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Saturday, January 28th, 2006
Pressing ahead with the music-reading -- today I played a couple of the jigs I had been playing yesterday, and learned two new reels -- "Judy's Reel" and "Paddy Handley's Goose". The latter is the first song I have been able to play from memory after reading from sheet music.
posted morning of January 28th, 2006: Respond
➳ More posts about Music
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Friday, January 27th, 2006
More music reading tonight -- I learned the A part of "A Wink of Her Eye" and all of "The Cork Road". Both songs are very slightly more complex than "Bundle and Go" (Which I played for Ellen and Sylvia to dance to before dinner). Learning jigs is bringing back a bunch of musical memories -- "A Wink of Her Eye" brought to mind a similar tune (which I don't know the name of), which I was able to play straight off note for note. Also I found the Fiddler's Companion, which has many traditional tunes written out in ABC notation, which I can download shareware to convert to musical notation and to audio files.
posted evening of January 27th, 2006: Respond
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Last night I read music! I bought a book of tunes from Amazon, and when I sat down and looked at it, I surprised myself greatly by being able to translate the notes on the page into sounds. The tune was a simple jig called "Bundle and Go" -- it helped greatly that almost every note in the song had the same time value, and that most of the intervals were thirds.
posted afternoon of January 27th, 2006: Respond
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Wednesday, January 18th, 2006
I have been playing my fiddle increasingly often over the past year, hardly playing guitar at all any more. Today I am going to take my first ever lesson in traditional fiddle playing from Kenny Kosek. Looking forward to it.
posted afternoon of January 18th, 2006: Respond
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Wednesday, January 12th, 2005
My last two posts don't really make sense together, I just realized, without a key bit of information which I omitted -- on Saturday I took the cracked violin to Millburn Music Center, where the repairman quoted me a considerably lower price, $75, for a simple glue-up -- Gagliardi's estimate was for a full repair which would involve taking the violin apart and putting a patch on the inside. So that is what I meant by "my fiddle is still in the shop"; I did not go crazy and send it out for the full repair.
posted morning of January 12th, 2005: Respond
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Sunday, January 9th, 2005
Jammed with Bob today while a sick Janis moaned in the next room. My fiddle is still in the shop but I was playing Bob's violin on a lot of songs, and switching off with him between violin and guitar, a lot of fun -- I'm definitely picking it back up very quickly, I was getting how to do double-stops and open string drones, even very haltingly up in second position on the E string. This is going to be a great thing. I ordered Alan Kaufman's Beginning Old-Time Fiddle from ALibris for book-learning, and John Salyers' "Home Recordings 1941-42" from The Appalachian Center, for ear training.
posted evening of January 9th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Jamming with friends
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Friday, January 7th, 2005
John finished repairing the bows and I picked them up from him at lunchtime. Very nice -- but unfortunately the man he works for, Yung Chin, took one look at the crack in the violin's body and said I should not be playing it -- that tension from being in tune will destroy the instrument. So... I gave a call to Richard Gagliardi to find out how much it would cost to fix such a crack. His low-end estimate was $2000, which is not going to happen. A bit dejected, I surfed over to E-Bay to find out how much entry-level violins are running -- turns out they are quite cheap. So, I bought a new instrument for $51. This should keep me happy for a while.
posted afternoon of January 7th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
I am taking up the violin again, after about 20 years of not playing at all. I had been thinking about it for a while; while we were in California at Thanksgiving I asked my mother how much she thought a lower-end playable violin would cost. Turns out, free! Mom replied that my sister Blythe had my grandfather's violin (the one I played as a kid) but was not playing it; and Blythe agreed to pass it on to me. A few months gone by, and now I have it! (Miriam brought it with her when she came back from visiting the family for Christmas.) The bows need new hair -- I am giving them tonight to John Aniano (friend from CJWA and from the Woodcentral message boards) to be repaired. But even in the current state, I played it some last night and the tone was very nice indeed -- and my fingers seem to remember their positions pretty well, 20 years later. (By a funny coincidence, Bob got loaned a violin a few weeks ago and he is trying to learn to play too. This should open up some nice new territory for jamming.)
posted afternoon of January 5th, 2005: 1 response
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