Tips and techniques for Cajun & Creole fiddlers
These tunes are pretty much all played
in Cajun tuning (DGCF smallest to largest)
which is one whole step down from Standard tuning (EADG),
and the strings are called by their standard tuning names.
Check out my post called “Talk About Cajun Tuning“ for more on that.
Let me know if you have any questions, have fun and stay inspired!
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Hi! I’m Mitch Reed. My vlog this week is on Cajun and Creole Blues. I just wanted to talk a little bit about the origins of that. Some of the people I was lucky to study with: Wade Frugé, Canray Fontenot, Dennis McGee, those people. Definitely there was a mixture, Creole and Cajun big influence on the blues so…One of the first guys I think that was so influential for…
Hi, I’m Mitch Reed…welcome to my Vlog! Today I wanted to tell a little bit of a story about what I just finished doing. I went on a trip with Michael Doucet and David Doucet. We went to Appalachia and we got together with a guy named Chester McMillan and he was Tommy Jarrell’s guitar player. And so we got together, played some tunes, it was really fun. Michael got…
Hi! I’m Mitch Reed and welcome to my vlog. Today I’m going to talk about ornamentation in Cajun music. So, the decoration that you add to a tune once you’ve learned the notes. So you can take a tune that’s real simple, maybe we’ll do that, we’ll take… I just broke down Pistache à Tante Nana and that’s a pretty straight melody and maybe what we can do is I’ll…
Hi! Welcome. My name is Mitch Reed and I’m gonna talk a little bit about what I call The Lost Tunes. The reason I’m bringing this up is I was gonna break down some tunes this week on my website. I have tunes you just don’t hear that much about and one of them is Galop which is a type of fast dance tune, like a two-step or a reel.…
Hey! How’s it going today? I’m Mitch Reed and I thought it would be fun to talk today about the top ten Cajun records that have really influenced me on the fiddle. These are the top ten recordings that I have found a lot of inspiration to listen to and that I feel that helped me to become a better fiddler. There are also recordings that I recommend for my private students…
By the way, you can’t see my face because I have the camera focused on my feet…A lot of people have asked me questions about it so I thought I would do a Vlog on it and just basically explain what I do and how I learned to do it. I actually learned from my first teacher, Mr. Adner Ortego of Grand Prairie, Louisiana. He lived in an old wooden…
Hi…Welcome to my Vlog! Today I thought I would talk a little bit about vibrato…A lot of times when I break down tunes, when I play real slow, a lot of y’all will see me when I’m holding a long note especially…do that little shake with my hand. And that’s what vibrato is, it basically gives a note some kind of flux or shakiness. It makes the note interesting is…
Hi! Welcome to my vlog…today I’m going to talk about playing 2 strings at a time. Double strings, double stops, droning, all that kind of stuff… So if you’re a beginner, if you’ve been playing for a year or maybe you’re going on your second year, you might have been playing two years…it really depends on how often you pick up the fiddle. If you pick it up every day you’re…
It’s the week of St. Patrick’s day and I thought it might be a little interesting to talk about the Irish influence in Cajun music or some people call it Scotch-Irish, Scotch-Irish being more of the people who settled the Appalachian mountains from Northern Ireland. And, we also did have a lot of Irish that came here, to Louisiana, during the Spanish land grants when Spain owned Louisiana, the two…
Hi! Welcome to my vlog. Today I’m going to talk about chords again. A lot of people have been asking me (now that I’m posting a lot of tunes, and breaking a lot of tunes down). It’s like “What are the chords? What do you do with the chords? How do you figure out the chords? Chords! Chords! Chords!” Well, chords are a huge part of Cajun fiddle, especially modern-day, today’s…
Hi! Welcome to my Vlog. Today I thought it would be kind of fun to talk about the three different Mardi Gras songs that you’ll hear played on the fiddle and the accordion as well. If you come down here to South-West Louisiana, especially for Mardi Gras Day and the weeks leading up to Mardi Gras, and you go out dancing, and you go to parties and stuff, you’ll hear…
Hi! Thanks for joining me today on my blog and I’m gonna talk about today the difference between a tune and a song. You know sometimes, really honestly I think anytime somebody says, “Oh, let’s play this song” or “Let’s play this tune,” I mean we all know what that means. It’s just if you wanna be more specific about the types of tunes…of course you have two-steps, waltzes, one-steps,…
Hi, welcome to my blog today…and today I’m talking about playing Cajun and Creole music on different instruments. So this was actually the first instrument that I learned to play when I was a kid. It’s called a cello and it’s a big violin basically. But recently I’ve been teaching a couple of cello players around Lafayette, Cajun and Creole music on this instrument. I started out playing some classical…
Hi! I’m Mitch Reed. Welcome to my fiddle blog and today I was going to talk a little bit about chords, what chords are good to learn first and also how you can apply them when you go to a jam session. So this is a good video for someone who’s just starting out on the fiddle…and basically I was going to talk about also the keys that you’ll usually…
Hi! I’m Mitch Reed. Welcome to my fiddle blog today. I wanted to talk about some things that people have been asking about and it’s really just talking about “if you go to a jam what to expect?”. You know there are not a lot of rules but there’s kind of a typical arrangement and so that’s one of the first thing I was going to talk about was a…
Hi, welcome to my fiddle blog. Here I just talk about a few things, some suggestions about learning and what to expect when you’re first starting out on the fiddle. One of the things I want to talk about today was just practicing in a real practical way because I know that a lot of you have a full-time jobs and careers and have a really busy schedule. So when…
That was a tune called “The Bigfoot Reel” and I wrote this tune after being chased out of the woods at my family camp right outside of Melville, Louisiana, by a Sasquatch or a Bigfoot. I didn’t really know what it was at the time and did some research and found out that’s what it was. So those of you all who know me know I’m a huge Bigfoot fan.…
Hi! Welcome to my vlog about what type of fiddle to choose. There are a couple of different styles of Cajun fiddle and those styles have tones that match them. One of the first fiddles that I owned and liked a lot was a warm sounding fiddle and I think I just kinder to me because I was a beginner. I played right off the fingerboard so that it gave it a…
Alright! Welcome. I’m gonna talk a little bit about what we call Cajun Tuning. And so what Cajun tuning is it’s one whole step down from Standard tuning. So Standard tuning would be what we would tune a violin, from the little strings, E-A-D-G. But because the C accordion is so popular in Cajun music we play a lot of songs in the key of C andG. The Cajun style…
