Jam Report #27: 10/21/01
Oct. 21st, 2001 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperAs originally posted to the OKP. Transcribed to Livejournal 10/4/05.
In which we do some more playing with new material, in which Monica and Paul both get to do a lot of singing, and in which we enjoy a homemade pie for once. Songs: "Acres of Clams", "Stray Cat Strut", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Goin' Up".
This being another late Jam Report for no particularly good reason except that yours truly was lame!
As it happened, this past session was supposed to be an off-week but turned out having more attendance than our last real jam. No![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kathrynt (Kathryn) and no mamishka (Mimi) (because both of them have been working extremely hard lately), and also no Fred (because consarn the U.S. Navy), but we did have the entire guitar section and ssha (Cyn) and solarbird (Dara) and me. And more importantly, Monica showed up with the lyrics to "Acres of Clams".
As I have mentioned in a previous report, this here is a folk song that somebody in the area wrote at some point, and which had parts of itself scarfed for a jingle for Ivar's, a local seafood chain. "Acres of Clams" is now their motto. Monica figures and quite correctly that if we're going to be a Pacific Northwest folk group, the least we can do is do a Pacific-Northwest-flavored song. This one fits the bill quite nicely.
She discovered as well that it is sung to the tune of another old ditty called "Rosin the Bow" -- which, as it turns out, is in fact in one of my songbooks, so I promptly whipped that out for her and let her play with the chords. Since none of the rest of us knew any of the words, this also meant that Monica got to sing lead. She even tried this a time or two without the guitar, for a switch, oncedaspatrick (Patrick) and spazzkat (Paul) got the chords down.
Dara and I got some nice piccolo work going once I figured out that if she started her phrases on D and I started mine on F sharp, we could get some nice harmony playing off of one another. It wasn't flawless, but by the last few takes there were definitely some times when it fell together.
Onward, then, to another round of "Stray Cat Strut" and Patrick happily scooping up Paul's new baby, the Colonel. If there is any guitar on the planet that looks the part for playing "Stray Cat Strut", the Colonel is definitely it. There's a definite rockabilly sort of look to this particular instrument, with the combination of its red body and its obvious age, all its sixties-lookin' dials, and the whammy bar. (I now know what a whammy bar is, thanks to the Colonel. Learn something new every day! But I digress...)
Thanks to this song Cyn is breaking out her bass more often, and with her on the bass, Patrick on the Colonel, and Paul on the vocals, the mix is more or less right to try to capture the flavor of the original song. Dar and I are still pretty baffled as to what to do with flute parts, though, and Dar more so than I. This puppy's in C minor, which means I can't really play any of my bamboo flutes easily on it and Dar has to break out her biggest one and play a lot of accidentals. It's not a piccolo-flavored song, either, so I have to break out my silver, which I don't do very often.
Still, it's kind of fun and challenging to try to come up with something that fits the style of the song. My part really isn't quite there yet, but at least at this point I know that it involves starting off in my bottom octave and jumping up towards the end, and it also involves tonguing tricks--
WITH THE NOTES! THE NOTES!
--ahem. Er. Where was I? Ah yes. It involves tricks of (cough) enunciating the notes that I never really quite formally learned in school, but which I've always rather liked the sound of and seem like the thing to try to do if you're going to play flute in a rock song. Or a rockabilly one, for that matter.
Any-HOW, this ditty still needs some work, but we seem to like it well enough to keep playing with it on the off-weeks, so we'll see where it goes.
We also still like "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", too. This time around we only did a couple of takes, however. It really needs more of us to come out sounding right; we definitely need Mimi on the drums to help keep the time, and we need more vocal strength to get up over the guitars and my mandolin. Monica so far is the only one of us that can actually sing this song while she's playing, and Cyn sat out of some of the singing as well so as to try to play the fiddle part she's making for it. And considering how we seem to have a habit of getting significantly louder on the choruses, all the instruments rather drown Monica out.
One good finding of the various takes, though, was that we seem to have back a needed happy energy for the song. As Dar described it, it was a mess, but a happy musical mess rather than a slow, draggy, dirge-y one.
Lastly we took a stab at another Great Big Sea song we'd not tried before, but which I'd discovered how to play: "Goin' Up". The chords are all pretty easy (at least on the mandolin, though I have the impression they're pretty easy on the guitar as well), a bunch of G, Am, C, D, and Em. The tricky part I'd discovered, though, was on the changes on the choruses when the rhythm seems to demand that I hit the chord in the middle while strumming up, rather than down as I am accustomed.
Patrick picked up the Colonel again for this song, claiming he wanted to try to improvise something he thought would sound better on that instrument (not that he had any ulterior motives to get another shot at playing with the Colonel or anything, he assured us), and from what I could tell he was right. Even though I'm still new enough to my instrument that it's hard to pay attention to what others are doing, while I'm strumming -- I was mostly too busy trying to follow Monica, Keeper of the Tempo.
"Goin' Up" is another ditty that we'll probably have some bridge problems on for the time being, since as Great Big Sea does it, there's an accordion solo on the bridge. For one thing, none of us play the accordion (and the closest thing we have, a concertina, is on its way to the Persian Gulf with Fred). For another thing, though I have some vague clue of how the bridge goes and can halfway improvise it on the piccolo, I'm too busy over there trying to play the mandolin, so we'll have to have someone else do it. Which means homework assignment of bridge transcription, since we couldn't find one on the helpful GBS fan web sites that collect such things.
After a couple of takes of this we called it Pie. We had two pies again this week -- and one of them was courtesy of our friend Sarah, who actually made us a chocolate pie which was very tasty. But since it had cream on it and Monica and things of the dairy family do not co-exist well in the same universe, we got another pie for her to enjoy as well: bumbleberry. But I have also informed Sarah that, courtesy of her providing us pie, she gets to be an honorary Murkjammer!
