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Originally posted by Brian Wood

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Originally posted by RB-1My question would be: 'Why?'

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The forums here aren't divided by styles. On Banjo Hangout there are several categories listed. As people come across Fiddle Hangout some might not stay because they don't see a place for them. I think a few categories by style would be in order. Why has it never been done?

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Like said, I proposed exactly this and heard it was 'unnescesary' or something in that vein.

Don't know where it was posted, but you could look it up, I guess.

However, the chances of people (who couldn't find their thing here and moved on) returning wouldn't be that big, or?

I'm here mainly because of the excellent advice on maintenance and other technical aspects.

But as for the 'learning to play' aspects, hardly anything I could use...

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Originally posted by Lonesome Fiddler

As DougD and groundhogpeggy imply above, the banjo doesn't really lend itself to being played in a variety of keys. It's something that, at least in my opinion, makes it considerably less flexible when you bring it to a jam or an organized live music session. If the jam leader or somebody else decides to play a tune in C when the last few tunes were played in A, you're pretty much out of luck unless you're a wiz at quickly re-tuning your axe. It's like a 'ukulele. You might as well put the instrument aside and amble to the bar.

Things become even more confounding when a fellow jammer insists everybody play in Bb...probably because it's the only key he/she can sing in.

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Dear Ed,

this is a common misconception.

If need be, I'd play banjo in any key, just not all at the same time....

Bb is a common key for singing, as is B. Listen how Kenny Baker handled this.

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Originally posted by DougD

Steve, just curious. What do you do for the key of Eb, or don't you encounter that very often?

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Capo 1 and spike the 5th at fret 8 and play as if in D

I thought everyone on this site knew that the banjo isn't really a true instrument... at least compared to the fiddle.. which is the king of instruments. Sure, people attempt to legitimize the banjo by playing "real" music on it... even classical...sometimes without a capo... in a variety of keys... these efforts are respected by real musicians (who mostly choose the fiddle), but the results are often controversial...and only slightly tolerated.... 

and even worse than the banjo is those who play the banjo...they congregate in great numbers and can be quite scary for fiddlers... the best fiddlers only allowing one within arms reach as they can become violent or emotional about their status in the world of people who play legitimate instruments..

I think the Bible goes into detail about this somewhere. Well maybe not the Bible, but perhaps it was Mark Twain?

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Originally posted by Shawn Craver Fiddler

I think the Bible goes into detail about this somewhere. Well maybe not the Bible, but perhaps it was Mark Twain?

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Oh! That guy that said the Mississippi River was too thick to drink and too thin to plow. Truth!

To get back to the original conjecture - WHy the higher number of people on the BHO forum then here. I play both. The fact is fiddle is just harder to get music out of, at least music that anyone, including the player, wants to listen to. We all know that! No instrument is what you can call easy, but some will reward the player quicker with the same amount of effort and time. Fiddle is not one of those. ITs easy to get discouraged learning it. Banjo = once you learn a few chord shapes and strum the thing, you get a passable result. Fiddle = learn a few scales, which in itself is an object lesson in patience and perseverance, you are not even close to making musical sounds. There is also THE BOW, easily the most counter intuitive method of producing sound ever invented.

I dont know how others fiddle journeys started, but when I started I was fanatical about learning this instrument. I cut classes in college, just to practice in the stairwells, took my fiddle with me when I drove a taxi, just to practice while waiting for a fare, and spent every waking moment home not eating or sleeping working on it. Lost all my friends and family stopped calling by. It still took a good 2 years of this before anything like music was coming out of the Devils box. WHat banjo player would have that amount of drive and patience, with so meager a return? Instead of divisive chatter about what is fiddling and what is not, instead feel pride and yes exclusivity about even trying to attempt to play this instrument. A select cadre among musicians.

"What banjo player would have that amount of drive and patience, with so meager a return? "

Yes, exactly . We fiddlers have a responsibility to these lesser among us, these men of low degree who learn not scales on their drummy thing with strings... to guide them... yea, as spiritual guides to inspire some kind of order from their clanging and banging as not to be a rejected abomination...

