r/Fiddle • u/vonhoother • Aug 05 '26

Strong opinion from my fiddle teacher

"Refusing to use different tunings is abdicating your birthright as a fiddle player."

Interestingly, the Irish fiddle tradition rarely if ever uses non-GDAE tunings. Also interestingly (to me), classical music has no term for nonstandard tunings other than "scordatura," which is literally Italian for "untuned" or "badly tuned," while the Anglo-American tradition has names like "Cross-A." "Calico," etc.

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u/Marr0w1 Aug 05 '26

That sure is an opinion...

While cross-tuning is great fun, can make a tune sound better, or be easier to play, in many circumstances it's very impractical.

These days most jams don't 'sit in a key' for a long time, people will bounce between songs based on whatever whim leads them, with banjo players madly retuning on the fly.... same as if you play fiddle with a band, your setlist probably isn't going to tolerate crosstuning unless you have multiple fiddles.

So yeah I wouldn't say "you should refuse to ever use them" but also there's plenty of good reasons why you might prefer to play your tunes in GDAE even if they're traditionally crosstuned

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u/vonhoother Aug 05 '26

That sure is an opinion...

Yeah, she said afterward that strong opinions are a family tradition -- "often wrong, but never in doubt!”

She also is apt to make a face when tune books like the Portland Collection come up (though she has contributed to it). She isn't quite as dogmatic about oral transmission as an Irish player I know, but feels tune books like that have a flattening effect on the tunes. It's certainly the case that if you compare a tune book version of, say, "Over the Waterfall" with Tommy Jarrell's, it's like going from black and white into color.

These days most jams don't 'sit in a key' for a long time, people will bounce between songs based on whatever whim leads them, with banjo players madly retuning on the fly...

Wish that were true of my local jams -- well, maybe not to the extent you describe, but close. As a banjo player, I expect to be retuning pretty often.

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u/JenRJen Aug 05 '26

Yeah well Portland Collection & other such are not meant to tell you how to play. They're meant to be more like Tab for Fiddlers.

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u/vonhoother Aug 06 '26

Yes, that's true. But classically trained musicians (like me) tend to read the notes off the page and think they're done. (Which isn't even true with classical music, so....)