Music Theory

Putting Sets Together

February 13, 2020 By

Instructor: Wendy MacIsaac
All Levels; All Instruments

What elements are considered when putting tunes together to make a compelling set? Discover the crossroad at the science and art of this endeavor. Some artists approach this from a purely musical theory point of view, others group like styles together (all reels for example) still others will select tunes by their titles, to tell a story that way. In both Scottish and Cape Breton traditions there is the MSR formula, for a march, strathspey, reel combination. Learn how a seasoned recording and performing professional has approached this lingering question, and bring your own tunes to play with and contemplate.

Adding Improvised Variations and Fills to your Tune Playing

January 22, 2020 By

Instructor: Neil Pearlman
Intermediate/Advanced Levels; All Instruments

So you know a bunch of tunes but what now? How do you keep them fresh, interesting and exciting as you delve into them? In this class Neil will share some of his favorite techniques for adding spontaneous variations and fills to the fiddle tunes you know and love. We’ll cover a variety of ideas from adding occasional “jazzy” runs to re-purposing the ideas already present in the tune to give it an extra kick!

Fiddle Tune Form for Cellists

December 19, 2019 By

Instructor: Joy Adams
All Levels; Cello

As an accompanimental instrument, cellists frequently get asked to back up fiddle players on tunes they don’t know. This workshop will present a set of strategies to help you learn the chords and form of a fiddle tune on the fly.

Crawl Before You Walk: Learn the Bas(s)ics of a Walking Bass Line

December 13, 2019 By

Instructor: Rob Flax
All Levels; Bass players & All Instruments

Inspired by Tom Warrington’s fantastic method book, Rob outlines a simple strategy for creating powerful walking bass lines. Take the guess work out of the low end! While this course is primarily aimed at bassists, all instruments are encouraged to attend, both to practice bass lines of their own and also to better understand what their rhythm section is doing.

Idiomatic Improvisation

December 11, 2019 By

Instructor: Barry Saunders
Advanced Levels; All Instruments

We will explore idiomatic considerations when improvising, i.e. rhythmic and/or harmonic specific language of the idiom. We will also cover community improv and sharing the joy of music.

Playing in a key–using scales for improvisation

December 11, 2019 By

Instructor: Barry Saunders
All Levels; All Instruments

Here we will cover how to recognize a key to aid in developing your improvisation. We will also cover community improv and sharing the joy of music.

Improvising with Fiddle Tunes

November 22, 2019 By

Instructor: Andy Reiner
All Levels; Bowed Stringed Instruments

Using ornaments, tune skeletons and smaller phrases, we’ll learn strategies for on-the-spot rhythmic and melodic variations. Keeping tunes fresh, alive, and 3-Dimensional. (Can you find the mysterious fourth dimension of fiddle tunes?) Game-changing for contra dance tunes as well as taking solos in bluegrass jams.

Tunewriting

November 22, 2019 By

Instructor: Andy Reiner
All Levels; All Instruments

Tunewriting is for players who want to explore the compositional side of traditional music. In this workshop, we’ll dissect fiddle tunes to find out what makes them tick, explore different compositional strategies, discuss how to use melodic development to turn a small phrase into a coherent fiddle tune, and learn how to open ourselves up to receive those magic bits of inspiration. As a group, we will collaborate on writing a new tune together, and attendees will leave with a new skill set and inspiration for writing new tunes into the future!

Free Improv

November 22, 2019 By

Instructor: Andy Reiner
All Levels; All Instruments

Featuring small group musical explorations in a welcoming environment with a strong focus on listening and musicality. A perfect introduction to improvising, and just as appropriate and deeper for more experienced players. It’s time to get weird!

Improv From Scratch

November 22, 2019 By

Instructor: Andy Reiner
All Levels; All Instruments

With our instruments, we will explore rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic improvisation strategies that enhance our musicianship in any style, while working to cultivate a healthy musical attitude – removing mental barriers and freeing ourselves to be creative, improvising musicians.