Leviticus 11:12
Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.

One cannot save the multitudes of these banjar whackers... just as every washed up star fish on the beach cannot be saved, but we must try.

And who knows, sometimes banjo players attract at least one good guitar player to join we fiddlers in our music making...a good guitar player being worth 12 banjar whackers to a fiddler...

I don’t think the issue is a lack of interest or motivation among the current members. That may be the cause of an exodus in the past (as I understand it this site experienced a drop in traffic around the same time that it happened in other places because of burnout and because the online forum lost its popularity in general), but at this point it seems to me that the problem is in finding more people to join the forum, especially younger contributors. The other two violin forums have managed to stay alive and well because they have provided a place to find excellent technical information (Maestronet threads have become the source of many articles in The Strad magazine, for example), gather and discuss the latest news in the violin world, and to argue about methodologies of making, repairing, and playing the instrument. Younger audiences have come to those forums despite their being an “old-people thing” because they simply have some of the best information and because some of the best makers in the world are members (Maestronet had probably its biggest boom when Roger Hargrave spent a good six months posting about the Cremonese working method and his latest varnish recipe in a thread about making a bass). On Violinist.com, you regularly see high school and college age players write posts because they’re looking for advice and direction from the more experienced teachers, players, and parents of music school students who share regularly about the process of auditioning and going through music school. Because the demand for information is so high, with the number of auditions for spots at schools constantly rising and the requirements fir acceptance becoming stricter and stricter, the forums provide a useful resource for students and parents looking for help to get onto the track or even just to find out whether a path toward music is attainable. Fiddle Hangout struggles in that regard because there isn’t any roadmap to success in Old Time music. Because playing technique is not given much consideration in the genre and being self-taught is often suggested as a benefit, it turns away a lot of new players who are struggling to get a decent sound out of the instrument and want desperately to find out what can be done to improve. When you’re trying to figure out how to do something, being told “Just go figure it out for yourself” is not a satisfying answer, and it tends to give off the impression that the person answering in that manner simply has no desire to be helpful. Old Time has a major perception problem among players of other genres as being a genre that is defined by ignorance, closed-mindedness, and unwillingness to rise above mediocrity. I think this is an unrealistic assessment, but I come across it all the time when I talk to players of other styles. As I’ve mentioned before, I heard a player try to explain what Old Time was to a European violin maker a while back, and it was a bit sad to hear that even someone who made a living playing the music cast it in such a negative light, as though playing the style was something of which to be ashamed.

If members continue to die out and are not replaced by newer members, the numbers will continue to drop off.

The forum tends to be almost exclusively devoted to Old Time, which is not exactly what one would expect from the site’s title. If players of other styles like Celtic, Cajun, Klezmer, Nordic, Persian, or Indian fiddling were to find a home here, I wonder if the membership might grow significantly. Just looking at The Session for comparison, it has a large and varied following, but members tend to use it as a sheet music or news outlet, with the forum part being an utter nightmare of useless or bad information. If some of those players could come here for good information I could see this site becoming a remedy for what’s lacking elsewhere. I think a lot of the other genres just don’t have a dedicated place to hang out online. Imagine if you could go to the site every day and see a variety of content covering a wide range of topics and styles that were all devoted to the fiddle.

This forum is also unique in that it has a marketplace portion, something that has been intentionally prohibited elsewhere. The marketplace here is not very active, but it could become a great resource if it started getting serious attention.

The question is how to increase participation. I think adding categories might help and couldn't hurt. Nothing else comes to mind.

Well I love playing my banjo and love the rich and wonderful things it can do. Even though I also get a real kick out of the banjo jokes...lol. But I do think it's a pretty easy instrument to play. Fiddle is terrible to learn and does take time and tolerance. Not patience, but tolerance. And hope...hope that your crappy sounds slowly turn into something a little closer to musical.

But comparing violin makers and auditions and schools and such in the world of violin to banjos probably isn't fair. I thought we were talking about fiddling...folkish, homespun fiddling, which would be more comparable to banjo playing, just a lot harder to do.

