Lilting Fiddle

June 2020 Fiddle Progress Report

Posted on June 15, 2020

Hey, look! I’m on time with this post for once!

Also, I’m happy to say that another month has gone by and I still have not missed a day of practice. It’s come close a few times, but I’ve been able to stick to it. I know there will come a day I will break the practice streak, but I’m trying to hold fast to it.

I’ve been pretty pleased with my progress and feel like going back and refining older, simple songs had been a good experience. I seem to spend about two weeks on each of the tunes before feeling like I can move on to the next. At this pace, I have a few more months of review before I think I’ll start pulling in a random tune again.

Sadly, I hit a wall in my attempt to play the next song in the OAIM method. I’ve really, really enjoyed playing the first three songs, but then I hit Hole in the Hedge and realize that the difficulty leap is just too much for my skill level. This makes me sad because I really have had fun adding actual Irish tunes to my practice.

For now, I’ve had to put the OAIM sub on hold since I know it’s going to be a while before I have the skill to tackle that tune. I do still have the means to practice the songs I’ve already worked on as it’s encouraged that you download the sheet music and the play-along track. So, I’ll still work on reviewing what I have learned.

In the meantime, I’ve been picking at tunes in the Celtic Fiddle book I got for Christmas. I’ve only played through one of these so far – Rakes of Mallow – but hope to work on a few more soon.

I’ve also had fun going back and reviewing songs from the EEI book. Though these tunes are simpler in composition, they have returned to me my old nemesis – the 4th finger. I’m really struggling to get it to work correctly (though I could have sworn I had it working before!), so I’ve added some focus on my 4th finger along with continuing to work on slides in my vibrato practice. I’m not quite ready to move on from slides yet, though.

I have converted a few songs using Scan Score since the last progress report — this is one of those ongoing project/goals. But I still have a ton more left to do. I also haven’t checked out the Udemy courses on fiddle that I picked up last month.

All in all, I’m going to stay on course and continue to do as I’ve been doing for yet another month.

Leave Your Thoughts!