Anglo playing guidance needed

[Don Taylor]

Please bear in mind that I have never knowingly touched a fiddle in my life, so what follows here maybe a complete load of cobblers elbow.

 

I became interested  in how fiddlers add drones and watched a few Youtube videos so I now know all that there is to know!

 

Most fiddle tunes are in A, D or G (plus their relative minors and modes?)

 

A fiddle is tuned as G3, D4, A4 and E5 (where C4 is middle C)

 

The possible notes played in common fiddle tunes are:

 

Open string 1 - G3	G#3	A3	B3	C4	C#4
Open string 2 - D4	E4	F4	F#4	G4	G#4
Open string 3 - A4	B4	C5	C#5	D5
Open string 4 - E5	F5	F#5	G5	G#5	A5

 

A fiddler plays a drone on an adjacent open string to the melody string being played so I came up with these tables of notes to play as a drone:

 

When playing in G add:

 

D4 for	G3	A3	B3	C4
G3 or A4 for	D4	E4	F#4	G4
D4 or E5 for	A4	B4	C5	D5
A4 for	E5	F#5	G5	A5

 

When playing in D add:

 

D4 for	G3	A3	B3	C#4
G3 or A4 for	D4	E4	F#4	G4
D4 or E5 for	A4	B4	C#5	D5
A4 for	E5	F#5	G5	A5

 

When playing in A add:

 

D4 for	G#3	A3	B3	C#4
A4 for	D4	E4	F#4	G#4
D4 or E5 for	A4	B4	C#5	D5
A4 for	E5	F#5	G#5	A5

Edited March 24, 2019 by Don Taylor

[Don Taylor]

For some reason I cannot add anything to the end of my last post and I accidentally hit 'Submit Reply' before I had finished.

 

This was the fiddle lesson video that I used to derive my tables:

 

 

'Golden Slippers' with the drones sounds OK on a concertina.  Other tunes, I am still thinking about it.  Of course, concertina players (and really good fiddlers) are not limited to just four notes to choose from as drones to play in three different key signatures, but sometimes less is more.

 

BTW.  The nicely formatted tables in my earlier post came via a cut and paste from a Google Docs document that I was using to make notes about fiddle techniques. I was really surprised that it came out exactly as I had laid it out in the Google Docs document.

 

Don.

 

[David Barnert]

On 3/24/2019 at 4:47 PM, Don Taylor said:

How about extending your thoughts to other accompaniment patterns besides oom-pah? 

 

One of my favorite things to do with my left hand on the Hayden is to play parallel 10ths (that is, a 3rd plus an octave) below the melody. You can hear it in many of my youtube and soundcloud examples. So, for example, if the melody is playing with the 5th and 6th notes of a scale (D and E in G major, for instance) then my left hand plays the same rhythm on 3 and 4 (B and C).

 

On 3/24/2019 at 8:04 PM, wunks said:

... you can play the melody above or below the drone...

 

Using the same example as above, while playing [DE] with my right hand and [BC] with the left, I might hold a drone G between them with the middle finger of my left hand for a fuller sound.

Edited March 26, 2019 by David Barnert
Added a word for clarity