Toby Rider wrote: > Alot of those other books that have been mentioned, especially some of > the older ones, have alot of really good strathspeys in them. It's hard > to get the feel of strathspeys from the notes, you have to hear them > played. Also people from different regions have slightly different takes > on them.
That's a good point and it shows one disadvantage of learning from tune books. A couple months ago I attended a workshop on strathspey bowing that Laura Risk taught for the San Francisco Scottish Fiddlers, and she took some time to demonstrate various styles (highland, lowland, Shetland). I started realizing there's a lot more complexity there than I thought! After that I started listening more closely to some of my favorite recordings vs. my own playing and I realized that in reading the music, I tend to play it too much like it's written and not enough like it should be played. As I listen more it seems to me to be a fairly common problem with the SCD fiddlers here, since a lot of us are coming from either a classical background or a different fiddle style and don't have a lot of "pure" Scottish fiddlers as mentors. I guess that's one problem with living halfway around the world from the source of these tunes! -Steve -- Steve Wyrick - Concord, California Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