One thing about participation on this site...many of the former participants have passed away. That's one thing. I guess there are lots of younger generation of fiddlers...I mean YouTube is full of great, young fiddlers, but they might be too busy practicing, going to jams, going to contests or making recordings or performing or whatever...probably would rather spend their free moments playing video games instead of talkin' fiddle or whatever else with a bunch of fiddlers.

Facebook groups, and Youtube are both perceived to be better (?) geared to new participants (imo). But - I frequent FHO because I have come to know most of the folks here. Familiarity... creatures of habit... birds of a feather... and all that stuff.

I resist moving, because starting over in a new place at my age - just doesn't make sense. I have similar feelings about FHO. I follow some things on facebook, but I would feel out of place trying to participate. I don't have those "feathers"... I'm not really that relevant here, but I'm invisible there.

I do have a deep appreciation for FHO and what it has meant to me through the years. I started my fiddle journey at the same time I joined. It has meant a lot. I don't think I would have found - what I got from here - anywhere else.

How do you communicate that to other / new fiddlers?  ...or fioddlers that haven't been here?  I do mention FHO to other folks when it seems appropriate, but you can't make folks visit.

Well you guys have certainly educated me…I impressed one of the crossover players today! She said she went to a fiddle festival last weekend and played OT. I said, like Soldier’s Joy, Cumberland Gap, Shove the Pig’s Foot…she was so surprised! She said, “Where did you learn all that…do you play…?” I said, it’s from the fiddle forum I visit. :-)

Actually I run into crossover players a lot around here…OT seems alive and well. Not in need of preserving or life support quite yet!

Hmm well yea, honest points of “friction” for me, although I love this friendly forum:
- Focus on OT makes posts about other genre playing styles/tunes feel a bit irrelevant or unwelcome
- Difficulty of posting media (video, audio, photo) when it’s mostly a drag-and-drop interface on the web these days
- spam posts lately

We seem to have always been very OT centric. The session has Irish/Scottish covered pretty thoroughly. What else is there? Jazz? I'm sure there are jazz forums.

There was a time when we had some bluegrass going on, even had a bluegrass tune of the week/month.

The times they are a-changing I suppose.

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Originally posted by RB-1

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Originally posted by Lonesome Fiddler

As DougD and groundhogpeggy imply above, the banjo doesn't really lend itself to being played in a variety of keys. It's something that, at least in my opinion, makes it considerably less flexible when you bring it to a jam or an organized live music session. If the jam leader or somebody else decides to play a tune in C when the last few tunes were played in A, you're pretty much out of luck unless you're a wiz at quickly re-tuning your axe. It's like a 'ukulele. You might as well put the instrument aside and amble to the bar.

Things become even more confounding when a fellow jammer insists everybody play in Bb...probably because it's the only key he/she can sing in.

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Dear Ed,

this is a common misconception.

If need be, I'd play banjo in any key, just not all at the same time....

Bb is a common key for singing, as is B. Listen how Kenny Baker handled this.

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Yeah, true, but as you say it's tough to change the key on the sly.  It's a good thing I wasn't accompanying my wife on the banjo couple of minutes ago when she was singing Me and Bobby McGee while accompanying herself on guitar. For the final verse she likes to modulate the key from G to A. By the time I could'a gotten my banjo cranked up to the new pitch, the song would'a been over.

LIke Tony says (Tony the Tiger Sez too...lol), I'm just used to this and really don't want anymore hassles in my life, like looking for other forums or whatever there is out there...FB groups and such, whatever...I don't even know what's out there. Also, like Tony says...I joined up FHO just as I was starting out to play the fiddle...I remember the long back and forth discussions...quasi "arguments" back and forth, but usually still friendly and very instructive, as far as giving fiddlers a lot of stuff to think about. I mean, how to go about playing the instrument, I mean in the folksie kind of ways, is just all over the place...there's so much you can do, so many roads to travel or things to try, things to keep and things to toss aside. It's overwhelming for a new fiddler...I learned so much from reading and often participating, even with my total ignorance...lol...in those pages and pages of discussion that used to occur here. I came up with the idea at one point to have a Virtual Fiddle Festival, and a buncha people tried it here and there until life just made it go away...but I was always glad it was here. It truly did help me find paths to explore and eventually find my own way to my fiddling journey.

