Teaching with Bubble Notes
by Amy Swenson
I would like to share with you the Bubble Notes which I created and successfully used for the past 20 years on the Island to teach beginner fiddlers aged 4 to 82 in community school classes, private lessons, and with the Southern Kings Fiddlers. Bubble Notes are now being put to good use by Ronita Baird who teaches the Donagh School Fiddle Program, by Urban Chaisson who has been teaching a beginner community school class this year in Cardigan, and by myself in the first LEAP program seniors fiddle class in Murray Harbour, as well as with many private students.
To make the learning process quicker for beginners, I developed the very simplest notation possible using an enlarged treble clef so that students have a visual picture of the notes in the songs they are trying to learn. In teaching hundreds of islanders to play, I have found that the majority want a visual representation to take with them to aid their memory when they practice. We all learn differently: a lucky few of us are blessed with the ability to learn by ear right off the bat, but many of us are visual learners and like to play a song by looking at the notes, over and over again, before the tune is finally memorized. Bubble Notes can be seen as inhabiting a territory between learning by ear and learning the classical teensy black notes – they are accessible to everyone and much less annoying to by ear learners than regular notation. They level the playing field in group classes which often contain some students fluent in note reading and some who have never had any exposure to it.
Beginner Bubble Notes are big, color coded by string, and have the finger needed to play the note right inside the note itself. Most beginners of all ages learn to read Bubble Notes in about 5 minutes. Then they can get right to the task of learning how to make the sequence of notes sound good on their violin…a much longer process! Large notes mean that people with visual problems can see them clearly, so seniors with trifocals or only one good eye and kids who need glasses but don’t have them yet can read the notes with ease. The color coding and the finger numbers take away the daunting abstraction of the normal black notes, or as older island fiddlers often call them,“chicken scratches”. But, the Bubbles are drawn on the very same treble clef staff so that if the student is able to see the smaller notes, and wants to learn them, the transition to reading regular notation is quite smooth after reading Bubble Notes for six months to a year or so. (I find William Starr’s Adventures in Music Reading for Violin -Book One – very helpful in the transition to reading regular notation.)
Our website now has a Bubble Notes for Beginners section which presents beginner songs in Bubble Notes along with an mp3 audio version. Teachers are encouraged to try them out with students and find out for themselves just how easy they are to teach and use! As you can see from tunes 7 and 8, I teach my students how to slur as soon as they are at all able to try slurring. I find that early exposure to slurring assists them in properly tracking and holding the bow. And slurs are so important later on in all kinds of fiddle tunes!
If you are a beginning fiddler or teacher interested in the Bubble Notes and want a particular tune in Bubbles which is not in the list of tunes, please let me know, because thanks to a demand from about a third of the Southern Kings Fiddlers who prefer Bubble Notes, I have a considerable repertoire of over a hundred popular tunes already drawn up in Bubbles and can scan them and send them to you. Yes, even St. Anne’s Reel!
Happy fiddling, Amy Swenson gagliano31@hotmail.com