Chopping and Strum Bowing (Tracy Silverman’s new rhythm fiddling method, it rules!)

November 22, 2019 By

Instructor: Andy Reiner
All Levels; Bowed Stringed Instruments

This class combines both chopping techniques as well as the Strum Bowing Method. Both are described below:

Chopping – unpitched bow noises that turn the violin into a drumset. Learn the technique and feeling at an incremental pace. Take the oath and learn how to chop wisely, musically, and tastefully. You will emerge with the tools and strategies to practice your chopping into the future, and employ the technique wherever your creativity takes you.READ MORE

Tunesmithing

November 22, 2019 By

Instructor: Steve Muise
All Levels; All Instruments

Join a collaborative experience in tune writing. We’ll write a group tune together while gaining some take-away tips
for continuing composing tunes on your own. We’ll talk about inspiration, tune types,key and phrase structures, call and response, resolutions, a bit of theory and more.

Navigating Accompaniment Techniques on Stringed Instruments

November 22, 2019 By

Instructor: Steve Muise
All Levels; Bowed Stringed Instruments

How to employ notes, chords and grooves when accompanying other players, singers, etc. You will learn some basic music “string theory” that you can use to jam, play duos, use as a springboard for improvisation and more. We’ll play some basic chords, go over left-hand finger patterns, and bow grooves.

Tips, Tricks, and Techniques For Fiddle

November 22, 2019 By

Instructor: Erica Brown
All levels, All Instruments

We will touch on a little bit of everything in this class: from exercises to improve your intonation and speed; vibrato; double stops and chords; chopping; slurs; and more!

Please come prepared with a question to address a specific issue you are dealing with. My favorite thing to do as a teacher is to help my students work through challenges they may be experiencing and help them figure out the best ways to work through them. My goal is to give you a new tool to add to your toolbox, one that will help you overcome not only your current struggle, but future musical hurdles, too.

Expanding Your Guitar Fretboard Real Estate-144 Chords in an Hour

November 14, 2019 By

Instructor: Fred White
All Levels; Guitar

Do you want to learn to play “up the neck” and spice up your style? If you already have three or four or a dozen chords down, and want to multiply them exponentially, this brief course may be for you. If you’ve already tried to memorize lots of chords, but they don’t seem to be there when you want to grab them on the fly, this course is just what the doctor ordered. This will be a relaxed non-intimidating experience covering some introductory theory, chord chemistry, and physics. No test will be given.

Chop and Groove for Fiddles

November 14, 2019 By

Instructor: Erica Brown
Experienced Fiddlers with Chord Knowledge Only

Chopping* is a rhythmic, percussive bowing technique that is used to provide backup to singers and while another instrument is taking a solo. It sounds a little like beat boxing on the fiddle using chords and different rhythms to create a really cool sound. It was made popular recently by fiddlers like Casey Driessen and Darol Anger.

*Being able to play and have a general understanding of chords is a must!

Harmony Singing

November 14, 2019 By

Instructors: Erica Brown and Matt Shipman
All Levels; Vocals

In this class we will illustrate the fundamentals of harmony and harmony singing for duets and trios as done in Bluegrass and Country styles of singing. We will learn to sing and identify different harmony parts and to sing specific songs in harmony with the rest of the group. This class is open to anyone who is interested in learning to sing or who already has some singing experience.

How to Back-up Singer

November 14, 2019 By

Instructor: Erica Brown
All Levels; All Instruments; Voice

In this class we will go over all the dos and don’ts of backing up a singer*. We will talk about how songs are structured, what to do in those little spaces between the lyrics, what to do and not to do while the singer is singing, when to chop, how to create a solo and some basics on how to arrange a song within a group.

