READIN

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

🦋 Étude/Song

I spent a lot of time practicing my fiddle tunes yesterday. These tunes -- generally Irish or Appalachian tunes, mostly in 4/4 time, mostly with two sections of 8 or 16 bars each -- I mostly play as a sort of étude, just getting used to playing the violin fast and clear and with a constant beat; something nice can happen when I have played a tune enough times, become familiar enough with it, that it will metamorphose from a practice tune into an actual song... when this happens it is as if I start hearing actual expressed meaning in the notes rather than just the bouncing melody. That transformation took place yesterday with the Irish song "The Boys of Blue Hill" -- suddenly that song is a part of my consciousness, not just a melody in my ear. Here are the fiddle tunes I feel familiar enough with that I think of them as songs:

• Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine
• Bonaparte Crossing the Rocky Mountain
• Bonaparte's Retreat (almost -- I still don't totally understand the B section)
• Old Joe Clark
• The Irish Washerwoman (the odd man out -- this song is a jig, in 3/4 time)
• The Growling Old Man and the Carping Old Woman
• The Boys of Blue Hill

I am thinking I should try and build a songbook of fiddle tunes, similar to what John and I are doing with our songs. (I am wanting to do recordings of some of these, hopefully before to long I will upload some mp3's.) Below the fold, a list (in no particular order) of songs I am working on, that are getting close to inclusion in the songbook.

• Harvest Home (this works great as a medley with Boys of Blue Hill)
• Whisky Before Breakfast
• Bill Cheatham
• The Red-Haired Boy
• Devil's Dream
• The Girl I Left Behind Me
• Angelina Baker
• The Halting March (another odd man out -- this song is 4/4 but its structure is very different from all the rest of these.)
• Haste to the Wedding (jig)

(The fact that most of these titles are in the first half of the alphabet may give you an idea of how I approach my alphabetically-organized book of fiddle tunes -- generally to sort of let it fall open at random but biased toward the front of the book, and turn pages until I see something that catches my eye.)

↻...done

posted morning of January 31st, 2010: 3 responses
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Friday, January 29th, 2010

🦋 First cut

John and I had a good time practicing tonight -- we will be playing at the open mic at Menzel Violins on Thursday, the songs we play will most likely be "Man of Constant Sorrow", "Meet Me in the Morning", and "Walk Right In" -- here is a recording we cut of "Walk Right In". Sound quality is still pretty ragged but it is nonetheless, I think, a fun song to listen to. (And to play, of course.)

posted evening of January 29th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

🦋 What key?

So my sticking point on "Mack the Knife" is, I keep thinking it should be in D. But the recordings I'm listening to are mostly in C; and it turns out to actually be easier to finger in C than in D. But I need to avoid switching keys in the middle of the song...

I added another video to last night's playlist, a Brazilian performance by Servio Tulio and Glauco Baptista -- a lovely performance and sort of a midpoint between Lenya and Sinatra, or another interpretation with shadings of both. This is the first I ever heard of Tulio and Baptista but there seems to be a lot of great music by them up on YouTube.

posted morning of January 23rd, 2010: Respond
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Monday, January 18th, 2010

🦋 Walk Right In

This is encouraging! I went to sleep last night thinking about "Walk Right In", with the different versions running through my head; and I woke up this morning with some ideas for my own version running through my head. So far today I have recorded three versions of it, each one sounding progressively better -- takes 2 and 3 even being music that I would play for somebody else without feeling embarrassed! It still needs guitar in it to sound like a complete song -- if you'd like to hear what I'm working on you can download take 3 from my box.net account.

This seems like a good place for a note about my current recording setup, which has gotten a lot more hi-tech in the last couple of weeks. I am recording into condenser mics which are going to a Behringer Xenyx 1204 mixing console, then a Behringer UCA-200 analog-to-digital converter, into my USB port, and REAPER is storing the sound and turning it into .WAV and .MP3 files. This seems to work pretty well -- I am happy about the sound quality of the recordings -- I need to spend some time on learning the ins and outs of the software, which is a good deal more complex than Audacity but also works better. John and I are working towards the goal of recording both of us together; to do this properly we mainly need another mic stand or two and possibly another mic.

posted afternoon of January 18th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, December 6th, 2009

🦋 Metronome etude

Something new is opening up for me musically as I start using the metronome -- I was able tonight to learn a new tune in about an hour, where it usually takes me weeks before I can think of a song as something I feel comfortable with. I learned "Boys of Blue Hill" -- which is a vaguely familiar tune from my youth but I have not listened to consciously in a long time -- from sheet music; starting with a very slow metronome (80 or so) I played the notes to rhythm, adhering to the metronome's time even when I stumble on the melody. Play it through a few times until the slowness begins to feel like a drag, and speed the tick up to 108, which is the very slowest I can play most reel or jig type of fiddle tunes and have them sound anything like a song. And repeat; keep playing until the slowness feels like a drag, and raise the speed a bit, for a few iterations, until the speed has begun to feel right; only then do I start thinking about really learning the notes by heart -- and by then I have played them enough times that they are already fairly solid!

I tried this with a second tune, "Harvest Home" -- which is much less familiar, which a lot of YouTube fiddlers seem to like to make a medley of with "Boys of Blue Hill" -- and spent about half an hour on it, not getting nearly as close to knowing it as I feel with the other song, but still making palpable progress with it. I made a recording of "Boys of Blue Hill" which I will post if I can get my browser to coöperate in uploading it to a host.

