Fiddlewidget

Creating the Arrangement

I started with the tab for this tune from Pete Wernick's Bluegrass Banjo book. The tab was a little tricky for me to play, so I changed it in a couple of spots to make it easier, but that part of it is pretty much like you'll find in the book.

Next step was to convert this tab to standard musical notation that a bassoonist could read. Turns out that bassoonists and other classical musicians don't read banjo tab, nor do they play by ear. Virginia laid down these ground rules pretty early, so I got to work converting banjo tab to bass clef musical notation.

Using the Widget to convert tab to notation

I confess to not knowing the banjo neck all that intimately, so I set my widget to the key the tab was in, and found the notes' names on the banjo neck, writing them in the book under the tab, then transcribing to regular notation. This is actually pretty easy to do, because when you lay the widget on it's side, it's oriented just like tablature. Just look at the fret numbers in the tab and read them off the widget.Simple enough, really--just a little tedious.

(Guess it's possible to use the widget to go the other way, from notation to tab, but if you are that good at reading notation, chances are you don't need tab, and may not even play the banjo.)

Divide up the parts and write the backup

There wasn't any good reason for complicating a perfectly good fiddle tune too much, so I divided up the A and B part melody line between the two instruments. We each took a turn with the lead on each part.

I wrote the backup mostly by writing in non-melody notes in the underlying chord. I used the widget for this also, because it showed me the notes in a particular chord, even locating them for the banjo tab. All the backup notes don't need to be in the chord, but it does work easier if the downbeat or accented notes are chord tones.

Final Touches and Clean-Up

I finished it off by putting that "extension" in the middle where it goes into the tune from "Popeye", and ended the whole thing with that little "head fake" tag in the A minor chord before the ending phrase. There's a technical term for that but I've forgotten what it is.

"Alternative Harmonization", maybe.

That's pretty much all there is to this one. You can listen to it again watch for the extension and ending if you like. Sound File