Jam Report #35: 2/3/02
Feb. 3rd, 2002 02:39 pm![[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 TGM goes punk with its very first Original Song, thanks to Dara; in which we nearly have our eardrums shattered, thanks to me and high A on the piccolo; and in which we are gifted with a way to get in touch with our collective Inner Bob, thanks to Fred! Songs: "Acres of Clams", "My Boyfriend Wears a B-Cup", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Mari-Mac".
Jam on the Sunday of 2/3 was one of the smaller sessions, with myself,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird (Dara), spazzkat (Paul), ssha (Cyn), Monica, and mamishka (Mimi) in attendance... but as things turned out, it was quite the lively session regardless!
Some days prior, Fred had sent us all a mysterious package, which bore upon it several lively phrases. These included "Don't cross the streams", "I've found the cure for hope", "Hey sexy American -- for you; five-hundred bhat", "Open after Xmas", "Bring out your inner Bob", "Atomic batteries not included", "Open other side" (on the bottom, naturally), "Caution: Contents may open a portal to Hell", and last, but not least, "Open at a jam session". It could be surmised that this latter instruction was contradictory to the Xmas-related one, at least if one operated on the assumption that the redoubtable Fred did in fact mean for us to open the box on the next session held after we received it; however, considering the rate of mail to and from the U.S. Navy, this could well have been December 2002. Since the planets did align, pigs did go airborne, and we did in fact receive the package in a fairly timely fashion, we opted to open it at this session and disregard the Yuletide-related directive. More on this below.
To start things off we warmed up with "Acres of Clams", though this mostly started as a desire to practice "Fisherman's Frolic" on account of the flute-and-fiddle trio handling our new ending to the Clam ditty really needed to practice the Frolic. At this point, the Fisherman just isn't frolicking enough; he's just sort of stumbling. We don't know a ditty called "Fisherman's Stumble", though, so we're stuck with practicing this one.
We had a bit of a confusion between me and Cyn on the rhythm of the last couple of measures of the B part -- I was playing it wrong. But we agreed to just play what is actually written, so we should hopefully work it out and I should hopefully stop paying insufficient amounts of attention to what's on the sheet in front of me. ;) However, we also discovered entirely by accident that the A part of the Frolic played simultaneously with the B part doesn't sound half bad with the piccolo and the violin -- though the guitars can't join us on that stunt, since there are two different chord progressions in the A part and the B part.
Overall, though, we were happy with our tempo decisions for this ditty and its tail end, this time around. With Monica setting the tempo, we gunned it up to be faster so that the overall song is more sprightly, which it really does need so that we don't drag, given that it does have several verses to get through before we finally hit the Frolic at the end. (We'll get that Fisherman jigging yet!)
Second up, we decided to do something we'd never ever done before.
We played with OUR VERY FIRST ORIGINAL SONG.
Dara, you see, has written a little ditty she calls "My Boyfriend Wears a B-Cup". She sent this around to the Jam list a while back with the subject line of "I have no good explanation for this"; furthermore, she even had the beginnings of a punk-flavored melody for it.kathrynt (Kathryn) liked it so much she promptly came up with her own melody for it as well, but since Kathryn was not in attendance this session, we opted to try to mess around with Dara's version of the song.
The first take turned out almost reggae-flavored, though, since to start off with we had to try to figure out what chords we would need to go with the melody line Dara had written. So we were playing with it with Monica's acoustic guitar, my octave mand, and Meems on the djembe -- not exactly an appropriate instrumentation for a ditty whose creator intended it to be punk.
During the initial take, as well, we had some entertaining moments trying to figure out what key the song should be in. Dara originally wrote it with notes she described as all falling into the key of D, but we figured out what we really wanted in that key was B minor. So we played around with trying to figure out the chords, and Monica basically determined that it was a two-chord ditty. We wound up in A, and although we had exactly two chords for Paul to play with on the Colonel, he discovered to his chagrin that he couldn't keep track of the changes a few times.
