Sheebeg Sheemore Fiddle Lesson with Ian Walsh

Hey there, welcome to onlinelessonvideos.com. I'm Ian Walsh. Today, I'll be teaching you a sample of the tune you just heard. It's a piece by Turlough O'Carolan called Sheebeg Sheemore. It's in the key of D. I'll break it down for you note for note so you can play along with me in the video as we learn it. Then, we’ll go back and add in some ornamentation.

Mainly in this tune which is a slower tune, we’re going to want to use just some double stops and then also some vibrato which you saw and heard in the video. So, let's get started with today’s lesson Sheebeg Sheemore.

All right, so the first thing I'm going to do here is—

[Demonstration]

Play my A and my D string together, these two again is in the key of D. So it's really good to be really familiar with the D scale. But I'm just going to walk up my A string—

[Demonstration]

Make sure that my two Ds sound alike there. I'm just playing the D in the A string—

[Demonstration]

When I put that B on there, that creates like a G double stop. It was at C# and then the D—

[Demonstration]

So again, you should be really familiar with your D scale and not just from D to D here in the middle but the other notes are kind of outside of the scale. So, if you started on the G—

[Demonstration]

And another B there for first position—

[Demonstration]

And the G—

[Demonstration]

So those are the notes. We won't be using anything on the G string for this lesson. So the beginning of Sheebeg Sheemore here, we start on the D—

[Demonstration]

And you’ve got your D in tune. You know your fiddles in tune, so we start off and here are the notes played very rigidly or just how they should be played. We’ll go into variation before we move on here.

So we start off with D, E, F—

[Demonstration]

Let's just work on that section for a minute. Those are your pickup notes, your D and your E—

[Demonstration]

Then on the downbeat, you have the F and you play two of them—

[Demonstration]

Okay and a nice long D in there. Let's try it again—

[Demonstration]

So, there, I added a grace note very lightly with my second finger—

[Demonstration]

So one other way you can play this and it changes it up a little bit and it's putting a roll into it, this can be tricky to get your timing just right. But this is what it should sound like and we’ll play it slow in a minute.

[Demonstration]

So that’s a roll there. So, two things happened. I got rid off of the two Fs, r4eplace it with one roll and again timing is important because I want to make that roll last just a little bit longer than your normal roll that you might play in a real gig.

[Demonstration]

So, the other thing that changed is my bow. I'm no longer doing two bows for my F notes—

[Demonstration]

Like there, I'm just doing one long bow. So you have to kind of prepare for that, give yourself enough. Make sure when you go into the roll, you have enough bow to complete it.

[Demonstration]

Let's try that one more time—

[Demonstration]

All right, let's move on, continue with the tune.