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Songs
Some songs I like to play. See also my Charts page.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I've been messing around further with Napoleon Crossing the Rhine; here it is with "Bonaparte's Retreat" added as a chorus. Big jam at Menzel Violins this afternoon, maybe I will lead this tune.
posted morning of October 19th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
At The Fiddler's Companion, I found another Napoleon-themed Irish reel: "Napoleon Crossing the Alps". I've been playing it this morning and have uploaded the music in PDF format. I am curious what it means that the key signature is one sharp, but the tune resolves to A -- is this some kind of wacky modal thing? Also weird: The source at Fiddler's Companion has an accidental sharp marked at every occurrence of F♯, which seems redundant and makes the music difficult to read. I removed the accidentals.I was thinking it might be possible to make a medley of "Napoleon Crossing the Rhine" with this; but I'm not sure what kind of transposing I should do or alternately, how to modulate between the two.
Update: My mom (who knows about such things) says, this is Dorian mode:
A tune can be built (and resolve) around any of the notes in the
scale - this is modal writing. The mode that resolves to the 1st
note of the scale is what we call major. The one that resolves to the
6th note is what we call minor. the one that resolves to the second
tone of the (major) scale is called dorian. This modal writing is
used a lot in traditional tunes.
You can get the idea of the sound by playing a scale using only white
notes. First play c-c, that's ionian (major). Then play d-d,
that's dorian. e-e is phrygian , f-f is lydian, g-g is mixolydian. a-a
is æolian (minor), and b-b is locrian.
(Edited with some suggestions from my brother, who also wants to point out that ionian and æolian modes are Not Really major and minor, because tonal music is different from modal music. My sister wanted to point out in this regard that "we have the nerdiest family EVER.")
So I've been practicing this folk tune called "Devil's Dream" -- I happened on it in my book of tunes, and recognized it pretty well so I thought I'd try learning it. It's starting to sound alright -- not 100% yet, and not up to speed, but it's getting to where it sounds like a song. And then today, I was sort of noodling around with the idea of it and started playing a different song, in triple time, which I'm calling "Devil's Drunk" for now -- it is recognizably based on a similar tune idea, but it sounds drunk. Here is a rough recording of the two pieces:
(Not today; yesterday -- today the sun is shining.)
Snufkin got a feeling that he wanted to write songs. He waited until he was quite sure of the feeling and one evening he got his mouth-organ from the bottom of his rucksack. In August, somewhere in Moominvalley, he had hit on five bars which would undoubtedly provide a marvellous beginning for a tune. They had come completely naturally as notes do when they have been left in peace. Now the time had come to take them out again and let them become a song about rain.
This is nice: last night I was reading Moominvalley in November with Sylvia, and we came across the passage above. Later on, and without being conscious of the coincidence until this morning, I sat down and finished writing out a song I have had in the back of my mind since two weeks ago (when I first thought of it I wrote down the first two bars) -- I'm tentatively calling it "Rainy Day".
An interesting thing with the key of this piece -- when I started out I was thinking it was in D minor; but then something happened in measure 5. If the three-note run at the end of that measure is D-E-G♮, then the song ends up resolving on D; if it is E-G♮-A, the resolution is on A, and the key is A phrygian. I am not sure what the accidental sharps on C and G are doing to the key. Hoping to record this later on, it's pretty hypnotic (like listening to a heavy rain outside, was the genesis of the working title.)
posted morning of May 10th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about Moomins
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 ➳ More posts about Walk Right In
Ellen and I watched Quiz Show tonight, and among other things it made me want to learn the song "Mack the Knife" which plays (Sinatra's version) over its credits. Here are some versions:
This weekend I started working on a couple of new songs, some solo fiddle tunes and a blues tune I could play with John.
I thought I would explore the latter half of the alphabet in my music book a little; paging through the R's I found "The Road to Lisdoonvarna" -- well! I've been to Lisdoonvarna -- on a bike trip in western Ireland, with Ellen about 13 years ago -- and remember it fondly, and I have a shortage of jigs in my repertoire; so I thought I'd give it a try. Looked it up on YouTube to get an idea what it sounds like, and I found Ryan and Brennish Thompson playing it along with two other Dorian tunes:
I like all of these songs and have set myself the task of learning them -- they're coming along pretty well, I think. "Lisdoonvarna" and "Swallowtail" are jigs -- i.e. fast tunes in 6/8 time -- and "Drowsy Maggie" is a reel, in 4/4.
Another song I took a look at last night, which I think will be great to play with John, is "If the River Was Whiskey", Charlie Poole's version of "Hesitation Blues." Here are The Dough Rollers playing it:
or you can listen to Poole at
lala.com. It's a great fiddle part, a lot of fun, and it'll sound great with John's guitar.
For the first time in a little while, I've found a new fiddle tune I want to learn. Here is the Ether Frolic Mob (featuring Peter Stampfel, Craig Judelman, Stacey Samuels, Eli Smith, Jeffrey Lewis) playing "Billy in the Lowground":
Trying to do something with the violin by itself -- no voice, no guitar. Here's what I came up with:
It almost works, I think -- there are places where it is a little hard to follow the melody without lyrics but they are short in duration, the song comes back quickly.
This is the sketched-out notation of a melody I was working on the other night. (The focus is not right, I can't seem to take a picture of the page in focus; not sure why. The unreadable text is "slow walking tempo" and "(let ring)" -- the â…¤-shaped symbol above the staff I think means to stress the marked note; in any case this is my intent where I've marked that symbol.) An interesting aspect of writing this out was trying to justify writing it out, trying to explain to myself why it's not a waste of time, what's useful about it...
Writing the melody out ends up being useful to me as a way to let myself improvise -- my favorite thing to do when I'm practicing is to take a short melody and repeat it with variations. I had been trying recently to improvise the melodies "from scratch" but the problem I run into is not being able to keep them in mind long enough that the structure of the melody repeats among variations.
While I was thinking about this I got a message from Vance Maverick that he had written out a transcription of the recording which I'd posted on YouTube. (The images of my and Vance's output are linked to the YouTube video.) The recording is my eight bars repeated three times with variations, plus a measure of intro and one of outro. Vance's transcription is the full 26 bars. This is fun: he has transcribed what is in many ways a completely different song than what I wrote out -- what is certainly a more readable, more accurate representation than mine of what's on the tape -- but which I would have a hard time using to produce what's on the tape.
There is a metric rule we both followed, which makes the notes on the page different from "what's on the tape" -- we both represented metrical values as eighth-notes throughout the song regardless of whether or not they're swung. And as Vance points out neither of us writes out the double-stops -- I think of these as a form of improvisation on top of the written melody -- or is precise about writing out the occasional flat fingering that slides up.
I'm fascinated and impressed by the notion of being able idly to jot down the melody one is listening to -- I am not at all fluent in musical notation, producing it is for me a very clumsy, mechanical process. I'd love to get better at it.
