Jam Report #31: 12/9/01
Dec. 9th, 2001 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperAs originally posted to the OKP. Transcribed to Livejournal 10/7/05.
In which we practice a couple of our oldies that we haven't touched in many weeks, but also have Adventures with Brand New Sheet Music and writing Brand New Bass Lines. Songs: "Jolly Butcher", "Mari-Mac", "Acres of Clams", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood".
This was an off-week, so we weren't expecting the whole group to show up. We did wind up getting two-thirds of the group, though!
As we waited for everyone to show up, we yakked some about "Si Bheag Si Mhor", and the adventures Monica is having with trying to make the Gaelic lyrics actually scan. She reported today that she has discovered that the lyrics we have do not actually rhyme, which she considers a problem; other similar songs she's heard generally do rhyme, she informs us. She and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ssha (Cyn) and I weren't exactly convinced that this is a problem, though. If we can actually get the lyrics to scan, that may be enough. Especially since we have yet to actually find any recordings of anyone tackling this song with lyrics.
We yakked some about "Lukey" as well, since I wanted to know if Monica had any chords for the bridge. I can play most of the song now, except for the bridge, and the bridge is different on different versions of "Lukey". The only chords I've seen so far have been the ones played on Road Rage, which go with a snippet of a ditty called "Gone by the Board" that GBS actually plays with the song "Great Big Sea" on their very first album. Monica had a set of chords to go with "Staten Island", which is the bridge actually played with the studio version of the song. We also determined that the last time we'd actually tried to play "Lukey" had been session #4 -- way back before we'd actually started recording ourselves.
As it happened, we wound up not trying "Lukey". On the grounds that Monica was in the mood to try some oldies, "Jolly Butcher" was our first ditty this time -- and Cyn and I had to sing sincekathrynt (Kathryn) and mamishka (Mimi) weren't around. For the life of me, I couldn't remember how the melody on the chorus went, so the first time through I wound up singing Cyn's melody. The next time through, we started on the wrong key. And I kept forgetting the words. We had a bunch of tempo issues with this, as well; I kept counting off quickly and then coming in much more slowly.
solarbird (Dara) wound up trying to keep tempo for us on the third time through by picking up Mimi's doumbek and banging out time on it, just to see if we could keep together. We all decided that we'd need a metronome at some point as well if we had no Mimi to actually play drums -- which inspired Dara to actually download a shareware metronome. (Let's hear it for technology!)
In general, it really sounded like we hadn't played this song for forever. Which we hadn't. Which made it a good thing we practiced!
"Mari-Mac", our other major oldie but goodie, was next. I flat refused to sing "Mari-Mac" since I can't actually get the whole thing out at tempo, or, rather, tempos, given that this ditty has the speed-ups it does in it... so Monica took over to sing the lead. And we had adventures with this ditty speeding up so fast at the end that I couldn't actually play my piccolo part anymore; I wound up having to simplify it and still keep the same general idea. Monica had to stop playing the guitar halfway through our takes because she couldn't play and sing that fast at the same time. On the whole, though, even though we basically made it the Grand-Prix of "Mari-Mac", it was kind of funny to listen to;spazzkat (Paul) told Monica it was like she was jogging with a football, and she tossed it to him so he could then run at top speed.
Kathryn finally showed up after we finished "Mari-Mac", about 3pm or so, and informed us that the reason for her delay was because she had gotten absorbed into a marathon of episodes of "The Crocodile Hunter" show, involving outtakes where the guy actually got bitten by the animals he was handling. According to Kathryn, she was riveted, with jaw agape, to her television. Them wacky Australians do that to you.
Now that she'd finally arrived, though, she was able to jump in on "Acres of Clams" with us. This session, we finally got around to picking out an ending part to go at the tail end of this ditty, courtesy of a book of Irish flute songs I've got. We found something called (appropriately enough) "Fisherman's Frolic" in 6/8 and the key of D, and discovered that it worked quite well for our purposes. Cyn decided to try to play her bass through most of the song and then switch over to the fiddle when we went into the Frolic; Dara, for her part, got ideas going about how to echo back around to the part she plays during the main body of the song, while I decided it was best to just do very simple twiddles until the Frolic kicked in at the end.
Kathryn, in the meantime, discovered that she'd started to worry about whether some of her higher notes were in tune -- and immediately realized thereafter that for this particular song, it really didn't matter if she wasn't quite in tune. As she describes it, a song that requires more passion than talent. Furthermore, much to her delight, she determined that she could belt the whole thing out without any pain to her jaw whatsoever, and given the massive amounts of dental work she's had to have done to her jaw and her teeth as of late, this is a major accomplishment.
