With Scottish music being her passion, Queenstown violinist Erica Hastie can’t think of anything bigger than what she got up to last month.

The Scottish expat, who teaches violin and performs in local Irish band, Ceol, successfully auditioned for the core band of 16 fiddlers for The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo — held on the Edinburgh Castle esplanade since 1950.

The high-quality 90-minute production ran for 26 shows.

“There’s 9000 people every night so the numbers are huge, and it’s such an electric crowd that’s just really fun and exciting as a performer,” she tells Mountain Scene in Edinburgh, where she lived for three years.

The Tattoo certainly wasn’t a walk in the park — the fiddlers had to learn by heart  a mix of music from traditional Scottish numbers to pop tunes.

“And our directional bowing has to be absolutely perfect — we work really hard at making sure our down and up bows are all exactly the same.”

Sitting in the middle of the front row on the castle ramparts, there was certainly no room to hide. 

“Then there’s marching off in formation, and all of that is quite new to me.

“Being seven shows a week, it’s very intense, it’s quite late nights.”

A highlight was being one of two fiddlers invited to lunch to meet Tattoo patron, Princess Anne — “she was very friendly, very warm and personable”.

Hastie says she’s learnt so much from the experience — “the leader, Margaret Robertson, is such a well-renowned fiddle player, and she just gives me so much”.

“I’m getting so much good feedback and ideas and advice and inspiration, all of which I’m really intending to just bring back to Queenstown to help inform what I do as a teacher and performer. 

“My fellow fiddlers are from all over the world, so the connections I’ve made have been really invaluable as well.”

Ironically, Hastie says she could only see snatches of the Tattoo immediately before and the fiddlers struck up their violins — special weather-resistant carbon fibre models — “so I’m going to have to watch it on TV like everyone else”.

As to whether she’d go back, she says “there may be opportunities closer to New Zealand because the Tattoo goes on tour”.

Ahead of her trip, a ‘Get Erica to Edinburgh’ ceilidh fundraiser raised about $13,000.

scoop@scene.co.nz