Jam Report #32: 12/16/01
Dec. 16th, 2001 11:04 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 Dana is down with the Plague, but not the rest of us; in which Robo-Mimi makes her first appearance but is pre-empted by Actual Mimi; and in which we play the old, the new, and the not-been-touched-in-some-time. Songs: "Jolly Butcher", "Mari-Mac", "Little Beggarman", "Stray Cat Strut", "Acres of Clams".
This being yet another episode of The Jam Report is Late Because the Jam Reporter was a Big Lame-O Theater, but well hey. Y'all are lucky to see this before the holidays really kick in, eh? ;)
We had a decent-sized session this past time around, with almost everyone in attendance except Dana, who had to bow out due to fighting off one of the many plagues that haunt the residents of Seattle around this time of year -- which has been particularly bad with the cold and the wet and the ick as of late. It was observed at the time that being plague-ridden hasn't stopped us from jamming before;![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird (Dara) did, after all, label the track list for the session way back on 9/16 as "The Plague Years" (relevant quotes from said session being "I'm on Nyquil!" and "Alan has a black plastic thing"). Nevertheless we remained sans Dana, so we did not in fact record "The Plague Years Part II".
However, we did play for the first time with the metronome software that Dara downloaded off the Net. Said software was pretty much immediately dubbed "Robo-Mimi", though it was the opinion of all that Robo-Mimi was rather more limited in her repetoire of ways by which she could keep the beat. She had Method 1, which sounds pretty much like this:
TOK TOK TOK TOK
She also had Method 2, which works pretty much like Method 1 except every so often she'd smush two counts together and make them really fast for no apparent reason whatsoever, and we couldn't figure out what was making it happen. Which sounds pretty much like this:
TOK TOK TOK toktok TOK TOK
Once we finally got started, "Jolly Butcher" was our first song of choice, just to make sure we could get in some practice with one of our best ditties, and also see whether the metronome counts would help us hold a consistent tempo. We regularly have problems slowing down on the bridge, and as it turned out having the beat going did help to at least a small extent. The main problem with it though was that we all realized that in order to compensate for the TOK TOK TOK from the computer, we all unconsciously started playing LOUDER. So nobody except those of us closest to the computer could actually hear the beat, which meant pretty much me, so everyone wound up watching my foot as I was tapping.
kathrynt (Kathryn) and ssha (Cyn) had a bit of rustiness getting their harmony back together for the opening of the song, and on one take actually started off in an entirely different key than the song actually is played in. Personally, speaking as the person who couldn't hold to the melody to save her life the session before, I blame it on gremlins. (They can take the blame too for any and all errors on my piccolo playing, for that matter. Just so's we're on the record on that.) On the other hand, spazzkat (Paul) reports that he's finally getting comfortable with the chord changes that involve F for the guitars in this song, so at least we have some balance!
"Mari-Mac" was next up, partly in the spirit of wanting to keep it in practice and partly because Kathryn wanted to give it another shot now that she's been getting a whole bunch of extensive dental work done... the upshot of which is that now, apparently, she can actually belt out "Mari-Mac" without doing herself actual bodily harm or needing to stand there by the mike holding her jaw in place. Much to her satisfaction, she was able to do this for three takes, as well.
As one might expect the metronome was pretty useless on "Mari-Mac" due to the tempo shifts. We experimented with running it for the first chunk of the song and electing Kathryn as person in charge of shutting it up when the time came (which involved leaning over and hitting the mouse button at the right moment). This, though, managed to throw Kathryn right off her groove for the rest of the song, so we didn't try that again. The metronome did, however, enlighten us that we appear to be starting this ditty in the ballpark of 138 beats a minute and going up by about 7 beats for each of the tempo changes. We even tried to get it over 170, but determined that that was definitely Way Too Darned Fast... though Dara did exult that she could keep up at that speed. ;)
After "Mari-Mac", the actualmamishka (Mimi) showed up to displace Robo-Mimi from her job, much to the group's general pleasure since we hadn't had Mimi in a while. Mimi has continued to be an extremely busy Mimi as of late, and had asked me prior to this session whether I thought it was better to show up for the beginning of jam or for the end of it -- to which I naturally replied, the end, because PIE. (At this, Mimi told me I was very wise; me, I just know the value of a good nummy dessert.) And on we went to...
"Little Beggarman", which we hadn't done in a while, and which Monica and Kathryn both wound up wanting to play with again. I finally got to the point with this song where I could actually play the mandolin on it all the way through, thanks to Monica taking the time to show me the chord changes for our version. They're all pretty easy, a bunch of D and C and a little bit of A minor, but I just hadn't managed to figure out what chords went where yet. The mandolin was at any rate deemed a Good Thing to Have on this particular song, due to the brightness of its voice.
