Category Archives: Shuffle

Intro to Shuffle Bowing Video Lesson

A few years ago I wrote a quick overview of shuffle-bowing and posted it here on my blog. It hasn’t escaped my attention that this entry gets more traffic than just about anything I’ve written. So apparently I’m not the only fiddler out there thinking about shuffle bowing!

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, shuffle bowing is simply a repeated bow pattern that fiddlers use to create a driving rhythm. At least in bluegrass and old-time music, we don’t use drums, so fiddlers, the groove is almost entirely in your hands. Shuffle bowing is far and away the most important technique to know when it comes to groove creation.

Here’s a video lesson on shuffle bowing I just uploaded to my Youtube channel. If you click on the link below and subscribe to my email newsletter, I’ll send you the practice tunes that accompany the video.

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Shuffle Bowing

[1/17/2018: check out my new video lesson on shuffle bowing below] A student once told me that Bruce Molsky in his fiddle workshops calls the violin bow a “rhythm stick.” I love that! Calling the bow a rhythm stick gets to the heart of what makes fiddling distinct from violin playing, and that of course is…Continue Reading