So many have passed on, meaning, either passing away or just moving on away from FHO...but I sure have appreciated every person I've communicated with or read ideas and thoughts of on this forum. As my life stands at the moment, I find myself having no time to play...not spending as much time online in anyway either...so I miss all of it. But I hope someday, somehow I can get back to it, and like any other instrument I play, I always think of those who helped me along my way on that instrument, each time I pick it up.

I have loved FHO and all the friendly folks here.

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Originally posted by Shawn Craver Fiddler

"What banjo player would have that amount of drive and patience, with so meager a return? "

Yes, exactly . We fiddlers have a responsibility to these lesser among us, these men of low degree who learn not scales on their drummy thing with strings... to guide them... yea, as spiritual guides to inspire some kind of order from their clanging and banging as not to be a rejected abomination...

Leviticus 11:12
Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.

One cannot save the multitudes of these banjar whackers... just as every washed up star fish on the beach cannot be saved, but we must try.

And who knows, sometimes banjo players attract at least one good guitar player to join we fiddlers in our music making...a good guitar player being worth 12 banjar whackers to a fiddler...

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A good banjo player is worth more than a whole band. Staying out of each others way and complement wherever you can, that's what fiddle/banjo is all about.

Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEmUqTt0qCc&list=RDaEmUqTt0qCc&start_radio=1

About those fish scales, a wise person once said: 'Superstition spawns misfortune'...

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Originally posted by Lonesome Fiddler

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Originally posted by RB-1

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Originally posted by Lonesome Fiddler

As DougD and groundhogpeggy imply above, the banjo doesn't really lend itself to being played in a variety of keys. It's something that, at least in my opinion, makes it considerably less flexible when you bring it to a jam or an organized live music session. If the jam leader or somebody else decides to play a tune in C when the last few tunes were played in A, you're pretty much out of luck unless you're a wiz at quickly re-tuning your axe. It's like a 'ukulele. You might as well put the instrument aside and amble to the bar.

Things become even more confounding when a fellow jammer insists everybody play in Bb...probably because it's the only key he/she can sing in.

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Dear Ed,

this is a common misconception.

If need be, I'd play banjo in any key, just not all at the same time....

Bb is a common key for singing, as is B. Listen how Kenny Baker handled this.

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Yeah, true, but as you say it's tough to change the key on the sly.  It's a good thing I wasn't accompanying my wife on the banjo couple of minutes ago when she was singing Me and Bobby McGee while accompanying herself on guitar. For the final verse she likes to modulate the key from G to A. By the time I could'a gotten my banjo cranked up to the new pitch, the song would'a been over.

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I didn't say that (or at least, didn't imply to)...

For a key change in a song, it depends completely on the context what I'd do. In your example, I'd tend to capo up 2, 5th string spike on the 7th fret and play from F positions first, avoiding the 5th string where needed. Then, at the key change, playing as if open G.

Starting off from an F frame up the neck, I'd resort to a two finger pattern, so ably demonstrated by John Boulding; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut-63rOlg38

I tend to throw in my index and middle more there and use the thumb more sparingly, but esentially it's the same.  Hard to find a more 'out of the way, yet effective' back up...

For moving up a whole tone for the last time around, I'd use a C shape as a connection when ging from F shape to open G ( with capo 2 : from G to A) Most important, listen to the (vocal) context and adapt your back up to complement, instead of stepping on the lead.

Problem solved...  In theory, I know...

Then, there's this  'makes it considerably less flexible when you bring it to a jam or an organized live music session. If the jam leader or somebody else decides to play a tune in C when the last few tunes were played in A, you're pretty much out of luck unless you're a wiz at quickly re-tuning your axe.' as you wrote.

To me it's not all that different from playing a gig on stage.

Mandolin ( and fiddle. if present) and bass are pretty much ready  (or allways off pitch, depending...) in micro seconds while guitar and banjo have to reset capo/spikes and fine tune. 