Fun with lyrics, on this song: Dara making cracks about "Quakers on the lam", and Kathryn belting out "surrounded by Quakers with hams!" and throwing Monica completely off.
The greatest part of working on "Acres of Clams", though, was the fact that we dug out a piece of music none of us had ever seen before, and actually managed to make it more or less work! It took a little bit of tweaking, and Dar and Cyn and I trying to figure out what all the rhythm bits were in the sheet music, and my embouchure getting pretty tired at the end of it, but it really actually kind of worked. Which was very gratifying indeed.
I finally did get tired, though, and announced that I wanted to play something involving the mandolin. Which turned out to be "You Woke Up My Neighborhood".
Kathryn has up till today's session had a recurring problem with keeping the rhythm for the lyrics, which is based on the fact that the vocals hit the downbeats while the guitars and mandolin are over there strumming on the upbeats. The odd thing here is that Great Big Sea does this all the time -- and Kathryn doesn't have a problem with rhythm in any of their material. This time, though, she deemed it enough of a problem that she needed to find a solution for it.
("Here's the problem!" Paul cried, as we listened to the recording of ourselves during Pie. "We had the knob turned to Suck on that take!")
However, Kathryn's actual solution turned out to be trying to see if we could whip together a bass line for this ditty. A search on the net for bass tabs for Billy Bragg ditties was unsuccessful; I turned up a bunch of guitar tabs, but no bass tabs. Fortunately, Paul whipped together a fairly simple bass line for Cyn... and after a take in which Cyn played the bass and a take in which Paul took over for her while she played her fiddle, Kathryn was quite satisfied with how dramatically having a bass hitting the downbeats helped her with her rhythm.
I had my own issues with this song; in theory, I've memorized the chord progression, but I kept dropping chords here and there.
And although nobody outright admitted it, I think we missed having Patrick's cheesy bit to go on the end of the song. ;) Well, I did, at any rate.
We keep coming together on the choruses, still, and finding bits of actual Music. Hopefully we'll manage to put together a listenable take of this thing one of these days.
The pie, which was tackled by me while everyone else was listening to an MP3 of an REM ditty that has mandolin in it ("You are the Everything") and whichdaspatrick (Patrick) and Kathryn are eager about us trying, was strawberry rhubarb.
More in another week,
Anna the Piper
In which we practice a couple of our oldies that we haven't touched in many weeks, but also have Adventures with Brand New Sheet Music and writing Brand New Bass Lines. Songs: "Jolly Butcher", "Mari-Mac", "Acres of Clams", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood".
This was an off-week, so we weren't expecting the whole group to show up. We did wind up getting two-thirds of the group, though!
As we waited for everyone to show up, we yakked some about "Si Bheag Si Mhor", and the adventures Monica is having with trying to make the Gaelic lyrics actually scan. She reported today that she has discovered that the lyrics we have do not actually rhyme, which she considers a problem; other similar songs she's heard generally do rhyme, she informs us. She and
ssha (Cyn) and I weren't exactly convinced that this is a problem, though. If we can actually get the lyrics to scan, that may be enough. Especially since we have yet to actually find any recordings of anyone tackling this song with lyrics.We yakked some about "Lukey" as well, since I wanted to know if Monica had any chords for the bridge. I can play most of the song now, except for the bridge, and the bridge is different on different versions of "Lukey". The only chords I've seen so far have been the ones played on Road Rage, which go with a snippet of a ditty called "Gone by the Board" that GBS actually plays with the song "Great Big Sea" on their very first album. Monica had a set of chords to go with "Staten Island", which is the bridge actually played with the studio version of the song. We also determined that the last time we'd actually tried to play "Lukey" had been session #4 -- way back before we'd actually started recording ourselves.
As it happened, we wound up not trying "Lukey". On the grounds that Monica was in the mood to try some oldies, "Jolly Butcher" was our first ditty this time -- and Cyn and I had to sing since
kathrynt (Kathryn) and mamishka (Mimi) weren't around. For the life of me, I couldn't remember how the melody on the chorus went, so the first time through I wound up singing Cyn's melody. The next time through, we started on the wrong key. And I kept forgetting the words. We had a bunch of tempo issues with this, as well; I kept counting off quickly and then coming in much more slowly.solarbird (Dara) wound up trying to keep tempo for us on the third time through by picking up Mimi's doumbek and banging out time on it, just to see if we could keep together. We all decided that we'd need a metronome at some point as well if we had no Mimi to actually play drums -- which inspired Dara to actually download a shareware metronome. (Let's hear it for technology!)In general, it really sounded like we hadn't played this song for forever. Which we hadn't. Which made it a good thing we practiced!
