Once upon a time there was a reader who inquired about all my musical instruments.  What kind are they, what are the tunings, which is the harder to play, which do you enjoy the most?  So after a long time I decided to actually do a post on such a topic.

Way back in the year 1986 I was 5 years old.  I sneaked into my parents’ room and looked in the top drawer of the vanity and found a little 4 inch shiny piece of metal also known as a harmonica.  I sneaked it out and while my dad was at work I blew and blew on that thing until later that day while in my room I figured it out…a melody! That was the beginning of my musical quest.

After finding out I could play the harmonica better than him, my dad let me have the instrument. Two years later came a guitar for my birthday in which I strummed and plunked on it for a year before a divorce sent me on the road to live beside my uncle who, ironically enough, played the guitar well. Day after day I would walk up the road two houses away and go in and learn to play music with him. I learned chords and a few lead tunes like “Windy and Warm” by Chet Atkins and of course “Wildwood Flower” by the Carters.

This is a Takamine who many have called the "Lawsuit" guitar because it was a nock off of a Martin. This guitar is not mine only loaned to me by my brother. It is the only Guitar I use.

Those two instruments were the primary musical influences I had growing up.  When I got married we were living in Springfield when we decided to try to buy a house.  I, being a farm boy, wanted land and I didn’t care what the house looked like as long as there was room to roam. Funny thing was we settled on a place that had very little land…I believe it was God directing me…that’s another story some day.  We ended up purchasing 3.9 acres of land in Oldfield Missouri.

As the months went by soon I learned of a neighboring girl who at the time was 15 years old and was often talked about by locals I had talked to who knew her.  She played the Fiddle and was a student of the late Bob Holt. Holt who was the winner of the $10,000 National Heritage Award and played square dances around the country for years, taught her since she was very young.  Who’s the girl? Ashley Hull.  She lives a stone’s throw across the road from the house I wouldn’t have normally bought, but did.

Still never having met her I learned about a Jam session at a place called McClurg from her grandmother (I fixed her computer problems).  It was an old town that only had one gas station that was out of business and a couple houses.  I took my guitar down with me to play with them. Up to this point my guitar experience had been the occasional performance at church or even sometimes playing in the band and then lots of time spent playing at home. Hours upon hours at home…but this was really the first time playing with a group of musicians who knew music. I quickly found out that not playing with others causes the musician to lose their timing abilities…assuming I had timing in the first place.

I met Ashley while down there and I began to get an itch for the fiddle and that was in 2004.  By the end of 2004 I was going to school at a local college and I was able to acquire a cheap Chinese fiddle from a teacher whose daughter didn’t want to play anymore. I paid $50 for it. I took it home and because I wasn’t really a stranger to music my first job was to learn where the notes were. Scales were never really taught to me by anyone but I knew I had to learn where the notes were and as a result I practiced scales without knowing.

This is my Standard fiddle which I keep tuned to GDAE. It is actually a "Permanent Loaner" by Alvie Dooms who was the guitar player for the late Bob Holt. This is a Hofner and has a very loud sweet and sound.

The fiddle for me was not hard to figure out.  In fact was simple!  The hard part is making it not sound like a cat being strangled.  As my intonation got better I still continued my every Monday night at 6:00pm jam session at McClurg playing only the guitar. Finally I brought the fiddle down with me.  Everyone’s eyes turned to an eerie form of disbelief and I sawed out Soldiers Joy, Amazing Grace, and Little Dutch Girl (which I recorded by tape at a previous Jam session).

I continued to find more tunes I could learn but I was having trouble hearing the notes and being able to replicate it on the fiddle.  So I spoke to Ashley and asked her how she does it.  She said, Bob always slowed down the tunes for her on tape while she was learning then she became able to pick up many tunes at full speed.  Most of her tunes though Bob played normal speed then played at a really slow speed.  So she offered her tapes to me to copy…yes I said she offered them to me.  No cost. I copied all the tapes and while many of the tapes were so rough I couldn’t learn the tune (her tape recorder wasn’t the greatest) I still have a plethora of tunes I can learn from to this day.

After some time with the tapes I felt like I wasn’t learning things right. I thought I need work on my bowing…because everyone says most of fiddling is in the bowing.  So I asked Ashley if I could take lessons. She agreed and I began at first with a tape recorder but after my disgust with the quality, I began taking a video camera with me.  I would record the tune fast then slow and on some tunes I had an intermediate speed, then I could watch the bowing and see the how she noted the tunes.  And because it was digital, I could upload them to my computer and save them on my hard drive for later study or to edit to an even slower rate using video editing software.

This is my Cross tuned fiddle. Usually tuned to AEAE or AEAC# sometimes I tune to DDAD. This is my Fiddle I bought at a Antique store for a $100. Plays wonderfull. This is a Strad Copy. In addition to these two fiddles, I have two other fiddles which are mine but their quality of play is low.

I began learning every tune I could.  In the early days I would learn at least two tunes a week and I could have learned more but I felt I should hold it back to two.  I must admit, however, over the years my zeal has faltered a bit and I learn a new tune about once a month now.  However with over a hundred tunes I know, I never lack tunes to play in practice or in jam sessions.  I have played all day and most of night in jams before and have never played the same tune twice.

As a side note I recommend to everyone who plays the fiddle to use the computer and create a spreadsheet of the names of the tunes and a few notes to start it. In a Jam, you have so many melodies flying around its hard to remember how to start your tune so the first few notes helps you to start. A fiddle is tuned GDAE so I type G1 for the first finger position on the G string and so on.  You could write by hand but it’s easier on the computer.

As I learned about this “new music” called Traditional or Old-Time music, I learned that the culture of the music is so appealing to me that it’s as if I were created to continue the “tradition”.  I began to take an interest in other instruments of “Old-Time” music which were the banjo, mandolin, and mountain dulcimer. I must admit that my skills of these are nowhere near as good as either the guitar or the fiddle.  I can mostly play rhythm.

This is a cheap Chinese banjo I got out of a trade for labor. Cheep but it works for what I know.

The Mandolin I recently bought.

Even though I have played the Guitar for over 20 years, the Fiddle is “My Instrument”.  I may not be as good as Ashley, but I love to play the fiddle more than any other instrument.  And though I was taught by Ashley, I have a distinct sound that is unlike hers and I feel it makes it mine.  For me, if it were not for Traditional Music, I think that I may not have ever discovered who I am, what I enjoy, and how that fuzzy image of a dream could be clarified into reality.