Update -- got my browser walking on the straight and narrow again. The "Boys of Blue Hill".

posted evening of December 6th, 2009: Respond

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

🦋 Pendulum

Some thoughts about using a metronome when practicing music:

• I have to devote a fair amount of attention to the metronome, to really benefit from its clicking -- possibly not as much attention as I need to pay to a musician I am jamming with, but it is unexpected -- my impulse is to think well it's a machine, let it click away on its own.
• If I do pay attention and really think about where the click is supposed to come in relation to the notes I'm playing, it makes me sound a lot better -- my rhythm can range from fairly sloppy to quite crisp, but to be crisp I need to be thinking about it. The main purpose I see in using the metronome is learning how to think about that.
• So that's what I'm hoping will carry over into my jamming with other musicians, is the understanding of precisely where my notes should start and end in relationship to the song's meter.

This evening I played five songs with the metronome, moving progressively to slower songs. "Whisky Before Breakfast" was at 160; "Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine" at 140; "Old Joe Clark" and "Napoleon Crossing the Rocky Mountains" at 120; and "My Grandfather's Clock" at 108. I have never played that last one before, at least not as a serious song -- just sort of a clichéed musical joke to fill in space at a jam. But it's a song where rhythm is really vital -- the ticking of the clock is the backbone of the song -- and it actually has a pretty nice sound. The others I have been playing a lot of over the past few weeks, I'm actually working on developing a repertoire! Had been meaning to work on that for a while now...

posted evening of December 5th, 2009: Respond

Friday, November 6th, 2009

🦋 Set List

John was over tonight (after the reading) and we jammed out for a couple of hours. This is the approximate set list with some comments. (Hoping to keep set lists every time we play -- that seems like a good way of keeping track of the music.)

• Prodigal Son -- this was good, maybe my favorite song of the evening. I used to play a pretty good version of this on guitar, I'm finding it's a very different song on violin -- here is a tape of me playing it, except with no guitar or vocals: Prodigal Son (the ending needs work, both in the solo and duet versions)
• California Stars by Woody Guthrie and Wilco -- a really fun song to play. I'm trying to work out the structure of the song a little better. Playing the solos can be very much effortless, like laying one's head on a bed of California stars. But I have to maintain a balance, not sink too much into the bed.
• Lay Me Down a Pallette on Your Floor -- another song that is very different on fiddle. Lovely old tune about adultery.
• Beautiful World by ? -- don't quite get this song.
• Angel From Montgomery by John Prine. I like playing this song a lot, not sure if I enjoy singing it.
• IKY Rider
• Honky Tonk Woman
• Jockey Full of Bourbon by Tom Waits -- totally new song for me. I like it a lot.
• Cry Baby Cry
• Mother Nature's Son
• Will the Circle Be Unbroken
• Jesus Etc.
• The Louisville Burglar

A song it would be fun to play:

• Weary Day by the Stanley Bros.
• Amazing Grace, but faster and without the lack of synchronization caused by recording in multiple tracks -- which should be easily solved by having two people play it instead of one in two takes.
• After Midnight by Patsy Cline

posted evening of November 6th, 2009: 2 responses

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

🦋 Jamming

This has been a really excellent weekend for playing music -- last night I jammed with John, who I met pretty recently and had not played with previously, and was startled to find that we're on just about the same page musically. We picked up each other's songs very quickly and got some nice harmonies going.

Then today I played with Bob and Janis and Gregory, and realized that we've really made a lot of progress over the past half a year or so, after a couple of years of being in a rut -- at this point one of us can call a tune and even if we haven't played it in a while, we jump right in and harmonize. A musical milestone of sorts for me this afternoon was playing violin and singing in unison with it -- I've never been able to figure that out before but today it was sounding all right. (Neither the playing nor the singing was as good, quite, as if I do one or the other -- but I could hear how they were going to get better.)

posted evening of October 31st, 2009: Respond

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

🦋 Untitled melody

Here is a melody that I've been working on a bit yesterday and today. I'm not sure what kind of a song it is -- at first I thought I might be playing a minuet, and perhaps it is that -- some kind of simple dance.

While recording this, I finally got my procedure together for setting up and breaking down my recording equipment. Not quite satisfied with the performance, whatever -- this is a work in progress...

Update: a refinement -- I've changed the B part substantially. have not recorded this yet:

posted morning of April 26th, 2009: Respond

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

🦋 Tuner

It is time to break down and buy a clip-on tuner for my violin. At the show last night I used Ron's tuner (plug-in, not clip-on; but that was alright since I had my pick-up attached for playing with their electric band); and it just made it a lot easier going in, to be confident my tuning is correct and the same as everyone else. I have always associated a sort of machismo value with being able to tune by ear; but here are the problems with that*: it takes a lot longer; my strings end up in tune relative to each other but there is no guarantee they are going to line up precisely with the rest of the band; and it is not always feasible in a noisy gig situation. In gigs I usually end up borrowing somebody else's tuner; things would be simpler if I had one of my own.

I was getting frustrated last night about not being a member of the band -- if my musical activities consist of sitting in with other people's gigs, I do not ever get to be an integral piece of the sound -- it's more like I'm adding in on top of their sound, and I'm playing pieces I have not practiced with them so it takes me until the middle of the song to actually feel comfortable and believe in what I'm playing. I enjoy the times I play with Bob and Janis and Greg much more; but that does not seem like something we could extrapolate to performing, the privacy of the setting is a pretty key part of the music.

* (Leaving aside the obvious problem of its ludicrosity.)

posted morning of March 29th, 2009: 2 responses

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