videos and other aids for learning Swedish fiddle accompaniment?

[artedels@gmail.com]

I play octave mandolin, mostly for Celtic and am now trying to accompany fiddlers doing Swedish music. There seems to be almost nothing on the Internet about how to back up this style of music on guitar or octave mandolin or zouk in the Swedish way not the American way.
Any suggestions??
Thanks Art

[Mandobar]

Try looking up Roger Tollroth of the group Vasen. He has some YouTubes and there are plenty of videos of the band there also.

[Steve Mead]

Not sure this will help but Sweedish fiddler Lena Jonsson has a presence on you tube, maybe you can pick up some hints by watching her performances, just a thought!

[Dagger Gordon]

Roger Tallroth is the biggest influence here, by some way. Many of the others seem to adopt his approach. Matthias Perez is very good.

These guys tend not to use standard tuning to accompany Swedish music. This is from Tallroth's biography. https://tallroth.se/about.html


Tuning and nylon


Roger first introduced his own tuning back in 90-91 when he after experimenting came up with the tuning that still is his main-tuning.

A-D-A-D-A-D.

for the lowest A, Roger blended in a low nylon-basstring among the steel. A winning concept.

That tuning has over the years sat a new standard in tradmusic in Scandinavia and is also used by many followers worldwide. And that special-tuning was also a big part in Roger's unique voicing.

Tallroth's other tunings:

G-D-A-D-A-D

A-D-A-D-A-E

[Dagger Gordon]

A lot of Swedish players use a cittern or octave mandolin to accompany, such as Ale Moller
One of the best is Ale Carr. In this Mandolin Cafe thread from 2013, Ale Carr himself joins in to talk in a lot of detail about the approach, tunings etc, microtonal notes etc. It's quite complicated !

https://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/t...cittern-player

[Eric Platt]

Besides Tallroth tuning, others will tune the guitar DADGAD. That has become popular for Swedish and Norwegian players. Finland seems to use regular tuning more. And Danish appears to be either regular tuning, or custom tunings like Morten Hoirup.

This is one of the reasons I moved over to mandolin. Figured it was easier than learning new tunings for music I had already been playing.

[Dagger Gordon]

Roger Tallroth on guitar and Magnus Stinnerbom on mandolin

https://www.facebook.com/sophia.stin...48692312299864

[Paul Cowham]

I'm certainly no expert on Swedish music, but I do have a fairly broad experience of accompaying folk tunes in a range of genres. I always think that before considering chords, tunings or instrument choice, the most important thing to learn or understand about accompaniment are the rhythmic styles/quirks of the various types of tunes you be accompyaning.

I have a very limited knowledge of Swedish music, but I'm aware that a common type of tune is the polska, which is in 3/4 but not like a waltz. I can't offer more help on the polska or Swedish music generally, but I'd suggest that getting comfortable with the rhythms of these tunes would be a useful thing to do.

[Eric Platt]

I'm certainly no expert on Swedish music, but I do have a fairly broad experience of accompaying folk tunes in a range of genres. I always think that before considering chords, tunings or instrument choice, the most important thing to learn or understand about accompaniment are the rhythmic styles/quirks of the various types of tunes you be accompyaning.

I have a very limited knowledge of Swedish music, but I'm aware that a common type of tune is the polska, which is in 3/4 but not like a waltz. I can't offer more help on the polska or Swedish music generally, but I'd suggest that getting comfortable with the rhythms of these tunes would be a useful thing to do.

One problem is there are different styles of polska. And they have different emphasis and length on different beats. I'm not good at describing the differences but folks diving in can find out and hopefully learn.

There are two good books out there on polska. However, AFAIK, neither has been translated into English.

[mandocrucian]

There seems to be almost nothing on the Internet about how to back up this style of music on guitar or octave mandolin or zouk in the Swedish way not the American way.
Any suggestions??

Ale Möller

[whistler]

In addition to the recommendations of some excellent cittern and guitar players, I suspect there is much to learn from Swedish traditional harmony fiddle playing. In addition to single-line countermelody, it makes a lot of use of open string drones and double stops, much of which could be transferred note-for-note to octave mandolin. But it is also not a great leap to incorporate some of this into a chord-based style.

I imagine that various open and 'semi-open' tunings could be helpful here, to free up the fingers for countermelody, e.g. GDAD, ADAD, GDGD/AEAE... But there is no doubt much that can be done with standard tuning as well.