Playing Like Martie (or trying!!)
Why she's my hero: Martie is a REAL player. She's not just standing
there looking pretty with a fiddle, she plays the hard stuff, and she plays it
on the radio, and she started out exactly like me, in a school orchestra.
She proved you can do both. Every time somebody at school says the fiddle is
for old men at the county fair, I just point at the CMA Awards.
What I've learned so far, trying to play her parts by ear:
1. Get out of the singer's way. The fiddle in her songs mostly plays
between Natalie's lines, little answers and fills, and then gets quiet.
In orchestra you play all the way through. In a band, the space matters as much
as the notes.
2. Double stops! That's playing two strings at once to make harmony.
She does it all the time and it makes one fiddle sound like two. My orchestra
director, Mrs. Quam, has been helping me with my intonation on them, even though
she says she "doesn't do country." She's starting to, a little.
3. Slides. She slides up into notes instead of landing right on them.
In orchestra that gets you a look. In country it's half the feeling.
4. Less vibrato. Classical violin uses a lot of wobble on the long
notes. Fiddle style uses way less, and when you do use it, it means
something.
5. Find the key first. Before I try any part, I figure out what key the
song's in by playing along on open strings until something sounds right. A lot
of fiddle-friendly songs are in G, D or A, and when they're not, I know I'm in
for a long night.
6. The rewind button is your teacher. I play the same five seconds of
the CD over and over, forty times if I have to, until I can hum it, and THEN I
try to find it on the strings. Old Joe on Fiddle
Tunes by Ear says the same thing: if you can hum a tune, you can learn to
play it. He's been doing it since he was nine and I believe him.
7. It takes forever, and that's okay. I've been working on the Ready to
Run part since July and I can play it at about two-thirds speed. My goal is to
play it at full speed at the spring orchestra concert, if Mrs. Quam lets me
do a solo. (Mrs. Quam, if you're reading this: PLEASE.)
At church: our music minister lets me play with the praise band on
Sunday nights, and last month he let me take a solo on I'll Fly Away. Nobody
fell out of their pew but a couple of people clapped, which at our church is
practically a standing ovation.
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