Jam Report #38: 3/10/02
Mar. 10th, 2002 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperAs originally posted to the OKP. Transcribed to Livejournal 1/26/06.
In which we have our first official practice for summer busking; in which Mimi rejoins us (YAY MIMI); and in which I have Adventures in Tempo Randomness. Songs: "Dancing With Mrs. White", "The Old Woman of Wexford", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Mari-Mac".
I know I said something about trying to get the Jam Reports done more quickly... but clearly, I was mistaken! Gah. Well, at least I took thorough notes and can revisit them to build this report now.
A few of us were MIA this past session, but to some extent this was to be expected as not all of us are expecting to actually try to busk this summer. Among those of us that are, Dana was absent this time due to having a rough week for personal reasons; accordingly, our attendance was![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird (Dara), me, ssha (Cyn), Monica, and mamishka (Mimi).
We had some discussion about what songs would be good to try to tackle given the subset of the group that wants to busk, so we rattled off as many appropriate ditties as we could think of out of the ones we've covered, either with thorough practice or with passing glancing visits in older sessions. What we finally came up with this time around was a session that let us do sort of half-and-half, half stuff we hadn't really seriously played with before, and half old favorites.
First up was "Dancing With Mrs. White", which Dara and I had already done some work on to try to play with this notion of us doing it as "dueling flutes" -- since it's hell to play all the way through if you're a flautist. Dara has actually practiced on this a lot more than I have in the last several months so she's ahead of me on it and sounding quite good. To try to catch up with her, I need to work out harmony to play with her on the B and D parts since we're trading back and forth on this, and I need to memorize the durned thing as well; I figure if we're going to busk, I'd better memorize my parts to minimize the amount of stuff I have to carry around with me.
The others are of the opinion that I need to stay down in my lower octave rather than playing an octave over Dara. This makes us sound more like the same instrument rather than two, even though I'm playing a metal piccolo and she's playing a bamboo one.
Rejoining us again after another extended visit back east, Mimi finally got to play her bodhran again on this ditty, and she did some really nice work playing on the rim of said drum. It helped give us a very jaunty, bouncy feel to the whole thing, which is needed to keep the song suitably moving along.
Monica didn't have much of a problem working out the proper chords to play; the only issue that came up for her was to whether she wanted to play a B minor or an E minor in the second to last measure of the C part. She settled on B minor.
Cyn had no idea what to do yet, so she improvised bits and pieces to see what sounded good, and she has some good potential going on for something to play along with the flutes that isn't the melody, which is a good idea.
We wound up doing several takes of this, kicking the tempo up each time, though we definitely can't match GBS's speed quite yet.
After that, we moved on to "Old Woman from Wexford".
We hadn't touched on this one in a while, so we had to dig up the lyrics and the chords. It's very simple, so we also pulled out my Irish Descendants/Fables tape to listen to the Fables' version to see how they'd dressed it up, in search of inspiration for what we might try to do with it ourselves. As part of this effort, after we started to play it straight through I stopped us in the middle to suggest we stick some breaks in between choruses and verses, so it took us a while to talk about that in general.
I also wound up printing off the Fables' set of lyrics for this ditty to compare against the lyrics in my songbook, and Cyn and Mimi worked for a while to get lyrics out of both versions that they liked while Monica and I played around with the chords. There's some instrument or other doing some tremolo work under the initial verses on the Fables' version, so I tried something vaguely like that on my little mandolin, doing some tremolo on my open D string and with my fifth fret down on the A; Monica and I decided I'd try that on the first couple of verses before I joined her on the chords later on, so that I won't have to be quite so terribly bored playing the same note all the way through the song. However, I'm not sure yet whether even that will entertain me or whether I'm going to have to improvise a bit more fingerwork. It's definitely the little mand that I want for this song, though.
Dara had no clue yet what she wanted to do on the bridge, though she's pretty much going to have to carry the bridge for us; having several of us chant "something something something something something something something something" in 6/8 just doesn't cut it. ;) I'll have to go poking through my Irish Flute songbook to see if I can dig up something in the key of D and in 6/8 time for her to play with.
It was also during this ditty that Dara started channelling cats and frogs, meowing when Cyn asked for her starting note -- since the vocals and the drums are coming in first, she and Meems don't have the chord progression to set the key for 'em. Then she followed that up by hopping around like a frog on the floor. Later on, too, Dara and Monica had a parrot fight, making parrot noises at each other. The alarming thing about this is that she was not, in fact, on Nyquil, which has been the prior explanation for such behavior in previous jams.
In general we have decided we like this ditty a lot, and we think it has a bunch of potential, but we definitely need to spice it up; we may not be able to play it for Folklife assuming we do in fact get to busk there, but we could maybe busk it later on during the summer.
