Bridging Mandolin to Fiddle

[PugetPicker]

Good morning Cafe,
I have been playing mandolin for a few years and am just now starting to really dive into scales and soloing. I am a multi-instrumentalist who primarily plays for fun but also with a group who plays country, some bluegrass, and southern rock and I currently play Piano, Resonator, Banjo, and Mandolin. After a recent trip to Wintergrass, I have caught the Fiddle bug and am considering picking it up. I have a few questions for mandolin players who have crossed over.

Did you find the crossover hard, or did you pick it up relatively quickly? From what I have read, the bowing is a challenge but I have a very experienced friend who can get me started.

Does your bluegrass mandolin soloing techniques and experience help you solo on fiddle?

And finally, is there a great place online to find used fiddles "with character". The violin world seems so formal and uptight, and I am looking for something fiddle specific where tone is king and dings and scratches are the norm. Thanks in advance.
-Jake

[JeffD]

I find learning the fiddle to be the hardest thing I have ever done.

Because I have been playing mandolin for a bunch of years I have heard many many fiddle players, and I know real well what good fiddle playing sounds like. And so I have little or no patience with myself. It just takes a lot of time, or it is taking me a lot of time, to play acceptably well, because I know what acceptably well is. I do not remember mandolin taking this long. But I also had the advantage back then of not really having heard a lot of mandolin, so I did not know how it was "supposed" to sound.

So here am considering learning fiddle, and I thought, oh cool, I already have the left hand, I am half way there. Well its less than 25% actually.

What makes the fiddle significantly different from all the instruments you mention is that you are responsible not only for the clean beginning of each note, but the strong deliberate continuation of each note and the clean termination of each note. The mandolin does the second two for you. The fiddle does very little for you. It is not your ally in the process. That is my experience.

And fiddlers and especially violinners have different ideas about what makes a violin great. We all go for sound quality sure, but mandolinners also go for playability and looks. Violinners I know ignore the last two. Well they all look the same, but what I mean is that a fiddle that is finicky and harder to play but perhaps sounds wonderful, is considered... wonderful. You and I might be willing to trade some of that wonderful in for more ease of play, but fiddlers and violinners don't seem to be as willing. Sound is all, and you are either up to the challenge of wrestling that sound out and avoiding the wolves, or not.

Just my take.

Its hard. But it is a lot of fun.

[Nashville]

The only small advantage is knowing the scales and finger positions. So a melody you learn on mandolin is easily picked up on fiddle. But other than that, they are totally different animals. Bowing is an art unto itself. Getting good intonation on a fretless instrument is an art unto itself.

Yes, you will most likely pick it up quicker than someone with no stringed instrument experience. And yes, your experience as a musician will translate, such as soloing and backup. But a fiddle is more demanding initially.

You can find used violins in just about any pawn shop or used music store. Go with your fiddle player friend and let him help you pick out your first. After you learn how to play it then you will know what to look for. I found a few really good fiddles in the $100 to $200 range. But it's the bow that'll make the difference. A good bow with a cheap fiddle is better than a good fiddle with a cheap bow!

What JeffD says.

[JeffD]

You know, or might be aware, of the loose rule of thumb that a mandolin costs about twice a guitar of comparable quality. So if you know what $200 gets you in guitar, well that quality in mandolin is about $400.

Of course there are exceptions, but as a general rule.

Well my experience is double it again for fiddle. If you know what you can get in a guitar for $500 say, well that's what you get in a $2000 fiddle. Its crazy.

Again there are exceptions, but your expectations for a $200 fiddle are comparable to a $50 guitar. My experience. In general.

And yes, get the very best bow you can.

[SincereCorgi]

Did you find the crossover hard, or did you pick it up relatively quickly?

I play a few different instruments, and the first year and a half of violin/fiddle were the most miserable musical experience of my life. You will sound bad. Like, really bad. The next day you will have to take it out of its case and get ready to sound bad for another hour. Over and over. It's like climbing a mountain where the first stretch is up a sheer cliff.

