Fiddlesticks: Jam Buddies Workshop

Fiddlesticks. No, I’m not swearing.

Today was a day of Fiddle playing and Cajon drumming for our Jam Buddies Half Term Workshop. I arrived slightly late, so was introduced to everyone who had already started making their own beats on the Cajons. The beats were in the rhythm of their favourite foods! We had bacon and eggs, roast potatoes and lumpy onion gravy and burgers and chips amongst others. I introduced my chosen beat, ‘Karpatka’, which is a Polish cake. We all decided on our favourites, and then put them together to form a full drum beat. We played this together and recorded it, and it sounded AMAZING.

As soon as we have all of the recordings we will be sure to share them with you via SoundCloud and YouTube.

We then moved on to the artistic part of the day. We drew, painted and designed the artwork that will form the CD cover for the release of our Christmas CD, which will include songs written throughout the year. I won’t give away the designs, but they look very cool.

The final part of our day was with Becky, who came to teach us how to play the fiddle (or violin). This  part of the day was the bit a lot of us were very excited about! Becky started by showing us how to play the fiddle in the best way, and how to hold it. She taught us pizzicato, which is plucking the strings, how to use the bow, and also fiddlesticks, which is using things like pens to hit the strings to make a different sound. Once we had all played and practised, we put together a Halloween themed song which told a story of a boy walking through the woods, and something scary happening to him after meeting a werewolf.

We all decided how each part of the story would sound, and what technique we were going to use to make that sound. With Becky narrating, we played the story through, and once we felt it was ready, we recorded it. The story came to life in a scary and awesome way. We finished our day with some folk dancing and playing, combining the cajon with the fiddle. Dom and Kier were our expert dancers, and this finished off what was an awesome day!

Written by Ben Pidgeon, Published by Dominic Palfreman