On the page, fiddle tunes can look like one rapid-fire stream of notes, but that isn’t how they should sound. Fiddlers employ various techniques with their fingering and bowing to break up the monotony and bring the melody to life. Left hand techniques include fun tricks like slurs and hammer-ons. The right hand technique most popular with old time fiddlers is called shuffle bowing.
The Saw Shuffle
There are several types of shuffle patterns fiddlers use. The easiest is called the Saw Shuffle. This pattern alternates between up and downstrokes of the bow for every note.
The Nashville Shuffle
The most popular fiddle shuffle in old time music is called the Nashville shuffle. This is the bowing pattern that lends tunes their hoedown feel.
The Nashville shuffle helps break up a long stream of notes and put emphasis on the right beats. To play a Nashville shuffle, a fiddler will kick off with a long bow followed by two short bows. The long bow can either be one long note or two notes slurred together; the short bows are two notes bowed separately. The grouping of four notes together with two slurred and two separate works particularly well for the 4/4 reels of old time music.
To analyze the bowing pattern, a fiddler will start out on a long downstroke. The two short notes that follow will be created by a quick upstroke and downstroke. This means the next group of four notes will kick off on a long upstroke followed by two short notes bowed with a down and upstroke. Fiddlers repeat this alternating pattern whenever it fits into a tune.
A group of these four notes has a rhythm that can be spoken “huckleberry, huckleberry, huckleberry, huckleberry.” A heavier emphasis naturally falls on the first and third syllable of the word. That emphasis should come through in a fiddler’s bowing. The way a fiddler can do this is by applying a little more pressure to the bow each time he comes to the first of the two separate short bows. Fiddlers describe this as “digging into the strings.” It’s that emphasis on the off beat that gives old time fiddle music its most important quality—the toe-tapping feel that makes listeners want to get up and dance.
Fiddlers often use the Nashville shuffle to kick off a tune or fill in monotonous quarter notes in melodies like “Boil Them Cabbage Down.” To do this, they play one long bow and then two short bows in a pattern that can be spoken “strawberry, strawberry.”
Other Shuffle Patterns
There are lots of other shuffle patterns like the Georgia shuffle or the Double Shuffle fiddlers can pick up as they become more comfortable with their instrument and the old time genre. Some of the flashier patterns are more associated with bluegrass and shied away from by fiddlers who want the old time sound.
Briefly, the Georgia shuffle is three slurred notes on an upstroke followed by one note on a downstroke. To make this pattern work out with the bow, a fiddler has to really dig in and cover a lot of ground with his downstroke. In two measures of 4/4 counted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, those downstrokes come on the upbeates 3 and 7.
Fiddlers play a double shuffle by bowing two notes on one string, two on another, and then repeating the pattern. The pattern can be syncopated by playing two notes on the first string, one on the second string, two on the first string, and so on. That shuffle is definitely easier said than done, and many times fiddlers get all the notes in but lack the timing to make the pattern come to life. The most popular fiddle tunes that make use of the double shuffle are “Back Up and Push” and “Orange Blossom Special.”
Shuffle bowing is a wonderful way to dress up fiddle tunes, but it should always be smooth and natural. The pattern won’t work out perfectly through every tune, so fiddlers need to hear intuitively when it would help the melody and when it would get in the way. Once they get the sound of shuffle bowing, they’ll toss it in whenever they come across a string of notes that needs it.
Of course, the only way a fiddler can make this pattern a natural part of his playing is to drink in countless recordings of fiddlers who use the shuffle correctly. Once fiddlers have added shuffle bowing to their bag of old time tricks, they can try a few left hand techniques in their fingering to bring out more of that traditional fiddle sound.
Marcy Paulson - From the moment Marcy Paulson picked up a recorder in fourth grade music class, she was hooked. Since then, her passion for music has ...
