NORTH EAST FIDDLE SCHOOL

SAVE THE DATE!

Saturday 7th January, 2023
9.30 am – 10.00 pm

Join us for our first NEFS Virtual Winter Workout – a day of fully-online fiddle tuition on Zoom.

There will be live Zoom fiddle workshops, fiddle technique sessions, play-along tune sessions with spots from our tutors, plus a chat event and video tutorials. Events will be aimed at all abilities of fiddle player from competent beginner through to advanced, led by guest tutors Kevin Lees and Grace Smith, alongside our regular tutor Stewart Hardy for the weekend, and an exclusive video tutorial from Melissa Whitehead.

Plenty of breaks are scheduled, drop in and out of the workshops as you choose during the day, and there are some chat events to break up the day! Call recordings of the workshops will be available after the event if you miss anything on the day.

The evening before, Friday 6th January, Stewart will host an evening play-along session for all instruments, with harmony lines and chord suggestions provided. This will be available as a separate event, as well as part of the Virtual Winter Workout.

*** Updates will be posted on the Virtual Winter Workout page!

NEFS Residential Weekend

We are very excited to be brining you our first ever NEFS Residential Weekend!

This will be a chance to meet and socialise with other NEFS participants, extending our in-person Saturday workshop for the block. The weekend will run from 5pm on Friday 2nd December through to Sunday 4th December, finising with Sunday lunch. There are many different ways in which you can join us – from just the usual Saturday workshop, through to the full residential weekend, but with a variety of different options in between. All the packages (including extending your Saturday with dinner, a concert and a session, adding Friday evening or Sunday morning with bed & breakfast, plus non-residential options) are available on the NEFS Residential Weekend page.

The weekend will be held at the beautiful Retreat House, Shepherds Dene, near Riding Mill in Northumberland. Stewart and Ali will be with you all weekend, encourging music making and tune sharing throughout. All food and accommodation is provided by the venue, and we are looking forward to a wonderful relaxing and enjoyable weekend. We hope you can join us!

We have had a wonderful year so far at NEFS. The online Zoom workshops have been very well attended, and we have been working on our left hand technique, as well as extending our bowing patterns to give us more choices when we play the tunes we love. We have expanded our repertoire of “Live Tunes” – ones that we learn live on Zoom and can then all play together when we meet up. These have been the core of our sessions which end our Saturday in-person workshop days, and have been extremely rewarding, both in terms of improving our technique and learning new tunes, as well as playing together in sessions. Even when Stewart suffered from COVID-19 in June, we were lucky enough to have the amazing Sophy Ball stand in and teach us yet another brilliant tune.

Stewart and Melissa have created some excellent video tutorials for us each block, and these are available to refer back to at any time. Their teaching is extremely clear, informative and easy to play along with, so it is just like being in a workshop, with the added benefit of the rewind function!

NEFS Virtual Summer School 2022 – postponed

Unfortunately, we have decided that the Virtual Summer School will be postponed this year, as it just wasn’t possible to get the organisational side in place in time. Also, the only weekend we had available to run it in the summer was the bank holiday, and many of our regular participants have told us they will be away. So we are making plans to run it again, maybe in the new year. Kevin Lees and Grace Smith are still as keen to work with us as we are with them, so we can look forward to more great workshops in the future.

This autumn, we will be continuing with the same Online and Saturday Workshop model for Blocks 5 and 6, running from September to December. We have some exciting plans in progress for some surprise video tutorials, as well as the possibility of an in-person weekend around our Saturday workshop in December. This would be a weekend of sessions, meals together and time to relax and get to know each other better. There might even be an extra tune workshop on the Sunday morning. Look out for more information if you would be interested in joining us for that.

Many thanks for your support over this past academic year. We hope you enjoy your summer, and any fiddle playing you get at festivals or with friends. If you are interested in extra fiddle teaching, check out Stewart’s website for more Zoom workshops, and some in-person JSArts residential weekends this autumn. We hope you will join us again soon!

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.