Your friend may be a fine fiddler, but I would highly recommend lessons with a real teacher. I tried to have a friend teach me, a great player, and she was incredibly patient and enthusiastic but I think it really is much better to go at once to someone who has a lot of experience teaching. Like any instrument, there are a lot of flakes and frauds. I went through several teachers before finding somebody really good. It is worth the money, and I would consider it part of the fiddle/violin budget.

I agree with Jeff about fiddle prices, especially at shops. However, it's possible to get unlabeled high-end Chinese instruments if you meet people with the right connections. Most of these are sold to US and European violin shops, who set them up and label them as house brands. It's a very difficult instrument to shop for, especially in the beginning.

[Randy Smith]

Ditto on what Nashville has to say.

Two suggestions

1. Take a lesson or three with a violinist to get started on bowing, which is just about the whole deal about fiddling. Use what you learn to help make yourself sound like a fiddler. Tell your teacher, respectfully, that you want to sound like a fiddler rather than a violinist (though many great fiddlers were/are violinists). The sound is the part that's to you. The teacher can show you how to move your wrist, hand, and arm the best way; you'll be listening to fiddling to continue to get the sound you want.

2. To begin with, spend $200. on a fiddle and get it set up right. Depending on what you get, you might want to have a new bridge cut. Don't spend too much on your first fiddle. *Do* spend even a bit more or your first bow than on your first fiddle. Get an exspensive (even cheap) first fiddle that plays well and then work on bowing. You'll have lots of time to buy a better fiddle.

Let us know how it's going.

Randy

[Richard58]

Learn bow movements is a great start to sounding like what your shooting for ......bowing and producing great tone is the big battle with fiddling.

[MaryE]

All good advice in the previous posts. I came to mandolin with previous experience on wind instruments and guitar. I spent a few years on and off on mando, learned to pick a few tunes, read the notes and tabs. I set it aside for awhile, being busy with work and family. I have two daughters. One took up violin, the other viola. At some point they discovered my mandolin and were able to pick it up and play it like they had done it for years! They were far better than I had gotten. After several years of listening to them play their violin and viola, and hearing them in their lessons, I took up the violin, attempting to teach myself. It was a lot harder to play than I expected, and it was very uncomfortable (even painful) to hold. I soon figured out: Relax, bring the instrument to ME, don't try to fit my body around it. I took a few lessons, which were very helpful, but mostly I have worked at it on and off, on my own, due to an ever changing work schedule that makes it difficult to commit to lessons. I have gotten to a pretty decent level, enough to impress my daughters, and I enjoy working on fiddle tunes. Last year, I started to play my mandolin again. Because of the fiddle playing, I thought I could be like my girls, just pick it up and play it, haha! It feels like a whole different instrument, even though mandolin and fiddle have the same basic fingerings. At first, the frets on the mandolin drove me crazy, because I was used to having no frets on the fiddle. Over time though, it has gotten easier to go from one instrument to the other. I also play guitar and ukulele, and I find that the instruments complement each other. Practicing on one instrument makes me a better player on the other three, as long as I regularly spend some time on each one.

So I would say, give the fiddle a try. It's a great instrument and fun to play. Get a knowledgeable player to help you pick out a decent instrument and bow to start, along with a chin rest and shoulder rest to help you support the fiddle so you are not causing undue stress and tension in your body. It can take awhile to find chin/shoulder rests that are really comfortable for you. My daughters left me a collection of them to try out! I actually have two fiddles, and use different supports on each of them, because they vary slightly in size. Take some lessons - there are a lot of bad habits you can develop. Good luck to you!

Mary

[kkmm]

I have played many other instruments before taking on mandolin, 4 years now and I play mandolin very confortably, any tune that I know in mostly any key. Then 5 months ago, I start taking the challenge of the violin.

I simply bought a cheap one (VSO) to see if I have the gut for it. In the first two weeks, I just want to dump it in the recycle bin as it sounds horrible. But I had similar experience with mandolin tremolo, it takes patience. Then I found out that by putting the silencer on, it sound pretty sweet (low volume though). It's from that point that I made good progress, within 2 months, I play lot of tune (church music) in various keys (mandolin skill does help here about fingering), no tremolo yet.

