Fiddle

2023-07-13

I first started playing fiddle when I was five, just around my birthday. I had really wanted a fiddle because I wanted to learn how to play it and my parents got me one for my birthday so I started taking lessons. Though after a couple of lessons I started to find it more and more boring and at the time I wasn't really prepared for my fingers to hurt when I did it, so I didn't really like it that much and also overall I think that probably starting from that age wasn't the best idea. So I took lessons for maybe about a month and then eventually I quit.

But, then, a few years later, in third grade, when my class started taking strings lessons, I signed up and I started taking classes. Also, just around that time, I started taking lessons with Cecilia, my dad's bandmate in Kingfisher. I started learning the basics, like Hot Cross Buns and Mary Had a Little Lamb, and I found that a little boring because I kind of already knew how to play that stuff. When I started learning harder tunes, though, I found it a lot more fun. Some of my first tunes were Bile 'em Cabbage Down and Cluck Old Hen. As the tunes got harder they got funner but also sometimes they would get more frustrating too.

At first when I got frustrated I would kind of get pretty upset and would want to keep practing but also I'd be really upset, so normally I'd wait until the next day to try it again. Then, normally, after the first few tries it would start to get less frustrating as I started to figure it out. Also, the more I practiced the easier it got and the easier it was to learn new tunes. I also found it much easier when tunes had lyrics, to figure out how it went.

A few weeks ago, in Florida, at Dancing Fish, on July 1st, I played for my first dance weekend, playing two sets. One was Cripple Creek and Liza Jane, and the other was Mairi's Wedding and Angeline the Baker. I found it really fun, and just like when I performed in the Brown School concert the scary part was actually the thinking about it, but once I was actually playing I found it really fun.

These are my current tunes:


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