Flatpicking Old-Time Fiddle Tunes

Scott Nygaard’s Flatpicking Old-Time Fiddle Tunes live workshop will explore playing traditional American fiddle tunes on the guitar from Scott’s perspective as an old-time fiddler. Scott learned to play old-time fiddle for square dances in the 1970s (he won the fiddle contest at the inaugural Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Washington, in 1977) and that background has deeply informed his guitar playing. When playing for dancers, your objective is to get people’s feet moving, not to wow an audience or impress a contest judge, so the emphasis is on rhythm and phrasing. And we all know that syncopation can be an important part of getting people’s feet moving. In addition to learning 12 great old-time tunes, you’ll learn how to phrase melodies on the guitar, taking advantage of the fact that it’s possible to play notes in more than one place on the fretboard, so you can experiment with fingering to create powerful phrasing and rhythm. 

Another aspect of playing fiddle for dancers is melodic improvisation. When you’re the only melody instrument and you’re playing the same tune for five to ten minutes at a time, you learn how to vary the melody in small ways. As one of Scott’s mentors, the great fiddler Hank Bradley says, you’re “always improvising, but not in an extreme way.” This kind of improvisation is not based on the chord changes of the tune, but rather on the melody. For each tune you’ll learn, Scott will give you minor variations of each phrase and show you how to come up with your own.  

Solo playing, or playing with only one accompanist, is also a part of traditional old-time fiddling, and in this context, the fiddler is free to play in a more unstructured way. From this tradition, “crooked” tunes have evolved: tunes that don’t conform to the standard eight measures per part that is usually required of square dance fiddlers, and Scott will include a few  crooked tunes in the workshop.

This is an intermediate-to-advanced level workshop and students will be expected to be familiar with alternate picking technique. For those who haven’t mastered alternate picking, we will provide an alternate picking technique lesson from Scott’s Intermediate Flatpicking Guitar course at Peghead Nation, so you can take a look at that lesson before the workshop starts.