Well, okay, I was mostly able to play the mandolin all the way through. Kathryn's holding out a bit at the end where we're all dropping out except for Mimi on her drum, and I kept missing that. Kathryn was trying to signal us by lifting a hand -- but as I pointed out to her, when you've got your eyes on your fretboard because you're watching your fingers to make sure you put them in the right places, a hand signal ain't exactly useful! Oh well. Better luck next time. :)
Mimi played around with what drum to use as well, trying a take with the djembe and a take with the doumbek (the latter after Kathryn expressed an interest in having the doumbek's jingly bits in on the song).
Onward then to "Stray Cat Strut" and the breaking out of the electrical instruments. Paul got to play with the Colonel this time around becausedaspatrick (Patrick) had brought his own electric, and so there was much rearrangement of cords to accommodate everybody who needed to be plugged in. The group is pretty much convinced at this point, though, that Paul's going to need to get a longer cord on the Colonel for when he sings on this song. When he's over there by the amplifier playing, pretty much every instrument in the lot of us is between him and the mike, and so he gets drowned out.
Dropping down to backup vocals, Kathryn whipped out her knitting (she's taken up knitting lately, y'all, and she showed us all how she'd somehow managed to knit herself a little Moebius-strip-like sort of thing) and played around with when to come in on her "oohs" and how to harmonize with them, which made for some vocal goodness. Mimi on the drums was a particularly nice touch, especially towards the end and the final chorus. We're all getting this sort of neat layer effect on the beginning, with the bass, then the guitars, then the vocals and the flutes coming in, too. I myself am not quite solid yet on what I'm doing on the flute -- but I did better this time around with dropping out on the guitar solos. Dropping out as well at Mimi's suggested point of "I strut right by with my tail in the air", though, I still need to practice.
We closed out with "Acres of Clams" since we hadn't done it before with Mimi on hand, and moreover, Patrick hadn't heard the new tail end we're putting on the song, the tune "Fisherman's Frolic".
Kathryn expressed her deep affection for the line in this song that goes "And now that I'm used to the climate" -- which is entirely appropos for Seattle and the area around us. Because whoo boy howdy do you need time to get used to the climate around here.
The Frolic needs a bit of work, still, and I need to print it out so that the guitarists can have the chords and Cyn can practice it after she switches from her bass to her fiddle to play it. We had to rearrange stuff, but only a bit, to make sure that Cyn and I wouldn't bump into one another as we got up to look at the sheet music for the Frolic. But it does round out the song quite nicely... and there's a lot to be said for playing with music we hadn't touched before.
The pie: apple.
Discussion was had as to whether or not we will meet on 12/30, if enough of us are back from the holidays by then and up for it. A Jam Report shall be forthcoming on that date if events warrant... and if not, for all of y'all who might chance to read this, happy holidays and a big ol' musical new year!
Anna the Piper
In which Dana is down with the Plague, but not the rest of us; in which Robo-Mimi makes her first appearance but is pre-empted by Actual Mimi; and in which we play the old, the new, and the not-been-touched-in-some-time. Songs: "Jolly Butcher", "Mari-Mac", "Little Beggarman", "Stray Cat Strut", "Acres of Clams".
This being yet another episode of The Jam Report is Late Because the Jam Reporter was a Big Lame-O Theater, but well hey. Y'all are lucky to see this before the holidays really kick in, eh? ;)
We had a decent-sized session this past time around, with almost everyone in attendance except Dana, who had to bow out due to fighting off one of the many plagues that haunt the residents of Seattle around this time of year -- which has been particularly bad with the cold and the wet and the ick as of late. It was observed at the time that being plague-ridden hasn't stopped us from jamming before;
solarbird (Dara) did, after all, label the track list for the session way back on 9/16 as "The Plague Years" (relevant quotes from said session being "I'm on Nyquil!" and "Alan has a black plastic thing"). Nevertheless we remained sans Dana, so we did not in fact record "The Plague Years Part II".However, we did play for the first time with the metronome software that Dara downloaded off the Net. Said software was pretty much immediately dubbed "Robo-Mimi", though it was the opinion of all that Robo-Mimi was rather more limited in her repetoire of ways by which she could keep the beat. She had Method 1, which sounds pretty much like this:
TOK TOK TOK TOK
She also had Method 2, which works pretty much like Method 1 except every so often she'd smush two counts together and make them really fast for no apparent reason whatsoever, and we couldn't figure out what was making it happen. Which sounds pretty much like this:
TOK TOK TOK toktok TOK TOK
Once we finally got started, "Jolly Butcher" was our first song of choice, just to make sure we could get in some practice with one of our best ditties, and also see whether the metronome counts would help us hold a consistent tempo. We regularly have problems slowing down on the bridge, and as it turned out having the beat going did help to at least a small extent. The main problem with it though was that we all realized that in order to compensate for the TOK TOK TOK from the computer, we all unconsciously started playing LOUDER. So nobody except those of us closest to the computer could actually hear the beat, which meant pretty much me, so everyone wound up watching my foot as I was tapping.
kathrynt (Kathryn) and ssha (Cyn) had a bit of rustiness getting their harmony back together for the opening of the song, and on one take actually started off in an entirely different key than the song actually is played in. Personally, speaking as the person who couldn't hold to the melody to save her life the session before, I blame it on gremlins. (They can take the blame too for any and all errors on my piccolo playing, for that matter. Just so's we're on the record on that.) On the other hand, spazzkat (Paul) reports that he's finally getting comfortable with the chord changes that involve F for the guitars in this song, so at least we have some balance!"Mari-Mac" was next up, partly in the spirit of wanting to keep it in practice and partly because Kathryn wanted to give it another shot now that she's been getting a whole bunch of extensive dental work done... the upshot of which is that now, apparently, she can actually belt out "Mari-Mac" without doing herself actual bodily harm or needing to stand there by the mike holding her jaw in place. Much to her satisfaction, she was able to do this for three takes, as well.
