How to Bow a Jig on the Fiddle

Video Transcript

"Hello! I'm David Kaynor on behalf of expertvillage.com. There is several wonderful categories of music that we fiddlers play, and one of them is the jig. There is several different ways to bow jigs. The simplest ways to bow a jig is just play a bow stroke for each note. The Irish Wash Women. Now a way that some classical violinists learn to bow jigs, from their studies of Handel’s jigs is to bow down for the first two rhythmic increments and up for the third, down for the forth, and fifth and up for the sixth. What happens is that the bow in the up stroke has to travel twice as fast as the down stroke, and that increase in speed causes a corresponding increase in the tone’s density or the volume. And that in turn gives what some people call a lilt to the tune, where the beats 3 and 6 are little stronger and you got this kind of sound. And then a third application is to take that very pattern and move it so the bow was going down on beats 6 and 1, and then up on 2, and then down on 3 and 4, and then up on 5 and you get this sound. All of which is artificial, sounds awkward and contrived if you try to force that bowing pattern on a tune all the way through. So a lot of us who use these patterns at all, not everyone does, will try to use them at the most convenient points in a tune, and then abandon them where is more comfortable to use something else. And then you get this kind of sound. "