BRAS Fiddle Tunes Jam

Get off the couch and come on out for a jam! Playing at home is one thing, but playing with others is a whole new level; sometimes challenging, always fun. The Colorado Springs Senior Center provides us with a great space for playing together. If there are jam beginners, we’ll dedicate the first 20 minutes of the jam to going slow (at least in my jams), taking it easy and bringing new folks up to speed. Then we’ll pick it up. Now let’s be honest. The first time you go to a jam, you’re drinking from a fire hose. If you don’t know the songs, it’s worse. But you find one song you like, go home and learn it, and the next time you show up, you’re ready with that one song. Then you find a second song, and so forth. It takes a while to get a handle on these, but the process of learning, then playing with others, is what makes it so rewarding. Materials: For our jams, there are downloadable materials at dayjobmusic.com/downloads.htm for just about everything we do.

As always, this jam isn’t just for fiddles; it’s for anyone who wants to play fun, traditional dance tunes such as “Soldier’s Joy,” “Old Joe Clark,” etc. There are two downloadable files for this: one is the Fiddle Tune Jam compilation on the download page listed on our website. It has a good starter set of fiddle tunes, and on the main downloads page on our webiste, there’s also a good set of downloadable recordings that you can play with. We’ve also been working from Dave Firestine’s Carpilation book, which is bodaciously large and fun; also available at the download page. Make sure you have plenty of paper; maybe 3-hole punched; it’s 22 megabytes and about 180 pages.