Well... so be it. I consider band members and/or jam leaders not having the patience waiting for this not fit for their task (providing the requirements for the best possible music). Doesn't sound like fun.

But back to the question why BHO has more members than FHO.

My experience is that, on the subject of playing, BHO is much better equipped in dealing with diversity, as FHO breathes a "If you're looking for anything about fiddling, you can find it here (except when it's not Old Time). 

Of course this is an exaggeration, but you'll get the trend.

Like said, when I joined some 4 years ago, shortly after picking up the fiddle again - now finally seriously-, I discovered that information about my interest was sparse and scattered.

In my innocence I proposed having various styles having their own forum niche as with BHO.

The answer: 'No we don't do that', followed by some strange explanation that didn't make any sense at all. Except maybe when the aim would be keeping FHO a foremost Old Time forum.

Such a pity, as I have learned so much from articles (thank you Rich Maxham (sp?)) in the Building, Set Up and Repair forum, my No. 1 reason to stick here after all.

O well, there's worse things in the world...

Joking aside, I think categories could be beneficial for different styles...

I think old time gets a lot of attention mostly due to the dogmatic feelings about it. Dispelling dogma has been a large part of the dynamics of this site and I think that's been positive.

One more vote for adding categories.

Bruno, I found this old thread with you in it. Just from reading the responses on this archived thread, people were responding to as if status quo couldn't change. I think by that point, which was the near past, people were already using different platforms as mentioned above. But it was very .clear that most people seemed to really dismiss the idea. It's almost as if they thought people would silo themselves in the specific forums (say, bluegrass or Irish) and in turn miss something of value in another forum. Maybe some would, I personally read everything at least once. If I'm not interested, I don't go back (sometimes ).

I'm also on BHO (do not play the banjo or want to lol) and I will read pretty much everything, I find much of it interesting from the collecting and repairs to the musical styles and off topic stuff. The locked threads are entertaining, like a soap opera or the Jerry Springer Show. And that's sometime we don't have with our tiny community - no one is being an ass and getting banned these days. But back when the daily community was near peak, we did have someone who got kicked off several times via several different user accounts. Silver lining?  Fiddling doesn't seem to have that much minutiae to talk about.

When I joined in the late 2000s FHO was already firmly established as old time discussion, or so it seemed to me. Not sure we'll ever have the critical mass to change anything about that now.

Edit: forgot to link the thread!

https://www.fiddlehangout.com/archive/52023

I wonder what they style of Hank Williams' fiddler would be called? I truly think that's possibly my favorite fiddling...but there's never enough of it in a H.W. song of course. You hear that in other places too, though...sorta like very old country with a sprinkling of OT leftovers??? I do like some BG, and that is some difficult finding...but when it goes all hectic and metallic my nerves get shattered. I don't get into hectic sounds that much, as much as I admire those who are good at doing that sort of thing...I just don't like the sound of it much.

As to capoing...yeah, really if you get above the 2nd fret it sounds like your instrument has been huffing the party balloons...lol. That can be an issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Rivers


"At the suggestion of Williams' mentor, the producer and publisher Fred Rose, he adopted a characteristic double-stop style of bowing: playing the melody and harmony simultaneously on two strings. It was a style that Hank dismissed as "garden seed" fiddle, but one which served Rivers well on many of Williams' greatest recordings..."

Hey, I enjoy the banjo a ton. I always have a good time playing it, and I am okay when I gotta stuff a rag into the back of the device when the durned ben-jur finds itself a tad too noisy to be polite in mixed company. Maybe I've mentioned this before, as well, but I get a kick out of it that the word "banjo" is decidedly off-color in the Japanese language.

This may be a feeble-minded question, but ... what did Hank mean by '"garden seed" fiddle' (other than that it was apparently a kind of fiddling that didn't appeal to him)? Anyone?

Was about to ask the same. 

I did see something about something that is "meant to please" but when I followed the link, that phrase was nowhere to be found so.... It could be like, that fiddling is just window dressing, if that phrase means anything to you. Fancy for the sake of being fancy?