Power Stroke Fiddle Lesson

Kick Your Fiddle Tune into High Gear
with the Power Stroke

Whether you are playing for contra dancers, a festival crowd, or just for yourself in your own living room,
you can add rhythm, and a bump of excitement by using the Power Stroke.

This move is not difficult. If you can play three or four hoedowns with your speed up to 80 clicks a minute,
it’s time for you to add this “advanced technique” to your repertory.

In this lesson the Power Stroke will be thoroughly explained. You can see what it looks like in a tab chart.
You can hear it by downloading the MP3 files from the indicated links. You can apply it to Ida Red.

That tune is in my book 43 Fiddle Tunes in Tab. So, it may be familiar already. Knowing this tune gives
you a head start on learning the power stroke. I like to use Ida Red for this technique because it is familiar.
Students can focus their attention on the new move and not have to think about getting through a tune.

Anticipation and Accent

Anticipation, in music, means doing something before it is expected. In this case we will start playing a note
just before it normally would begin.
Accent means giving an emphasis to the beginning of the note. We just use a little more bow pressure or
speed to make a louder sound. Then, we continue playing normally.

Before and After

We will take a few bars of Ida Red as an example of what happens to a tune when you add the Power Stroke.
Below is the first five bars of the tune. (Most fiddle tunes have an A part and a B part.) We are looking at the
A part with the first bar of the repeat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next example shows what the tune looks like in tab with the Power Stroke added at the end of the phrase.
As you can see, the last two notes of the shuffle are not played. Instead, the first note of the phrase is played early.
That’s the anticipation. If you can add just a little bow pressure, you give it an accent as well.

To hear what this difference sounds like, click the play button.

The next example gets us from the A part to the B part with the Power Stroke. In this case we need to fudge our
finger over to the E string. (Not lifting it off the A and placing it on the E. That would create an in between sound
that is not wanted.) When you move your finger this way, it’s partly a rolling over the tip sideways and just moving
the finger tip to the next string without lifting it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An explanation of the numbers at the beginning of each bar might be handy. Those numbers count the measures or bars.
To get a better picture of how this works, look at the tab charts with bar numbers in two formats. One is with the repeat
signs, and the other is without the repeat signs: Ida Red with and without repeat signs

There’s a way to get into this technique that is easy. My students pick this up in the studio in five or ten minutes by doing
a little drill. The drill takes the last bar with the anticipated note and carries it one or two beats into the next bar. See the
example of the drill for the part A power stroke below.

 

 

 

The way to do any drill is to repeat it. Take three times as a minimum. There is power in the number three. Do the drill
three times in a row with no flubs. Then go on to something else. Come back again and do the drill again. This is the
most basic approach to doing drills. Click the play button and hear the drill.

For the B part, the drill would look like this:

 

 

 

And it sounds like this:

What does it sound like when you do the drills accurately?

 

The repetition of a short section three times is a basic practice technique. If you have not yet mastered it,
this is a good opportunity.

Elan