Then I put on Dominant synthetic strings, no more silencer, it sounds pretty good but still below my expectation, probably because I am still using cheap bows.

A good bow with a cheap fiddle is better than a good fiddle with a cheap bow!

I will borrow from a friend his expensive bow and see how it sounds on my VSO, may be I will ask him to play mine with his good bow. If it improves the sound, I will buy one or two of these bows as these are not wasted when I upgrade to a good quality violin later.

In summary, it is certainly easier for mandolinists to learn the violin than a total new bee as many skills are common: scale, music theory, left hand fingering (where to "fret" for the note). I also learned that tremolo on violin won't work for free strings, so one has to "fret" to be able to tremolo. That's like playing mandolin only with fretted notes (a bit harder on violin).

The bowing hand is a totally new skill to master, it takes lot of time but IT'S FUN.

[LindyHopper]

I would like to add the encouragement that once you put in the work, playing a violin is like nothing else. You are so connected to it and can change the tone in every possible way and really put yourself into it. Expressing yourself with a bowed instrument is very different than a plucked one and something I wish everyone could experience.

It does take a LOT of work and practice though, just getting to the point where you can noodle and have fun is such a process, but so worth it if you are dedicated.

[JeffD]

By all means get after it. I find it fun and fascinating - more important to me is that it has really improved my mandolin playing. Nothing I learn on the fiddle has been entirely irrelevant to mandolin, positions up the neck, double stops, even if only to be a more sensitive mandolinner when playing with a fiddler. (And I have never appreciated frets more!!!)

I wish fiddle had been my first instrument. Then the year and a half of sounding like a tortured cat would have been in my parents garage, and irritating my parents was one of my hobbies anyway. And, as I said, I would not be as impatient because I had less experience with music altogether.

My experience is that the fiddle is a very jealous instrument. It will have no instruments before it. My primary instrument being the mandolin means that my progress on fiddle is very slow and tortured. Practicing twice a week is just maintenance, not progress. Three days a week minimum to make progress. I can often only manage once a week, and that only slows down my degradation.

My fiddle teacher told me what I needed was to take a break from mandolin, or I would never get anywhere.

The conversation went like this:

Fiddle Teacher: You know, <with a wink and a smile> little children make faster progress than you are.

Me: Yea well its easier when you don't have a job and mortgage and wouldn't I be a great fiddler by now if all the food I need to eat just showed up on my plate cooked to perfection every day.

Fiddle Teacher: Little children rarely are playing the mandolin - at two jams, band practice, and a contra dance - every single week. Either. Just sayin...

Me: Ummm... yea. Where were we?

[UsuallyPickin]

I played guitar for twenty years before I picked up a mandolin and I played mandolin fifteen years before I started to learn to fiddle...... I read all of the above posts and there really isn't much I can add. So I will stress some of the , to me , most important. A bow is not a pick and fretless instruments leave little room for positional errors. It is a time consuming process and hard on a musicians self esteem. I had to make myself practice fiddle. It wasn't music at firat ... it was noise. What ever fiddle you buy have setup by a violin luthier. Violins have their own specific needs and general instrument repair and setup folks don't always know them. Buy a good student grade bow.... plan on at least a couple of hundred dollars in cost. Carbon fiber bows have come a long way in quality of manufacture in the last few years and their lower end models can be a good bow to start out with. Take some lessons because it will help to have a good foundation in the basics and learning properly first is easier than breaking bad habits later. Play daily. Much of this stuff is muscle memory. Daily reinforcement helps a great deal if you are doing the "right thing".
Here is a list I sent to all of the new to fiddle players .......
1. Tune your instrument each time you pick it up to play.
2. Play daily. This helps greatly with the muscle memory.
3. Take some lessons , preferably in the style you want to play. And if you can't find a teacher in the right style take some lessons anyway. There are countless things a teacher can show a new student in minutes that take hours or weeks to stumble on alone, if not longer.
4. Play scales with your tuner on to check your intonation.
5. Play with other people as soon as you feel you can. It will encourage you to practice and multiply the fun factor.
6. Find other fiddlers to play with and learn from. Closely watching how other fiddlers play helps a lot.
7. Keep a loose grip on your bow and don't over grip with your noting hand. Tension causes both short term and long term problems.
8. Change your strings every six months. Your fiddle will appreciate it. ( opinions differ on this)
9. Practice with a mirror. It will help you keep you bow aligned with the strings.
10. Practice bowing with you shoulder trapped against a door frame. This will help teach you how to use your wrist instead of your entire arm to bow.
11. If you can hum or whistle a tune you can learn how to play it. Christmas carols worked well for me.
12. When you think you are ready for a better fiddle get a better bow first.
Be patient and enjoy the journey. It can last a lifetime...... R/

