Jam Report #22: 8/26/01

[annathepiper]

As originally posted to the OKP. Transcribed to Livejournal 10/4/05.

In which Three Good Measures goes electric for the first time, and instruments outnumber actual musicians. Songs: "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Jolly Butcher", "Consequence Free".

Another extremely late Jam Report -- but this is what happens when the Jam Reporter is rather distracted by an impending week-long trip across the country. Let's see, though, how much of it I can reconstruct!

This session lacked three of us. mamishka (Mimi), on account of she was still at the kite festival she'd gone off to attend following the jaunt several of us took down to Portland. Monica, on account of she had to help work on her roof. kathrynt (Kathryn), on account of her hard drive started to choke the night before.

However, our reduced head count (is that corporate sounding of me, or what?) was made up for by our massive pile of instrumentation. For the very first time, Three Good Measures went ELECTRIC in this session, because daspatrick (Patrick) showed up with his electric guitar and ssha (Cyn) showed up with her bass! Well, the bass was actually already there -- since Cyn and I had musicgeeked the night before, and she'd brought it over, though we'd spent most of our time playing with "Trois Navires de Ble", me on my mandolin, her on her fiddle. But the principle still applies. ;)

Furthermore, we used way more instruments in this session than we had actual attendees. All told, we used all of the following instruments:

1. 1 electric guitar
   
2. 1 bass
   
3. 2 acoustic guitars
   
4. fiddle
   
5. mandolin
   
6. dulcimer
   
7. bodhran
   
8. piccolo
   
9. silver flute
   
10. 3 bamboo flutes
    
11. homemade distortion pedal made out of cardboard and insulated wire (I'm told to count this as an instrument)

With electric instruments on hand, this gave far more of a rock flavor to our overall sound and had a big bearing on our choice of songs to play with this session as well, though nobody minded in the slightest -- though oddly enough we had a lot more in-between-takes jamming. The electric guitar and bass went over really well. ;)

Our first choice was another crack at "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", on account of Fred had not been at a session before in which we did this one. Cyn carried the vocals alone on this, and I noted with pleasure that after a bit of work I managed to get down the chord changes on my mandolin, though I had to change fingerings for an A chord in the middle of it all--

Well, okay. A considerable bit of work. We had issues with the rhythm section (such as we were, Paul on the guitar, me on the mandolin, and Fred on the dulcimer and then the bodhran) being all over the place, though this did improve once Fred switched instruments and we had a better idea of where the beat was falling. We had issues, too, with figuring out where the chord changes fell during the bridge -- and determined that that bridge is very difficult to play at half speed.

"Jolly Butcher" was our second ditty, and if you think that this would be a strange song to play with an electric guitar, you'd be right. Let's just say that we came up with a unique interpretation of the Butcher. ;) We MIGHT have a gotten a printable take out of this if certain blonde flute-playing persons had not knocked over Fred's bodhran in the middle of the first take.... ahem. Er. Not that I know anything about that or anything!

Lastly came "Consequence Free", though this came out kind of random as we were sputtering on energy by then, and Cyn was still more or less the only singer, since I had to switch to piccolo to play my twiddles for this particular ditty.

So no printable take out of this session, unfortunately! Maybe next time -- after several of us have been revitalized by direct contact with the B'ys themselves.

The pie of this session: apple, brought down by Fred from the Snohomish Pie Company. Deemed yummy, but still not as good as Dar's homemade apple pie!

Till next time all,
Anna the Piper