We did some experimentation as well with Mimi listening to a couple of punk-flavored songs, to give her an idea of what rhythms to play; Paul played a bit with her doumbek and got an idea of something we liked the sound of, but Mimi wound up playing Paul's keyboard in drumkit mode instead, which worked extremely well.
Dara discovered to her amusement that she has to play her toy fife that we bought in Colonial Williamsburg to get the sound she wants. I tried my silver flute, but this was voted down in favor of the piccolo. And, furthermore, me playing as high as possible. I was, in fact, instructed to 'suck more'. I determined that playing high A on the piccolo -- and in sixteenth note chunks at a pretty fast tempo -- is pretty much almost beyond my control, though. I could only do it for a few takes before my face started to hurt, especially after I reminded myself of what the fingering for high B was as well so I could toss that note in there for a little bit of variety.
I think what I'll wind up doing on this, though, is to take my piccolo part down an octave and leap up to the high A only every so often, rather than stay up in the third octave the whole time. Because HARD! Furthermore, later on when we listened to ourselves, the others decided that me playing that high that much is probably not a good idea after all. Because we're here to tell you, folks, high A on the piccolo is a window-shatterer fer shure.
Cyn, Monica, and Mimi all took turns trying to sing the lyrics, though this required instruments to be traded around. The bass wandered from Monica to Cyn, the keyboard masquerading as a drum kit wandered from Mimi to Paul, and the Colonel wandered from Paul to Monica -- though Monica had to play the Colonel upsidedown since she's left-handed. It was observed that she looked just like Hendrix, to which she affirmed that yeah, she looked just like him, complete with braids.
Paul's car alarm went off in the middle of one of our takes, because he accidentally sat on the panic button of his car's cookie. As this did not actually augment the instrumentation, he shut the car up. ;)
So far, our agreed configuration for this song appears to be Cyn singing, Monica playing her bass, and Paul playing high chords while Patrick plays low ones for when we play this with Patrick around. We'll have to play with this more with more of us present -- and we also intend to try Kathryn's version of this ditty, which apparently is far more Pizzicato Five than punk.
Lastly, it must be noted that in the midst of all of these shenanigans, Dara tried once to hide behind the couch. We didn't let her.
Onward, at last, to a practice run through "You Woke Up My Neighborhood"!
I tried to sing on the choruses on this. This was not successful, since my rhythm line on this involves me strumming on the upbeats, and despite the recent beginnings of glimmers of ability to sing when I'm strumming on downbeats, singing on this ditty's chorus is apparently still beyond me. We almost missed Patrick's ending -- though Monica did once again point out that she's allergic to cheese. I couldn't play my own little cheesy bit without Patrick, though!
Lastly, we did another practice run of "Mari-Mac". My part was shaky, after the workout I'd given my embouchure earlier in the session, so after failing to improvise anything new and entertaining I punted back to playing what I was familiar with. We had some tempo issues as well, and determined this was because of the first tempo jump in the middle being too big a jump.
After a couple runs through "Mari-Mac" we were all getting fairly tired, so we called it a session and went for the pie. Which was apple. We ALSO went for Fred's mysterious box, which proved to contain a good dozen FLAMING BOWLING SHIRTS. All in assorted sizes, with assorted colors and styles of flame bedecking them. The general magnificence of this gift of Fred's was given the praise it was due, as we can now attempt to busk at Folklife in eye-catching splendor, and furthermore, we hope that it will aid us in channelling our collective Inner Bob. Either that, or we'll open a really BIG portal to Hell. We're not sure which yet.
Much trading around of shirts took place nevertheless amongst those of us who were present, as we all strove to determine which ones looked best upon which of us. Mimi also bemoaned the fact that the shirts looked pretty much exactly like the flaming bowling shirt that she had in fact given Paul this past Christmas -- especially since we're all fairly sure she had to pay a lot more for that shirt than Fred did for all of the rest of ours! Of course, this also now means that Paul has TWO flaming bowling shirts, but we will leave as an exercise to the reader what this says about the size of his Inner Bob.