[Newmexmandoboy]

+1 for taking a really long time. After 3 years of mando I picked up the fiddle, using Darol Anger's AOB lessons. I'm just over one year in, at about 25 minutes/night, 4-5 nights per week, and I tell my friends "If you would have told me it would take this long to be this bad I would not have believed you." But it's fun, and I'm not ready to give up quite yet, though there are some days ...

[Randy Smith]

4. Play scales with your tuner on to check your intonation.


As they say, NFI, but I'd recommend Darol Anger's cd.*Darol Anger's DIGTAL SRUTI BOX for intonation and zoning out.*
I don't want to quote the entire back of the cd, but here are a few sentences from it: "This CD contains drones of 2 tonics and an octave apart. . . .Each sequence lasts roughly six minutes and the CD plays through all the keys in order (the circle of 4ths starting from C." You can decide what key you'd like to practice scales, intervals, exercises, etc. in, go to that key, and have a great tone t practice your intonation with. Recommended very much. Check out Anger's website to find this.

[farmerjones]

Truth is, you really don't know until you try it. You may have the knack.
Now, I feel a fiddle is easier to play than the mandolin or anything, but 10k hours does that.

OK, my two cents about acquiring a fiddle: Find out where all the kids are renting. Either rent one too, or buy an old dog from the person who rents out violins. Put on a set of Prim steel strings. Prims are the J74 of the fiddle world.

PS, record yourself early as you can. Best of Luck!

[sblock]

...I also learned that tremolo on violin won't work for free strings, so one has to "fret" to be able to tremolo. That's like playing mandolin only with fretted notes (a bit harder on violin).

I think you meant to write vibrato, not "tremolo" [sic]. Vibrato is a violin left-hand technique that cannot be applied to any open strings, which 'warbles' (pulses) the pitch of the bowed note as it's played, by rolling the left-hand fingertip back and forth rapidly. Tremolo, on the other hand, is a right-hand technique that involves rapid repetitions of the same note. It's a common mandolin technique, but it can also be done to good effect on a violin.

[catmandu2]

I totally concur with farmerjones about acquiring first fiddle from the rental fleet - they'll get you set-up with a good used student S&R, Glaesel or Lewis and you'll be on your way.

One thing though - you might consider beginning with synthetic strings rather than steel - they're a little more forgiving (in the beginning, this is an asset!). And don't forget a little torte mute - also invaluable in the beginning

We do have a group here where there are some nice vids and such collected - albeit, not much used: http://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/group.php?groupid=109

Hmm, I just looked at some of those old posts and found something relevant - wrt mandolin to fiddle (corrected for spelling):

...hold a chord shape across all four strings on fiddle...shuffle across pairs of strings--a very effective technique for (seconding) and other accompaniment. Then there was a question of "how does one move it around up the neck?" In response, I guess the more notes involved present increasing intonation challenges. Holding a full chord and sliding it around requires some attention, certainly, as one is simultaneously executing two, three, or even four notes. The best advice I have for such techniques is to pay strict attention and listen carefully. Learning to play relaxed is probably helpful in simultaneously holding multiple notes for extended phrases. Good exercise for the little finger. Also, I believe this is one particular aspect where being a mandolin player can really be helpful in fiddling.

