A blog dedicated to Early American History Lovers, Civil War Reenactors, Living Historians, and people that love the past. Lots of Historical Recipes and Patterns!
Guest Post: Andy on His Civil War Reenacting Fiddle
Everyone who has read my blog has heard me refer to my significant other,
Andy. Andy has kindly written a post about his Civil War reenacting fiddle:
Since Christmas I have been excited. You see, for those of you who may not
know me personally, for a little over a year now I have been learning to play
the fiddle. For about two years, I have been loving music from all over Ireland.
Well for Christmas, Steph bought me an antique fiddle (1920ish.) She said
this one was for when we go out reenacting. So, since then I have wanted
to make this violin a bit more correct for the Civil War time period.
Fortunately, violins have not changed very much over the last few hundred
years. The major changes I have to make are the removal of the chinrest
and the conversion from steel to gut strings. The other change I want to
make is to the tailpiece. You can see in the picture there are three
tailpieces. The black one that is not attached was the original. It
is broken, and the previous owner replaced it with the smaller sized one
currently on it. The brown one is one I am going to replace it with,
because I want to have the proper size on the fiddle.
You can see from
the close-up that the tailpiece was attached with a piece of wire. I am
going to replace it with a piece of catgut. I begin by removing the
things I am going to replace. Most of the time you don’t want to take
everything off at once, but as I am replacing the tailpiece and tailgut there
isn’t much choice. After unwinding the strings from the pegs, I can take
off the old tailpiece. I put the bridge aside for later
Before I can put the new strings on, I will need to prepare the new
tailpiece. There are a few things needed for this. I need the
length of tailgut I bought, some stitching gut (or an old gut E-string) and a
lighter or source of flame. When the end of the gut is burned, it unwinds
and becomes stiff. The stitching gut is tied around the ends as
reinforcement. These wider ends prevent the gut from slipping through the
holes in the tailpiece. Once the tailpiece is ready, I can begin to attach
the strings.
The strings come in double lengths, so you can clip them in half—you
actually get two strings (except for the G-string, which is wound with
silver—that one is a bit more expensive!). The strings don’t use ball
ends like many steel strings, but they do use a similar technique of holding
themselves in place. The string is held in place by a knot tied in the
end. The package of these strings shows you how to tie the knot—you need
to burn the end of the string to prevent it from slipping from the knot.
I had problems at first with the G and E strings, because they are thinner
and the knots were small. By tying extra knots, I got them to stay. The
strings take a lot longer the stretch than steel strings, but they sounded
great after they were able to stay in tune for more than 20 seconds.
Thanks, Andy! The above photo is of Andy's modern fiddle along with his "Civil War" fiddle. We are currently trying to learn to play the fiddle and guitar together--a huge task for us! We are hoping to record something so you can hear how the gut strings sound. Civil War tuning is lower than today's modern tuning, the sound is more melancholy. We were hoping to get a good Irish song recorded in honor of St. Patrick's Day, we'll try tomorrow.
awesome post guys.
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