*Please familiarize yourself with the following song before coming to the class:
Katy Daley- https://youtu.be/o8bmCZMOSpg

Hearing the Chords

December 12, 2018 By

Instructor: Neil Pearlman
All levels, All Instruments

At sessions it’s not uncommon to be have a fiddler call out a key and start playing, but how does the accompanist follow along if they don’t already know the tune? Do guitarists and pianists have to develop an encyclopedic repertoire of tunes just to survive? Happily this is not the case.READ MORE

Guitar backing skills and techniques

December 26, 2018 By

Instructor: Matt Shipman

Backing up tunes in a session or in a band can really help lift the music. In this workshop we will work on skills to help us be a better backer of tunes. We will go over right hand technique in various time signatures such as 6/8, 9/8, 4/4 and waltz time.READ MORE

Demystifying the “Dots on the Page”

December 26, 2018 By

Instructor: Pam Weeks
All levels, All Instruments

Are you used to trying to figure tunes out by ear but have no idea how to read music notation? Or you can sort of use the ups and downs of the dots music to jog your memory of a tune, but there’s a lot you don’t really understand? We will start at the beginning of what it all means, with the goal of sending you home with the understanding and tools you need for practicing and improving your music reading skills!

Timing is Everything!

December 26, 2018 By

Instructor: Pam Weeks
All levels, All Instruments

A class to exercise our “rhythm muscles”. We’ll be clapping, tapping, stomping, strumming, drumming, creating polyrhythm with the whole class, learning how to entrain our bodies with the beat of the music. We will explore rhythmic notation, how to count accurately using subdivision, and how to translate that to our instruments.

Learning by Ear

December 26, 2018 By

Instructor: Pam Weeks
All levels, All Instruments

For folks who have been playing for a while but primarily from sheet music. Folk music is, at heart, an oral tradition, and it’s important to become comfortable learning by ear. This class will break down and de-mystify the process!

Tune Writing

January 5, 2019 By

Instructor: Pam Weeks
All levels, All Instruments

There’s a method to the madness of being creative that can give you greater success at writing your own music. We’ll take a little time analyzing common tune and chord structures, and and then spend the session brain-storming techniques to open up your creative well We’ll also check out alternatives to conventional music notation so you can remember what you’ve just composed!

Cajun Music

December 26, 2018 By

Instructor: Pam Weeks; Bill Olson

In 1755 French people were expelled from Canada when the English gained control of Quebec and New Brunswick. Those who settled in SW Louisiana are the source of the vibrant, passionate Cajun music of today. We’ll learn a Cajun two-step and/or waltz and how to “second” (chordal accompaniment), concentrating on the markers that separate this music from other fiddling styles.

Creativity in Music

December 26, 2018 By

Instructor: Rob Flax
All levels, All Instruments

The most direct way to foster “creativity” is through “creating!” This workshop is designed to foster courage for improvisation and composition using the abstract musical structures fiddlers already know, and encourages participants to embrace simple constraints as strategies for inspiration. When creating new music there are no answers, only better questions.

Jazz Fiddle: Where To Begin

December 26, 2018 By

Instructor: Rob Flax
All levels, Fiddle

This class focuses on unpacking the underlying structure of the jazz standard “Ja-Da,” a simple melody from the pre-bop era, which features a ii-V-I progression that pops up in thousands of jazz tunes (and many other places).

Tunes

Ja Da, by Bob Carlton (1918), as performed by the legendary jazz violinist Stuff Smith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=15&v=S9WM0W-pQSg

Improve Your Improv: Building More Compelling Solos

December 26, 2018 By

Instructor: Rob Flax
All Instruments

Multi-instrumentalist Rob Flax has a Masters degree in Contemporary Improvisation (“C.I.”), from the New England Conservatory, and in this workshop he shares secrets and insights from the C.I. program plus concepts developed over many years of performance. Participants will focus on deconstructing what makes a solo “compelling,” learning compositional strategies and exploring the importance of the human voice to craft better solos. Each participant will also have the opportunity to take a solo and receive feedback, masterclass style (but this is not required to participate!)