Although I'm new to playing ( attempting, actually) the instrument I've seen lots of violinists and lots of fiddlers from just about every tradition. Dick has properly, in my understanding, conveyed the advice from the tradition that is the most international, that of the classical violinist. In a sense, such violinists must deal with the broadest of musical requirements on thier instrument and so must use a technique that allows them to produce the required effects for lengthy performances over a lifetime of playing.

More specialised traditions require their performers to deal with the specialities of their respective traditions and these specialities may be more comfortably achieved with techniques that work well in that tradition but might not work as easily or as well in another.

Which means that, if all I wanted to play was the sort of music that the bloke in the next hamlet was brilliant at, I'd be silly not to emulate his technique as carefully as possible; if he sat the fiddle on his upper arm and gripped the bow in the middle, you bet I'd try to master that technique. Of course, if I also wanted to master the music of yer man from Donegal, as well as the one from Kentucky and the one from Romania (let alone the one from Vietnam) and they each had really idiosyncratic techniques, I'd probably be buggered unless I developed expertise in holding the instrument and the bow in a way that allowed me to play all the styles with equal facility.

This might mean that I'd be well advised to do as Dick recommends, most of the time (especially while learning), and change to more specialised grips on those occasions when the music couldn't be properly performed without them.

But I'll probably be arthritic before I got so good.

Cheers, Rowan