[billkilpatrick]

i've more or less made the transition from mandolin to fiddle but when i need to figure something out, i grab the mandolin. there's lots of on-line help for violin/fiddle - the only advice i'd give is: listen to the instrument; listen to the sound its making and don't try to make it sound like something else. the other thing is ... let the bow make the music - easy does it, using as light a touch as possible - don't push down on it.

and the last thing is don't be discouraged - many have come before you ...

[catmandu2]

I would like to add the encouragement that once you put in the work, playing a violin is like nothing else. You are so connected to it and can change the tone in every possible way and really put yourself into it. Expressing yourself with a bowed instrument is very different than a plucked one and something I wish everyone could experience.

Ya - is like the wind instrument of the strings...degree of difficulty great - equal to its expressive capacity

[PugetPicker]

I appreciate all your thoughts and advice, and I am happy to report that I am taking the plunge with a Rental on its way. I decided to go through Stringworks because I don't have access to any great rental services in my home town. I have definitely learned to set my expectation super low in terms of generating any decent sound in the near future, but I am very excited as its a completely new branch of music for me. I can play string instruments (guitar, mando, banjo, uke) and Piano, but a bowed instrument is a whole different animal. Thanks again, and I will try to update you guys on how its going in a few weeks/months.

[Newmexmandoboy]

Thanks again, and I will try to update you guys on how its going in a few weeks/months.

... years

[Jack Roberts]

Q: Did you find the crossover hard, or did you pick it up relatively quickly? From what I have read, the bowing is a challenge but I have a very experienced friend who can get me started.

A: Hard? Is anything that is as fun as playing fiddle really hard? If you expect to sound really good in the first few months or years, you will be disappointed, but learning the fiddle is the most enjoyable thing I have done in years. My poor family gets pretty tired of the screeches and squawks, but that is where a mute comes in handy.

Q: Does your bluegrass mandolin soloing techniques and experience help you solo on fiddle?

A: In my case, it was more the other way around. The better I got at fiddle, the better I got at mandolin.

Q: And finally, is there a great place online to find used fiddles "with character"?

A: Seeing as you have already got a fiddle on the way, let me offer my 2 cents to anyone else expanding to the fiddle.

Every town in almost every country in the world has someone with a fiddle for sale. I got my first fiddle as a trade for my beginner's mandolin. It has dings and had a separated back. I took it to a luthier and had it worked on and it sounds better than most violins selling for $1,000 or more. Ask any violin teacher if they know of a used fiddle for sale. You are going to want to find a teacher anyway. Spending money on lessons is going to be the best investment you can make, and if you make an appointment with a teacher who gives lessons to adults, he or she will steer you to a used fiddle if you ask. As others have stated, you will need to buy a bow. A student carbon fiber bow is a good way to start.

But find a teacher first. You don't need to show up at your first lesson with a violin in hand. But do show up with your mandolin.

[GTison]

My experience is that to play ANYTHING it takes a lot of my time to get "pretty good". Since I've been out of a regular band for 5 years or so, I've learned several instruments. Dobro and Banjo were first. Then I went back to the fiddle which I've been messing with for 20 years or more on and mostly off. I shouldn't have played in public but I did. About 18 months ago I decided to get more serious about the fiddle. My goals have been to play more in tune, learn more tunes, and learn to bow. l can tell you fiddle takes up my time. And I haven't learned a great many new tunes. However the quality of my playing has gone up a good bit. I'm sure if I am jamming I'll mess up a lot because bowing is still not natural to me. I joined Artistworks w/ Darol Anger. It has been essential to my learning process. I have met my 1st year goal. But now, I have NO mandolin callouses for the first time in about 30 years. I don't get to play mandolin right now because my focus is still the fiddle. Just know that to get good at fiddle you will have to dedicate yourself to fiddle for an extended amount of time, and that may cost you learning on mandolin.

[Pete Martin]

My experience was I gave up the mandolin for 15 years to learn the fiddle. They are only similar to a point, then they get WAY different. Now I play both regularly and I think totally different on both.

[JeffD]

Yikes. OK. Anyone want to buy my fiddle. Because the chances of me staying away from the mandolin for 15 years - well it just ain't never going to happen.