Tearing down the melody

“You don’t have to play every note,” mandolin player Earl Hunt told me when I said I was still learning to play hoedowns (reels) and jigs as fast as the melody fiddlers do in our pickup contra dance band.

How do you decide which ones to leave out, I wondered aloud, and he smiled and replied, “Keep practicing.”

It’s really rather simple, my fiddle teacher told me. It’s called “tearing down the melody,” eliminating the notes that are there just for show, “the fiddle fireworks,” he called them. The notes which don’t contribute to the melody. So long as they’re not crucial to the rhythm, which is foremost.

Meanwhile, I’m also struggling to learn to play (scales now, tunes later) with the Georgia and Nashville shuffle bowing patterns. There’s always something new to learn.