I've always been a bit of a "chordy" clawhammer player. This probably stems from the fact that I've spent a lot of time playing in a band without a guitar, or more often than not, in a duo (fiddle and banjo). In these settings, the role of the guitar falls to me to some extent - I'm the only one who can play full  chord shapes. I first grasped the power of adding chords to fiddle tune arrangements while playing solo banjo during my busking days. I was always trying to make my tunes sound fuller and soon realized I made better money when I could manage to give the listener some chord information - nothing like money for artistic inspiration! I got pretty good at popping the chords in while I was playing a tune without losing too much of the melody. 

 

In this workshop, I will share some of what I've learned about this subject: incorporating chords into your fiddle-tune arrangements and into your backup playing. 

 

 

Right-Hand techniques - You'd think that a workshop on adding chords would focus mostly on the left-hand - chord formations and voicings. But much of what we will be looking at is what the right hand needs to do to seamlessly incorporate chords into our arrangements without losing drive and fluidity. We will look at how variations on the basic clawhammer strokes, skipped beats, roll patterns, and strumming all come into play. 

 

Chord Shapes and Voicings - I'll show you the chord voicings that I find most useful and applicable in G and Double C tunings. Although those are the two tunings I'll focus on in the workshop, the written and video overview of the workshop will include examples of a tune and chord shapes in G modal and F tuning (FDGCD). Once you become familiar with your chord voicings, you can start to connect the dots between common melody notes and where they exist in different chords. This allows you to start merging the melody with the harmony (chord changes). 

 

Movement Within the Chords - Being able to hammer-on to whole chords as well as hammering-on and pulling-off individual notes within a chord is one of the keys to your success. We'll look at how that's done and work on some exercises that focus on this skill. 

 

Give and Take - Melody/Chord Balance - Just like a picture can paint a thousand words, a chord can sometimes take the place of a bunch of notes. When you start adding chords, you often have to take out some melody notes or "blur" the melody a bit. This can be confusing for some folks - it challenges you to hold the melody a little more loosely. We'll examine how this works in real-time and how it plays into one of my dirty little secrets - when I come up against a particularly gnarly phrase in a fiddle tune, more often than not, I just replace it with a chord. 

 

Kilby Snow's Shady Grove - This melody will serve as our touchstone for this workshop. We will look at it in both Double C and G tuning. Apart from being a lovely melody, it has some really nice chord movement in it. I'll show you how I would incorporate the chords into an arrangement using the right-hand elements mentioned above and many of the chord shapes. Kilby Snow's version is quite different from the more common modal melody. 

Listen - Here's a video of Kilby playing and singing his version. 
Listen - Here's a more contemporary version that I found from a band called Echo Mountain

 

 

Pre-Workshop Material - I'll send you an email two weeks before the workshop with some things I want you to be familiar with before the workshop. This will include a few right-hand patterns and some chord shapes. I'll also ask you to become familiar with the basic melody for Kilby Snow's Shady Grove. 

 

Live Workshop - On May 31 at 2 pm Eastern Time, I'll go live on Zoom and you are invited to join me. You'll be sent an invite when you sign up for the workshop. If you can't make the workshop live, you will be sent a link where you can watch the video at your convenience after the fact. The live workshop will be around 2 hours long (sometimes they go a bit longer, sometimes shorter). I'll take questions at the end of the program. 

 

Support Material - If you've taken my workshops before, you'll know that I put a lot of time into the support material for these things. After the workshop, you'll be sent (emailed) a package with a written overview which includes tabs and chord charts for what we cover. In addition to Shady Grove in G and C tuning, there will be at least 5 other tunes for you to work through on your own. Usually, the booklet is between 20-30 pages. There will also be a video demo of anything that I tab (all tunes and exercises).