Till next time, all,
Anna the Piper (flame color: teal)
In which TGM goes punk with its very first Original Song, thanks to Dara; in which we nearly have our eardrums shattered, thanks to me and high A on the piccolo; and in which we are gifted with a way to get in touch with our collective Inner Bob, thanks to Fred! Songs: "Acres of Clams", "My Boyfriend Wears a B-Cup", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Mari-Mac".
Jam on the Sunday of 2/3 was one of the smaller sessions, with myself,
solarbird (Dara), spazzkat (Paul), ssha (Cyn), Monica, and mamishka (Mimi) in attendance... but as things turned out, it was quite the lively session regardless!Some days prior, Fred had sent us all a mysterious package, which bore upon it several lively phrases. These included "Don't cross the streams", "I've found the cure for hope", "Hey sexy American -- for you; five-hundred bhat", "Open after Xmas", "Bring out your inner Bob", "Atomic batteries not included", "Open other side" (on the bottom, naturally), "Caution: Contents may open a portal to Hell", and last, but not least, "Open at a jam session". It could be surmised that this latter instruction was contradictory to the Xmas-related one, at least if one operated on the assumption that the redoubtable Fred did in fact mean for us to open the box on the next session held after we received it; however, considering the rate of mail to and from the U.S. Navy, this could well have been December 2002. Since the planets did align, pigs did go airborne, and we did in fact receive the package in a fairly timely fashion, we opted to open it at this session and disregard the Yuletide-related directive. More on this below.
To start things off we warmed up with "Acres of Clams", though this mostly started as a desire to practice "Fisherman's Frolic" on account of the flute-and-fiddle trio handling our new ending to the Clam ditty really needed to practice the Frolic. At this point, the Fisherman just isn't frolicking enough; he's just sort of stumbling. We don't know a ditty called "Fisherman's Stumble", though, so we're stuck with practicing this one.
We had a bit of a confusion between me and Cyn on the rhythm of the last couple of measures of the B part -- I was playing it wrong. But we agreed to just play what is actually written, so we should hopefully work it out and I should hopefully stop paying insufficient amounts of attention to what's on the sheet in front of me. ;) However, we also discovered entirely by accident that the A part of the Frolic played simultaneously with the B part doesn't sound half bad with the piccolo and the violin -- though the guitars can't join us on that stunt, since there are two different chord progressions in the A part and the B part.
Overall, though, we were happy with our tempo decisions for this ditty and its tail end, this time around. With Monica setting the tempo, we gunned it up to be faster so that the overall song is more sprightly, which it really does need so that we don't drag, given that it does have several verses to get through before we finally hit the Frolic at the end. (We'll get that Fisherman jigging yet!)
Second up, we decided to do something we'd never ever done before.
We played with OUR VERY FIRST ORIGINAL SONG.
Dara, you see, has written a little ditty she calls "My Boyfriend Wears a B-Cup". She sent this around to the Jam list a while back with the subject line of "I have no good explanation for this"; furthermore, she even had the beginnings of a punk-flavored melody for it.
kathrynt (Kathryn) liked it so much she promptly came up with her own melody for it as well, but since Kathryn was not in attendance this session, we opted to try to mess around with Dara's version of the song.The first take turned out almost reggae-flavored, though, since to start off with we had to try to figure out what chords we would need to go with the melody line Dara had written. So we were playing with it with Monica's acoustic guitar, my octave mand, and Meems on the djembe -- not exactly an appropriate instrumentation for a ditty whose creator intended it to be punk.
During the initial take, as well, we had some entertaining moments trying to figure out what key the song should be in. Dara originally wrote it with notes she described as all falling into the key of D, but we figured out what we really wanted in that key was B minor. So we played around with trying to figure out the chords, and Monica basically determined that it was a two-chord ditty. We wound up in A, and although we had exactly two chords for Paul to play with on the Colonel, he discovered to his chagrin that he couldn't keep track of the changes a few times.