In which we do some more playing with new material, in which Monica and Paul both get to do a lot of singing, and in which we enjoy a homemade pie for once. Songs: "Acres of Clams", "Stray Cat Strut", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Goin' Up".
This being another late Jam Report for no particularly good reason except that yours truly was lame!
As it happened, this past session was supposed to be an off-week but turned out having more attendance than our last real jam. No
kathrynt (Kathryn) and no mamishka (Mimi) (because both of them have been working extremely hard lately), and also no Fred (because consarn the U.S. Navy), but we did have the entire guitar section and ssha (Cyn) and solarbird (Dara) and me. And more importantly, Monica showed up with the lyrics to "Acres of Clams".As I have mentioned in a previous report, this here is a folk song that somebody in the area wrote at some point, and which had parts of itself scarfed for a jingle for Ivar's, a local seafood chain. "Acres of Clams" is now their motto. Monica figures and quite correctly that if we're going to be a Pacific Northwest folk group, the least we can do is do a Pacific-Northwest-flavored song. This one fits the bill quite nicely.
She discovered as well that it is sung to the tune of another old ditty called "Rosin the Bow" -- which, as it turns out, is in fact in one of my songbooks, so I promptly whipped that out for her and let her play with the chords. Since none of the rest of us knew any of the words, this also meant that Monica got to sing lead. She even tried this a time or two without the guitar, for a switch, once
daspatrick (Patrick) and spazzkat (Paul) got the chords down.Dara and I got some nice piccolo work going once I figured out that if she started her phrases on D and I started mine on F sharp, we could get some nice harmony playing off of one another. It wasn't flawless, but by the last few takes there were definitely some times when it fell together.
Onward, then, to another round of "Stray Cat Strut" and Patrick happily scooping up Paul's new baby, the Colonel. If there is any guitar on the planet that looks the part for playing "Stray Cat Strut", the Colonel is definitely it. There's a definite rockabilly sort of look to this particular instrument, with the combination of its red body and its obvious age, all its sixties-lookin' dials, and the whammy bar. (I now know what a whammy bar is, thanks to the Colonel. Learn something new every day! But I digress...)
Thanks to this song Cyn is breaking out her bass more often, and with her on the bass, Patrick on the Colonel, and Paul on the vocals, the mix is more or less right to try to capture the flavor of the original song. Dar and I are still pretty baffled as to what to do with flute parts, though, and Dar more so than I. This puppy's in C minor, which means I can't really play any of my bamboo flutes easily on it and Dar has to break out her biggest one and play a lot of accidentals. It's not a piccolo-flavored song, either, so I have to break out my silver, which I don't do very often.
Still, it's kind of fun and challenging to try to come up with something that fits the style of the song. My part really isn't quite there yet, but at least at this point I know that it involves starting off in my bottom octave and jumping up towards the end, and it also involves tonguing tricks--
WITH THE NOTES! THE NOTES!
--ahem. Er. Where was I? Ah yes. It involves tricks of (cough) enunciating the notes that I never really quite formally learned in school, but which I've always rather liked the sound of and seem like the thing to try to do if you're going to play flute in a rock song. Or a rockabilly one, for that matter.
Any-HOW, this ditty still needs some work, but we seem to like it well enough to keep playing with it on the off-weeks, so we'll see where it goes.
We also still like "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", too. This time around we only did a couple of takes, however. It really needs more of us to come out sounding right; we definitely need Mimi on the drums to help keep the time, and we need more vocal strength to get up over the guitars and my mandolin. Monica so far is the only one of us that can actually sing this song while she's playing, and Cyn sat out of some of the singing as well so as to try to play the fiddle part she's making for it. And considering how we seem to have a habit of getting significantly louder on the choruses, all the instruments rather drown Monica out.
One good finding of the various takes, though, was that we seem to have back a needed happy energy for the song. As Dar described it, it was a mess, but a happy musical mess rather than a slow, draggy, dirge-y one.
Lastly we took a stab at another Great Big Sea song we'd not tried before, but which I'd discovered how to play: "Goin' Up". The chords are all pretty easy (at least on the mandolin, though I have the impression they're pretty easy on the guitar as well), a bunch of G, Am, C, D, and Em. The tricky part I'd discovered, though, was on the changes on the choruses when the rhythm seems to demand that I hit the chord in the middle while strumming up, rather than down as I am accustomed.
Patrick picked up the Colonel again for this song, claiming he wanted to try to improvise something he thought would sound better on that instrument (not that he had any ulterior motives to get another shot at playing with the Colonel or anything, he assured us), and from what I could tell he was right. Even though I'm still new enough to my instrument that it's hard to pay attention to what others are doing, while I'm strumming -- I was mostly too busy trying to follow Monica, Keeper of the Tempo.
"Goin' Up" is another ditty that we'll probably have some bridge problems on for the time being, since as Great Big Sea does it, there's an accordion solo on the bridge. For one thing, none of us play the accordion (and the closest thing we have, a concertina, is on its way to the Persian Gulf with Fred). For another thing, though I have some vague clue of how the bridge goes and can halfway improvise it on the piccolo, I'm too busy over there trying to play the mandolin, so we'll have to have someone else do it. Which means homework assignment of bridge transcription, since we couldn't find one on the helpful GBS fan web sites that collect such things.
After a couple of takes of this we called it Pie. We had two pies again this week -- and one of them was courtesy of our friend Sarah, who actually made us a chocolate pie which was very tasty. But since it had cream on it and Monica and things of the dairy family do not co-exist well in the same universe, we got another pie for her to enjoy as well: bumbleberry. But I have also informed Sarah that, courtesy of her providing us pie, she gets to be an honorary Murkjammer!