5 Great Fiddle Licks - One Basic Concept

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:01]We're going to look at a very basic concept today, which is really effective and it's great for building fiddle licks. So, the concept is basically leaving out the fourth degree of the major scale. Simple as that.

[00:00:13]So, let's look at the scale of A.

[00:00:15]So, we'll start on our low A.

[00:00:18]And we'll play this over two octaves.

[00:00:20]So, the scale will simply be A, B, C sharp, and we leave out the D at this point. We move over to our E, F sharp, G sharp, then open A, B, C sharp, leave out the D at this point, E, F sharp, G sharp, and up to our high A. So, let's just play that and have a listen to it.

[00:00:45]>> [music] >> Very simple. But, the first lick that we can build from that is simply playing the pattern.

[00:00:55]Let's just play it with a little bit of swing.

[00:01:01]There you go. It's a very effective lick. Let's just change the rhythm of that slightly and we get So, again, that was just playing the pattern and uh we played the first note a little bit longer. We held it for a little bit.

[00:01:17]>> [music] >> And then we made triplets here.

[00:01:21]>> [music] >> And we use one bow per triplet.

[00:01:28]Now, the next lick that we can do is playing the pattern again, but all as triplets this time.

[00:01:38]And we use a separate bow for each triplet.

[00:01:42]>> [music] >> The next pattern is also a triplet pattern.

[00:01:50]>> [music] [music] >> So, what we're doing there is we're repeating a couple of triplets as we're ascending. So >> [music] >> Now we repeat that E, F sharp, G sharp.

[00:02:07]>> [music] >> And onto the A, B, C sharp. Then >> [music] [music] [music] >> This lick is especially effective for getting fast triplet runs.

[00:02:30]And the last little thing that we can do with this is just take a segment of it.

[00:02:34]So let's just take this much.

[00:02:36]>> [music] >> And we're just going to do that ascending and descending. So we get >> [music] [music] >> So that's one bow per triplet as well.

[00:02:54]>> [music] >> And of course we can do that on the lower set of strings as well.

[00:03:09]Except we're going to use our little finger for the A in that instance.

[00:03:15]Just at that point. We want to use that to keep it on two strings if possible.

[00:03:25]There you go. Hope you find that concept useful and you get some mileage out of those licks. And try coming up with some of your own as well.