We did some experimentation as well with Mimi listening to a couple of punk-flavored songs, to give her an idea of what rhythms to play; Paul played a bit with her doumbek and got an idea of something we liked the sound of, but Mimi wound up playing Paul's keyboard in drumkit mode instead, which worked extremely well.
Dara discovered to her amusement that she has to play her toy fife that we bought in Colonial Williamsburg to get the sound she wants. I tried my silver flute, but this was voted down in favor of the piccolo. And, furthermore, me playing as high as possible. I was, in fact, instructed to 'suck more'. I determined that playing high A on the piccolo -- and in sixteenth note chunks at a pretty fast tempo -- is pretty much almost beyond my control, though. I could only do it for a few takes before my face started to hurt, especially after I reminded myself of what the fingering for high B was as well so I could toss that note in there for a little bit of variety.
I think what I'll wind up doing on this, though, is to take my piccolo part down an octave and leap up to the high A only every so often, rather than stay up in the third octave the whole time. Because HARD! Furthermore, later on when we listened to ourselves, the others decided that me playing that high that much is probably not a good idea after all. Because we're here to tell you, folks, high A on the piccolo is a window-shatterer fer shure.
Cyn, Monica, and Mimi all took turns trying to sing the lyrics, though this required instruments to be traded around. The bass wandered from Monica to Cyn, the keyboard masquerading as a drum kit wandered from Mimi to Paul, and the Colonel wandered from Paul to Monica -- though Monica had to play the Colonel upsidedown since she's left-handed. It was observed that she looked just like Hendrix, to which she affirmed that yeah, she looked just like him, complete with braids.
Paul's car alarm went off in the middle of one of our takes, because he accidentally sat on the panic button of his car's cookie. As this did not actually augment the instrumentation, he shut the car up. ;)
So far, our agreed configuration for this song appears to be Cyn singing, Monica playing her bass, and Paul playing high chords while Patrick plays low ones for when we play this with Patrick around. We'll have to play with this more with more of us present -- and we also intend to try Kathryn's version of this ditty, which apparently is far more Pizzicato Five than punk.
Lastly, it must be noted that in the midst of all of these shenanigans, Dara tried once to hide behind the couch. We didn't let her.
Onward, at last, to a practice run through "You Woke Up My Neighborhood"!
I tried to sing on the choruses on this. This was not successful, since my rhythm line on this involves me strumming on the upbeats, and despite the recent beginnings of glimmers of ability to sing when I'm strumming on downbeats, singing on this ditty's chorus is apparently still beyond me. We almost missed Patrick's ending -- though Monica did once again point out that she's allergic to cheese. I couldn't play my own little cheesy bit without Patrick, though!
Lastly, we did another practice run of "Mari-Mac". My part was shaky, after the workout I'd given my embouchure earlier in the session, so after failing to improvise anything new and entertaining I punted back to playing what I was familiar with. We had some tempo issues as well, and determined this was because of the first tempo jump in the middle being too big a jump.
After a couple runs through "Mari-Mac" we were all getting fairly tired, so we called it a session and went for the pie. Which was apple. We ALSO went for Fred's mysterious box, which proved to contain a good dozen FLAMING BOWLING SHIRTS. All in assorted sizes, with assorted colors and styles of flame bedecking them. The general magnificence of this gift of Fred's was given the praise it was due, as we can now attempt to busk at Folklife in eye-catching splendor, and furthermore, we hope that it will aid us in channelling our collective Inner Bob. Either that, or we'll open a really BIG portal to Hell. We're not sure which yet.
Much trading around of shirts took place nevertheless amongst those of us who were present, as we all strove to determine which ones looked best upon which of us. Mimi also bemoaned the fact that the shirts looked pretty much exactly like the flaming bowling shirt that she had in fact given Paul this past Christmas -- especially since we're all fairly sure she had to pay a lot more for that shirt than Fred did for all of the rest of ours! Of course, this also now means that Paul has TWO flaming bowling shirts, but we will leave as an exercise to the reader what this says about the size of his Inner Bob.
Till next time, all,
Anna the Piper (flame color: teal)