Well, the title just about sums it up! We are continuing to run our online option but are also adding some elements of in-person workshops for those who are happy to attend. The Online option has in-depth Video Tutorials, teaching technique and tunes which you can watch at your own convenience and replay as many times as you wish, combined with weekly Zoom calls. The calls take place on a Wednesday evening for five weeks and incoporate Fiddle Practice, a Technical Nugget, and the teaching of a couple of tunes (one new to NEFS, and another which was previously taught in a block pre-COVID!) It is great to join the call, knowing everyone else is doing the same from their own houses (or indeed holiday homes or caravans!) and get a sense of community. All the calls are recorded though, so if you aren’t available for a week, or possibly for any of them live, you can watch them back and take part at any time).

Our in-person options include two Thursday evenings, where we are focusing on the joy of playing together, and helping us to prepare to play in other music sessions. Popular session tunes will be taught, along with general skills for picking up tunes by ear, and the second half of each evening will be a session, using the common repertoire we have learnt in these workshops, and at previous times.

We are also holding a full day of workshops on one Saturday in each block. These are based on the same in-depth technique and tune workshops which used to take place on a Wednesday evening at Westfield School. However, in order to allow those who would need to travel further the chance to attend, we are holding them as a complete day. Melissa and Stewart will both teach tunes during the day, aiming to make them accessible to all, with ideas to stretch the more able players, and we will finish the day with a session together.

For more details about the current or upcoming block, please visit the Classes page, and places can be booked in the Shop.

We have a new Instagram account to share with you! If you are an Instagram user, or just want to see what we are getting up to, please follow our profile page and like some of our posts. Huge thanks to Melissa for kickstarting this and getting the content up and running!

https://www.instagram.com/northeastfiddleschool/

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So that was 2020! The year that NEFS embraced online learning through video tutorials and live Zoom calls. We can’t thank you enough for your support, especially through the trickier times as we migrated rather suddenly at the start of lockdown back in March, and navigated the steep learning curves of video and audio editing, online bookings, more reliance on the website, and not least of all, Zoom!

One upside was that we have been able to welcome new participants from further afield, and also those who couldn’t make Wednesday evenings – with recordings of the Zoom calls available you can access all of the materials at any time of the day or night! Sadly, not all of our regulars have been able to join in online, so we hope it won’t be too long before we can meet again in person.

In the meantime, we have planned 2021 Block 1 Online and bookings are now open. We have decided to reduce the quantity of material slightly (but not the quality!), so that there will be two new tunes for each of Level 2 and 3, one aimed at the entry standard to that level, so well within your comfort zone, and one a little more challenging. Focusing on two tunes for 5 weeks will allow for some more in-depth study, and less anxiety about ‘keeping up’. All participants will have access to both Levels’ tunes, so if you are looking for more of a challenge there will be enough to keep you occupied. There are also the Live Teaching tunes, which will be taught on Zoom calls to add to your ‘playable from memory’ repertoire.

We hope you will join us again – and we always welcome new participants! So, if your New Year’s resolution is to improve your fiddle playing in a friendly and supportive community of adult learners, this could be just for you! You can read more details about the block on the Classes page, and online bookings are open now.

We had a fantastic time at the Virtual Summer School this block, and as we prepare for the next block of online classes we want to add some more of that live experience into our weekly meetings.

So we are adding a Live Teaching element which will follow on from the Fiddle Practice Calls on a Wednesday evening. These will be 45 minutes of Core Repertoire building, reinforcing the fundamentals of fiddle playing with some fun and accessible tunes. Players of both ability levels are welcome and notation will be provided although the tunes will be taught as if by ear. There will be some new tunes to expand your repertoire, and there will also be some tunes which have been taught in previous NEFS blocks or at other workshops. By revisiting these, and ‘learning’ them again by ear with a reminder of finger and bowing patterns and the groove of the tune, they will become more familiar and easier to play. Recordings of the Live Teaching calls will be available each week in case you have to miss one, or experience technical difficulties, or if indeed you prefer to work from YouTube rather than Zoom.

If you would like to take part in these calls or to have access to the Recordings, you can sign up now and make sure you tick the Block 5 Online with Live Teaching (£59) option on the Block 5 Booking Form. If you would prefer to stick to the Video Tutorials and Fiddle Practice Calls, please select the Block 5 Online standard (£47) option. Payment can then be made through the Shop using a bank transfer, cheque or PayPal.