Happy new year, everyone! We hope you had a relaxing and enjoyable time over the festive season. Now we are looking ahead to 2022 and are excited to be getting started with more wonderful fiddle tuition from Melissa and Stewart.

This block, 2022 Block 1, which will run from Weds 19th Jan to 16th Feb will have both online and in-person options. The Wednesday evening Zoom calls will continue as before, with fiddle practice, technical nuggets and live tunes taught to add to our core repertoire.

For the video tutorials, we are offering two brand new tunes, one each from Melissa and Stewart, and these will be aimed at Level 2 and Level 3 respectively. The third set of video tutorials will be a revision tune from a very early online block at NEFS. This is in response to those who requested more time to go over things they have previously learnt, in addition to freeing up a little more time for Melissa and Stewart in their busy teaching schedules. For some of you this will also be a new tune – so lots to get your teeth into! The tunes have been chosen to address the request to have more tunes which go together well in a set, and to talk more about set building in general, which both Melissa and Stewart will do this block. As we are offering less quantity of videos this block, we hope you will have more time to get into the depth of tuition that is offered, and to further explore the bowing, ornamentation and groove of the tunes. We are also not putting up our prices this block to reflect the reduction of new material.

We are also offering an in-person full day workshop on Saturday 5th February. Full details are available on the Classes page, and we hope lots of you will come along and learn some new tunes, consolidate your technique, and join us in an afternoon session playing some of our core repertoire. If you can’t make the whole day, but wish to join us for the session, please get in touch. The day will be run in accordance with our COVID-secure workshop guidelines, and the local situation will be taken into account before we go ahead. If we have to cancel to keep people safe, refunds will be given.

We aren’t running the Thursday evening workshops this block. With COVID, along with winter coughs and colds, and with the dark, wintry evenings of January and February, we don’t think attendance would be high enough to make the evening work well. Apologies if would have wanted to come – we hope you can join us online, or for the Saturday workshop or session. We will look at running evening workshops again in the Spring.