Fiddle Tunes started in 1977 as the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes, maybe the first in the nation. It’s a week-long, total-immersion workshop with a hallmark of presenting an expansive array of fiddle styles from specific geographic regions of the world. The workshop provides an opportunity to be in community with the bearers of fiddle traditions, and you will discover culture through music, learn music in a cultural context, and build lifelong relationships in the fiddle music community.

Workshops, classes, band labs, tutorials, dances, concerts, singing, open jams, hat parties, gumbo – all contribute to participants’ experience. The main teaching emphasis is on the fiddle, but you’ll find day-long instruction on many other instruments. Most of the fiddlers on staff choose their own accompanist, so the instruction on backup instruments varies each year. There will always be banjos and guitars, and often mandolin, button accordion, piano accordion, piano, singing, clogging, string bass, and social dance.

You’ll learn by the time-honored method of the oral tradition – close observation and personal experimentation.