Scott Nygaard’s Flatpicking Old-Time Fiddle Tunes live workshop will explore playing traditional American fiddle tunes on the guitar from Scott’s perspective as an old-time fiddler. Scott learned to play old-time fiddle for square dances in the 1970s (he won the fiddle contest at the inaugural Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Washington, in 1977) and that background has deeply informed his guitar playing. When playing for dancers, your objective is to get people’s feet moving, not to wow an audience or impress a contest judge, so the emphasis is on rhythm and phrasing. And we all know that syncopation can be an important part of getting people’s feet moving. In addition to learning 12 great old-time tunes, you’ll learn how to phrase melodies on the guitar, taking advantage of the fact that it’s possible to play notes in more than one place on the fretboard, so you can experiment with fingering to create powerful phrasing and rhythm. 

Another aspect of playing fiddle for dancers is melodic improvisation. When you’re the only melody instrument and you’re playing the same tune for five to ten minutes at a time, you learn how to vary the melody in small ways. As one of Scott’s mentors, the great fiddler Hank Bradley says, you’re “always improvising, but not in an extreme way.” This kind of improvisation is not based on the chord changes of the tune, but rather on the melody. For each tune you’ll learn, Scott will give you minor variations of each phrase and show you how to come up with your own.  

Solo playing, or playing with only one accompanist, is also a part of traditional old-time fiddling, and in this context, the fiddler is free to play in a more unstructured way. From this tradition, “crooked” tunes have evolved: tunes that don’t conform to the standard eight measures per part that is usually required of square dance fiddlers, and Scott will include a few  crooked tunes in the workshop.

This is an intermediate-to-advanced level workshop and students will be expected to be familiar with alternate picking technique. For those who haven’t mastered alternate picking, we will provide an alternate picking technique lesson from Scott’s Intermediate Flatpicking Guitar course at Peghead Nation, so you can take a look at that lesson before the workshop starts. 

Workshop Schedule:

The workshop will consist of six 1.5-hour sessions that will be held every other Tuesday on Zoom, from 5 P.M. to 6:30 P.M. PST (8 P.M.  to 9:30 P.M. EST), starting on April 1, 2025, and ending on June 10.

After the workshop is complete, students will continue to have access to workshop recordings and materials when signed in to their Peghead Nation account.

This will be the Zoom link for all six sessions:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81985921416?pwd=EsadGnrETtT95aXnkVua36JrMUy0fT.1

Session #1: April 1

Session #2: April 15

Session #3: April 29

Session #4: May 13

Session #5: May 27

Session #6: June 10

Scott Nygaard Bio

For the last 35 years, Grammy-winning guitarist Scott Nygaard has been one of the most inventive and influential flatpicking guitarists in the bluegrass/acoustic music scene. His solos, a seamless amalgam of bluegrass, folk, and jazz influences, shift easily from breathtaking virtuosity to soulful melodic musings, and his accompaniment is always intriguing, supportive, and propulsive. Downbeat magazine called him “a phenomenally talented stylist.”

Scott has performed and/or recorded with Tim O’Brien, Joan Baez, Chris Thile, Darol Anger, Jerry Douglas, Peter Rowan, Laurie Lewis, Anonymous 4, and many others, and has released two solo albums for Rounder Records, No Hurry and Dreamer’s Waltz. His self-produced albums include one with his band Crow Molly, a duo record with Swedish guitarist Roger Tallroth (Rosco), another with singers Chris and Cassie Webster (Ten Thousand Miles), and a trio recording of traditional material with fellow Peghead Nation instructors John Reischman and Sharon Gilchrist (Harmonic Tone Revealers).

 Scott was the guitarist on a number of recordings that have proven to be extremely influential on the contemporary acoustic music scene, including Chris Thile’s Leading Off, Tim O’Brien’s Red on Blonde, Jerry Douglas’s Slide Rule, and the Republic of Strings’s Generation Nation. Formerly the editor of Acoustic Guitar magazine, Scott has written hundreds of articles on music, musicians, guitars, and guitarists for Acoustic Guitar, Strings, Play Guitar!, and Guitar World Acoustic; authored two instruction books, Bluegrass Guitar Essentials and Fiddle Tunes and Folk Songs for Beginning Guitar; produced an instructional video, Bluegrass Lead Guitar for Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop, and taught at most of the United States’ best-known bluegrass and/or guitar workshops. Scott is co-founder and editor of Peghead Nation. scottnygaard.com.