to learn these by listening.
But also, tunes learned by ear stick much better in the memory. Tunes learned from sheet music are much harder to remember.
So, how do you learn tunes by ear? The first step is to listen to a tune until you know it really well. Until you can sing, or hum, or whistle the tune all the way through without hesitating.
Then break the tune down into chunks. If you are listening to a recording, play a short section – may just a second or two – then hit pause. Keep those notes in your head and see if you can work them out on the fiddle. You may have to try several times to find the right notes. Keep working your way through the tune like that.
If you are learning from another player, ask them to play each bar or measure for your slowly so you can work it out piece by piece. If you already play the fiddle a little bit, but mostly play from sheet music, give one of my step-by-step tune tutorials a go. See if you can follow along!
If you haven’t learned tunes by ear before, it may feel difficult at first. But it gets easier and faster the more that you do it. Once you have had some practice, you’ll pick up new tunes incredibly quickly!
In this beginner Irish fiddle tutorial I take you slowly through the Irish jig Out on the Ocean, so that you can learn to play it by ear.
This in-depth tutorial is meant for those who are just starting to learn fiddle tunes by ear. Maybe this is the first tune you’ve learned this way! So I take it very slowly, bar by bar (or ‘measure by measure’) giving you plenty of time to practice each phrase before moving on. It is best watched with fiddle in hand, so that you can play along.
Out on the Ocean is a well known double jig (meaning it has an A and B part, each repeated). It is frequently played for Irish (and Scottish) sessions and ceilidhs. It may be related to a Lowland Scots tune “Rock and a Wee Pickle Tow,” once a women’s spinning song. But it is now well established in the Irish repertoire, and has been a commonly played tune since at least as far back as 1903 when Francis O’Neill collected it and included it in his seminal collection of Irish tunes, Music of Ireland: 1850 Melodies.
(If you are already more experienced at playing tunes by ear, you may find this beginner Irish fiddle tutorial a little slow. If so, I recommend some of my other fiddle tutorial videos for intermediate players, which will go through tunes a little more quickly).
Below you’ll find sheet music for Out on the Ocean, if you would like to read along as you follow the tutorial. There are two versions here – the top one is just the melody as I would normally play it. Other players will have slight variations on this. The second version (bottom half of the page) includes some suggestions for bowing and ornamentation that you could use when playing this tune.
If you find this Irish jig fiddle tutorial helpful, please do subsribe to my Youtube channel, where I’ll be posting more Irish fiddle tutorials including tune tutorials, tips about ornamentation, bowing, tricks for good practice and more.