As one might expect the metronome was pretty useless on "Mari-Mac" due to the tempo shifts. We experimented with running it for the first chunk of the song and electing Kathryn as person in charge of shutting it up when the time came (which involved leaning over and hitting the mouse button at the right moment). This, though, managed to throw Kathryn right off her groove for the rest of the song, so we didn't try that again. The metronome did, however, enlighten us that we appear to be starting this ditty in the ballpark of 138 beats a minute and going up by about 7 beats for each of the tempo changes. We even tried to get it over 170, but determined that that was definitely Way Too Darned Fast... though Dara did exult that she could keep up at that speed. ;)
After "Mari-Mac", the actual
mamishka (Mimi) showed up to displace Robo-Mimi from her job, much to the group's general pleasure since we hadn't had Mimi in a while. Mimi has continued to be an extremely busy Mimi as of late, and had asked me prior to this session whether I thought it was better to show up for the beginning of jam or for the end of it -- to which I naturally replied, the end, because PIE. (At this, Mimi told me I was very wise; me, I just know the value of a good nummy dessert.) And on we went to..."Little Beggarman", which we hadn't done in a while, and which Monica and Kathryn both wound up wanting to play with again. I finally got to the point with this song where I could actually play the mandolin on it all the way through, thanks to Monica taking the time to show me the chord changes for our version. They're all pretty easy, a bunch of D and C and a little bit of A minor, but I just hadn't managed to figure out what chords went where yet. The mandolin was at any rate deemed a Good Thing to Have on this particular song, due to the brightness of its voice.
Well, okay, I was mostly able to play the mandolin all the way through. Kathryn's holding out a bit at the end where we're all dropping out except for Mimi on her drum, and I kept missing that. Kathryn was trying to signal us by lifting a hand -- but as I pointed out to her, when you've got your eyes on your fretboard because you're watching your fingers to make sure you put them in the right places, a hand signal ain't exactly useful! Oh well. Better luck next time. :)
Mimi played around with what drum to use as well, trying a take with the djembe and a take with the doumbek (the latter after Kathryn expressed an interest in having the doumbek's jingly bits in on the song).
Onward then to "Stray Cat Strut" and the breaking out of the electrical instruments. Paul got to play with the Colonel this time around because
daspatrick (Patrick) had brought his own electric, and so there was much rearrangement of cords to accommodate everybody who needed to be plugged in. The group is pretty much convinced at this point, though, that Paul's going to need to get a longer cord on the Colonel for when he sings on this song. When he's over there by the amplifier playing, pretty much every instrument in the lot of us is between him and the mike, and so he gets drowned out.Dropping down to backup vocals, Kathryn whipped out her knitting (she's taken up knitting lately, y'all, and she showed us all how she'd somehow managed to knit herself a little Moebius-strip-like sort of thing) and played around with when to come in on her "oohs" and how to harmonize with them, which made for some vocal goodness. Mimi on the drums was a particularly nice touch, especially towards the end and the final chorus. We're all getting this sort of neat layer effect on the beginning, with the bass, then the guitars, then the vocals and the flutes coming in, too. I myself am not quite solid yet on what I'm doing on the flute -- but I did better this time around with dropping out on the guitar solos. Dropping out as well at Mimi's suggested point of "I strut right by with my tail in the air", though, I still need to practice.
We closed out with "Acres of Clams" since we hadn't done it before with Mimi on hand, and moreover, Patrick hadn't heard the new tail end we're putting on the song, the tune "Fisherman's Frolic".
Kathryn expressed her deep affection for the line in this song that goes "And now that I'm used to the climate" -- which is entirely appropos for Seattle and the area around us. Because whoo boy howdy do you need time to get used to the climate around here.
The Frolic needs a bit of work, still, and I need to print it out so that the guitarists can have the chords and Cyn can practice it after she switches from her bass to her fiddle to play it. We had to rearrange stuff, but only a bit, to make sure that Cyn and I wouldn't bump into one another as we got up to look at the sheet music for the Frolic. But it does round out the song quite nicely... and there's a lot to be said for playing with music we hadn't touched before.
The pie: apple.
Discussion was had as to whether or not we will meet on 12/30, if enough of us are back from the holidays by then and up for it. A Jam Report shall be forthcoming on that date if events warrant... and if not, for all of y'all who might chance to read this, happy holidays and a big ol' musical new year!
Anna the Piper