"Mari-Mac", our other major oldie but goodie, was next. I flat refused to sing "Mari-Mac" since I can't actually get the whole thing out at tempo, or, rather, tempos, given that this ditty has the speed-ups it does in it... so Monica took over to sing the lead. And we had adventures with this ditty speeding up so fast at the end that I couldn't actually play my piccolo part anymore; I wound up having to simplify it and still keep the same general idea. Monica had to stop playing the guitar halfway through our takes because she couldn't play and sing that fast at the same time. On the whole, though, even though we basically made it the Grand-Prix of "Mari-Mac", it was kind of funny to listen to;
spazzkat (Paul) told Monica it was like she was jogging with a football, and she tossed it to him so he could then run at top speed.Kathryn finally showed up after we finished "Mari-Mac", about 3pm or so, and informed us that the reason for her delay was because she had gotten absorbed into a marathon of episodes of "The Crocodile Hunter" show, involving outtakes where the guy actually got bitten by the animals he was handling. According to Kathryn, she was riveted, with jaw agape, to her television. Them wacky Australians do that to you.
Now that she'd finally arrived, though, she was able to jump in on "Acres of Clams" with us. This session, we finally got around to picking out an ending part to go at the tail end of this ditty, courtesy of a book of Irish flute songs I've got. We found something called (appropriately enough) "Fisherman's Frolic" in 6/8 and the key of D, and discovered that it worked quite well for our purposes. Cyn decided to try to play her bass through most of the song and then switch over to the fiddle when we went into the Frolic; Dara, for her part, got ideas going about how to echo back around to the part she plays during the main body of the song, while I decided it was best to just do very simple twiddles until the Frolic kicked in at the end.
Kathryn, in the meantime, discovered that she'd started to worry about whether some of her higher notes were in tune -- and immediately realized thereafter that for this particular song, it really didn't matter if she wasn't quite in tune. As she describes it, a song that requires more passion than talent. Furthermore, much to her delight, she determined that she could belt the whole thing out without any pain to her jaw whatsoever, and given the massive amounts of dental work she's had to have done to her jaw and her teeth as of late, this is a major accomplishment.
Fun with lyrics, on this song: Dara making cracks about "Quakers on the lam", and Kathryn belting out "surrounded by Quakers with hams!" and throwing Monica completely off.
The greatest part of working on "Acres of Clams", though, was the fact that we dug out a piece of music none of us had ever seen before, and actually managed to make it more or less work! It took a little bit of tweaking, and Dar and Cyn and I trying to figure out what all the rhythm bits were in the sheet music, and my embouchure getting pretty tired at the end of it, but it really actually kind of worked. Which was very gratifying indeed.
I finally did get tired, though, and announced that I wanted to play something involving the mandolin. Which turned out to be "You Woke Up My Neighborhood".
Kathryn has up till today's session had a recurring problem with keeping the rhythm for the lyrics, which is based on the fact that the vocals hit the downbeats while the guitars and mandolin are over there strumming on the upbeats. The odd thing here is that Great Big Sea does this all the time -- and Kathryn doesn't have a problem with rhythm in any of their material. This time, though, she deemed it enough of a problem that she needed to find a solution for it.
("Here's the problem!" Paul cried, as we listened to the recording of ourselves during Pie. "We had the knob turned to Suck on that take!")
However, Kathryn's actual solution turned out to be trying to see if we could whip together a bass line for this ditty. A search on the net for bass tabs for Billy Bragg ditties was unsuccessful; I turned up a bunch of guitar tabs, but no bass tabs. Fortunately, Paul whipped together a fairly simple bass line for Cyn... and after a take in which Cyn played the bass and a take in which Paul took over for her while she played her fiddle, Kathryn was quite satisfied with how dramatically having a bass hitting the downbeats helped her with her rhythm.
I had my own issues with this song; in theory, I've memorized the chord progression, but I kept dropping chords here and there.
And although nobody outright admitted it, I think we missed having Patrick's cheesy bit to go on the end of the song. ;) Well, I did, at any rate.
We keep coming together on the choruses, still, and finding bits of actual Music. Hopefully we'll manage to put together a listenable take of this thing one of these days.
The pie, which was tackled by me while everyone else was listening to an MP3 of an REM ditty that has mandolin in it ("You are the Everything") and which
daspatrick (Patrick) and Kathryn are eager about us trying, was strawberry rhubarb.More in another week,
Anna the Piper