New Fiddle Instructor – Megan Lynch Chowning

She is good!!

Wow. Nice to have another great fiddler on board.

Whoohoo!

Exciting!
I was just watching her great video on transitioning from classical to fiddle.

I joined on July 5th after seeing her name advertised on youtube with you and I’m looking forward to her lessons. She is my fiddle hero and I followed her to Weiser.

I have a question. How do you memorize a tune. I can read music, but the music that I play doesn’t stick in my head. I will play the tune onto a recorder and then learn it note to note to get it in my head. But the best contest fiddlers have so many tunes memorized, which first had to be technically worked out before getting memorized. I’m so envious of you and Casey, the Clarridges, Natalie and Leahy to name a few, but there must be a method you great fiddlers practice to cover so much ground in so short a time, relatively. But I’m getting worried about my age now, and want to stuff as many tunes into my memory as possible, and then have some time to play them. My goal is to learn 3 sets as played in a contest and have them to playing level in a year. I claim I was first in Weiser in 93′, because I was the very first fiddler of the contest at 8:00AM Monday morning., LOL. But I’ve never made the first cut and always played my best three tune in my first round (only round), but I’ve always felt I was a participant and supporter of the contest. Someone has to be last, although I did reach 21st one year and missed the cut by 14 points. I love all of you contest fiddlers, because I know how hard you all have worked to be tops, but Megan you’ve always been my fiddle hero.

Howdy Mark!
I have to say, I’ve always been the type to memorize tunes in sections, usually two bars at a time. I actually talk a lot about this technique in my tune videos that will be here on this site within the next few months, yay! But I also hope you realize, we contest fiddlers don’t always know as many tunes as you might think. I know it seems intimidating but we usually work really hard on a few rounds and then have another group of tunes for which we know the basic melodies and and the chord progressions and we just play around with those, starting simple and adding things as we get more comfortable. I think that you might expect that we have memorized all of the things we ever play, but it’s really more that we memorize the simple stuff and go from there. So proud of you for staying motivated and I hope you enjoy all the stuff I have coming up here.
Cheers, Megan

Clarinet Polka possible lesson

Kitchen Girl 🙂