Welcome to the JamWithLauren Blog
Many of these articles are inspired by questions from our JWL students. If you can’t find a post that digs into the issues that are plaguing you, consider signing up for lessons with Lauren. When you sign up you will gain access to her amazing curriculum and she’ll be able to answer your questions during our bi-weekly LIVE Lessons. Who knows, maybe your question will inspire the next post!
Harnessing the Power of the Pinky: Left Hand Fiddle Technique
Many fiddlers grumble about using their pinkies while they play. I’ve met lots of students who always prefer to play an open string rather than nervously attempt a potentially out-of-tune pinky. But seriously, why limit your hand to three fingers when you’ve only got four (no thumbs on the fingerboard please) to begin with?
How to Improve Violin Tone and Bow Control: Recipes for Mixing Pressure, Placement, and Speed
As we draw the bow across the strings in various rhythms and phrases, skilled players are constantly adjusting these three components to find the perfect blend. Adding more weight might require using less speed. Or vice versa, increasing the speed could be necessary to balance your additional weight.
How and Why to Join the Rhythm Section as a Fiddler
Today, I want to talk about rhythm. I am primarily a fiddler, and the fiddle is often considered a “melody” instrument. However, this is a misnomer because many instruments including the fiddle can play melody, chords, and rhythm simultaneously and separately. There is no good melody without good rhythm!
Understanding Bow Direction and Why It Matters: A Fiddler’s Guide
The bow sets the fiddle apart from all other instruments. With the bow, a fiddler can emote like a vocalist and groove like a drummer. Bowing styles can help listeners identify the musician from a single phrase- perhaps even a few notes. On the flip side, the bow can be a source of aggravation and keep fiddlers from unlocking their full potential.
How To Cross Tune Your Fiddle
Cross tuning a fiddle is common practice in many traditions around the world, but often produces a bit of apprehension and confusion with musicians who are most comfortable with the ‘standard’ tuning of GDAE. Let’s demystify the process so you can begin to enjoy the benefits and fun idiosyncrasies of each tuning.
How To Prepare for an Anxiety-Free Performance
We’ve all been there. That moment before or in performance where things start to crumble and fumble out of your hands. Not because you’re unprepared - quite the opposite really, you’ve been practicing and sounding great. It’s just that right at that moment you’re not sounding your best. And then you start to get upset that you’re not sounding as great as you like/could/‘should’ and that exacerbates the problem.
I am here to strategize and make a plan so your next performance opportunities (either on Zoom or on stage or at your family gathering) are filled with more joy and less anxiety. Let’s get to work.
How To Create a Three Part Harmony
I have always looooved the sound of three-part harmonies - for voices and instruments. As a younger player who didn’t grow up learning harmony parts, I always wondered how other musicians could figure them out on the fly. Did they just know how the parts sounded and used their ears? Were there ‘rules’ that I just didn’t know about? Some of the time I could figure out a bit of a harmony part - if I lucked out that the third above or below the melody was also a chord tone, but I inevitably would get stuck and not know how to ‘fix’ it. Or all the notes would be ‘correct’ and yet all the parts wouldn’t blend together. So if this scenario sounds familiar to you, I’m here to help give a little guidance on how to figure out the tenor and baritone parts to complement your melody.
How (And Why) To Practice Scales
As a young student, I remember teachers making me play scales. I never wanted to play them, but I always had to play them for school orchestra tests and youth symphony auditions. To make things worse, I didn’t understand why I needed to learn scales. Or even how to practice them. Why would I work on something if I didn’t understand how it could help me or how to practice it? I only wanted to practice things that were fun!
How to Use Source Recordings for Inspiration
I want to talk to you about listening to old recordings. These days there are many incredible resources available to us—a big one being YouTube. For example, this great video popped up a few days ago of Tommy Jarrell and Fred Cockerham in 1971. If you have only a few spare minutes, check out their rendition of “Cluck Old Hen” just after 9 minutes in.
How To Know When to Move to the Next Tune
One of the most common decisions I make as a teacher is when a student should move on to new repertoire. When one of my JamWithLauren subscribers asked me how he’ll know when he’s ready to set one tune aside and start working on another, I thought it might be helpful to outline some general guidelines and share them.
How To Sing While Playing A Bowed Instrument
Your voice is perhaps the most natural melodic instrument you’ll find, and the most portable! We were all born using our ‘pipes and chords’ and I urge you to sing, especially if for some reason you think you can’t. Because you can. Everyone can sing. It just takes practice. Like everything in life, amirite?
In this post, I’ll discuss ways your knowledge from your instrument and hands can help guide your voice to improve, and then vice versa.
How To Play Music At A Faster Tempo
When you are ready to move up a level and begin to increase your tempos, it’s an exciting time. Whether you’re going from slow to mid, or mid to performance and jam speeds, this post should have some helpful suggestions for your time in the woodshed.
How-To Prevent Music Related Injury: Small Muscle Athlete Edition
We rely on our body to respond with speed, precision, flexibility, and consistency. We train, practice, study, repeat - until we’ve perfected a technique to such a degree that we simply can’t get it wrong. We ask our bodies to execute any kind of acrobatic episode, from up-bow staccato, to triple-tonguing, to playing the upright bass (which is an athletic event all on its own).
But no one warns you about this side of musicianship - the physicality of musical instruments is rarely taken into account, let alone recognized by non-musician folk.
Figuring Out the Key: A How To for All Musicians
When I lead workshops and jams at fiddle camps, one of the most commonly asked questions is some variant of, “How do I know what key I’m in?”
This question often happens when someone has learned a fiddle tune melody and might be trying to figure out the chords, or just tell their guitar playing friend what the key is so the friend can have a go at it.
5 Ways to Jam Without a Partner
We might have just experienced a move, a change in employment and schedules, you can’t make the weekly jam at a local dive bar, or you live in a place where you don’t know anyone to jam with. In the meantime, I’ve put together some ideas on how you can simulate a jam all by your lonesome.
Let’s be honest, we’re never alone if we have our instruments.
How to Hold Your Violin Bow
So, you’ve got yourself a fiddle. You’ve got the fancy case, you’ve got the rosin and shoulder rest, maybe you’ve even got a name for your instrument and by now you’re a pro at holding the instrument - which, I’ll have you know, is no small feat.
How To Practice Your Fiddle Efficiently and Effectively
What should you practice?
It’s kind of a silly question, but it’s the most important. I mean, there are SO. MANY. THINGS. You could practice; new material, old material, technical facility, foundational building blocks like scales and arpeggios, improvising, composing, arranging, the list is endless.
Can You Sing It?
I’m a firm believer of the ‘if you can sing it, you can play it’ mentality when it comes to ear training. Correctly singing a phrase, or the entire tune, before you attempt to put your hands on the notes saves valuable practice time, which promotes efficient learning and good muscle memory.
A Pep Talk, Peppered with Fiddle Practice Tips
Why did you choose the Fiddle?
I’m sure all of you have a story- maybe your parents picked the instrument and it stuck, or your child abandoned it and you decided to give it a try, or you heard someone play around a campfire or on stage. But often all these stories can be boiled down to this: you love the sound of the instrument, and the feeling you get when you make the sound.