Turkey In The Straw - Bluegrass Fiddle Lessons

Hi there, I’m Ian Walsh with OnlineLessonVideos.com. You just heard a version of me playing that old tune Turkey in the Straw. You might have noticed that I am playing in the key of G. That’s the key we were going learning it in today and we will get right into breaking this down note by note, but before we do that, I’m going to start of by showing you some common double stops in the key of G that you could play on the Fiddle. So, here we go. Let’s kick it off today with Turkey in the Straw.

So, let’s pull our bow across the G and the D string here. And this is going to be our first double stop in this lesson. This is a very simple one, it’s just, your two open strings played together. And this is the fifth because they are fives notes away from each other, the G from the D. So, we play this one big long bow. Okay.

[Demonstration]

Let’s move to our middle two strings. Take a look at a double staff there. This is going to be G and a B. So, we play at G, it’s a little bit trickier, we have to use our fingers. And that’s your third finger right here played on the D string in the G position. Again, to match that up, now I take this first finger that’s hanging out down here and put it up to a B on the A string. And now, put those two together and you have a nice G double staff. That’s the G with the B.

Now, let’s move to our A and E and see what we can do there? We’re going to keep that B right where it was and we’re going to add in a G on the E string. This G is on the low two positions what I sometimes called the lower—

So, fret there and you put that first finger right behind it on the A string. And you’ve got a nice high double stuff there. So, those three double staff stuffs will let’s review again, open G and D as big down bow. Let’s go over with an up bow for this middle one G and B and down bow for the B and G.

Let’s get started with the tune. Some of these double stops are going to be in it especially that middle one. Think a lot of these notes which I’m going to show you right now circle around these two notes B and G. So, this tune starts of with the A pick-up which all kind—so, if I counted in one, two, three, four, we play a B and an A. We have the down B is going to be B, A, G.

So, those three notes, let’s just try that down bow up bow down bow, one, two, three, four and a little bit slower one, two, three, four. Okay. So, from here we will dissect these notes just from that G. So, we will come back to that B, A pick-up again but it’s good to know where your first down B is when you're playing this tune if you somehow run out of time at the end to fit in that B, A. It’s good to know you can just play this down beat as G. So, you can start right here.

So, these notes are G, F, G. And now there’s an A coming up here. And I like to use my fourth finger just to stay on the string. So I play, ending on the G. As I go through those notes a few times, one more time. Now we will try it once more using an open edge just for the sake of practice. Here we go. Now, you can see after I shift my bow hand there to negotiate and get up to that A string, whereas with the fourth finger and keep my bow arm pretty much in a straight line without having to move it too much.

So from these notes, we play and move to our open D string. And we’re going to go to some low notes here on the G coming up so we play. Let’s break that down D, B, C, D, E, D, B, D. And let’s put that together with the notes we have here, the G, F, G. And then let’s incorporate that double stop we have in the very beginning, the B and the G. So, when we start the tune, we’re going to play B, A, G but we’re going to put that B right back down. So, it looked like this.

So, this is just one way of adding in a double stop into your plan, one that’s already built-in to the tune. So we start of again, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three. Let’s move onto the next section.