Onward! Next on the roster: "You Woke Up My Neighborhood".
I appear to be about >< this close to being able to sing the chorus while I'm playing the mand on this, but I'm not quite there yet; I have to practice this ditty some more. However, the fun thing is that the chords are falling on the upbeats in it, as they do in a lot of GBS ditties, and this whole notion seems to finally be starting to make sense to me. So there's hope that I can join on the vocals.
(Addendum, added in on 3/16/02 to follow up on the notes I took during the last session: I have in fact practiced this ditty some more since last time, and yes, I will be able to sing backup on the choruses. In fact, I may even have a harmony I can try, which is very satisfying. I want something backup-flavored on the bridge as well, maybe to help Mimi with the lovely "till it grew cold" she has wafting over Monica there, as well as maybe arpeggio-ing my way up through the "old" sung over the A chords coming out of the bridge.)
I really do have to make sure I've got the chords solidly enough, though. Right now I don't. I kept falling apart forgetting when I should change chords on this past session's takes, and I still forget the A - G - Bm - D sequence in the bridge.
On the other hand, Dara felt really solid on her flute part, which she was quite happy about, and Cyn has some numminess going on with her violin; in general, aside from the very noticeable bits where I fell apart on the mand (and it continues to be quite obvious when the little mand drops out on our records), we had some good music going on with these takes even if we didn't get anything printable.
Lastly, we wanted to practice "Mari-Mac", since Mimi can in fact belt it out rather nicely indeed, and if Monica doesn't have to sing we do have at least one guitar available -- which means we can do it busking. Mimi on her djembe was a much-missed, much-welcome presence with this song -- and yet, despite the presence of the drum, I still managed to fall all over the place with the tempo. This is apparently what we get for practicing this for weeks without a drum to keep our tempo in line.
Monica's trying to do Alan's harmony from Road Rage on the choruses, but isn't quite solid with it yet; Mimi, however, is belting out the words very well. When she knows them at any rate, which she doesn't yet. She reports to us that she can sing at speed, but she can't sing and read the lyrics at speed, so she finds herself falling behind when we get fast towards the end.
The pie: bumbleberry. Complete with the obligatory exclamation from Mimi: "What the heck is a bumbleberry?" We told her they were from bumblebees, though Dara, who is even less friends with bees than Monica is with dairy products, made a face at the idea of bumblebee pie.
Oh, and by the way: "yum yum bumbleberry, bumbleberry pie" does not scan to the Bumblebee Tuna jingle. Just thought you all should know that.
More very soon (because I was so lame writing this that it's almost time for the next session),
Anna the Piper
In which we have our first official practice for summer busking; in which Mimi rejoins us (YAY MIMI); and in which I have Adventures in Tempo Randomness. Songs: "Dancing With Mrs. White", "The Old Woman of Wexford", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Mari-Mac".
I know I said something about trying to get the Jam Reports done more quickly... but clearly, I was mistaken! Gah. Well, at least I took thorough notes and can revisit them to build this report now.
A few of us were MIA this past session, but to some extent this was to be expected as not all of us are expecting to actually try to busk this summer. Among those of us that are, Dana was absent this time due to having a rough week for personal reasons; accordingly, our attendance was
solarbird (Dara), me, ssha (Cyn), Monica, and mamishka (Mimi).We had some discussion about what songs would be good to try to tackle given the subset of the group that wants to busk, so we rattled off as many appropriate ditties as we could think of out of the ones we've covered, either with thorough practice or with passing glancing visits in older sessions. What we finally came up with this time around was a session that let us do sort of half-and-half, half stuff we hadn't really seriously played with before, and half old favorites.
First up was "Dancing With Mrs. White", which Dara and I had already done some work on to try to play with this notion of us doing it as "dueling flutes" -- since it's hell to play all the way through if you're a flautist. Dara has actually practiced on this a lot more than I have in the last several months so she's ahead of me on it and sounding quite good. To try to catch up with her, I need to work out harmony to play with her on the B and D parts since we're trading back and forth on this, and I need to memorize the durned thing as well; I figure if we're going to busk, I'd better memorize my parts to minimize the amount of stuff I have to carry around with me.
The others are of the opinion that I need to stay down in my lower octave rather than playing an octave over Dara. This makes us sound more like the same instrument rather than two, even though I'm playing a metal piccolo and she's playing a bamboo one.
Rejoining us again after another extended visit back east, Mimi finally got to play her bodhran again on this ditty, and she did some really nice work playing on the rim of said drum. It helped give us a very jaunty, bouncy feel to the whole thing, which is needed to keep the song suitably moving along.
Monica didn't have much of a problem working out the proper chords to play; the only issue that came up for her was to whether she wanted to play a B minor or an E minor in the second to last measure of the C part. She settled on B minor.
Cyn had no idea what to do yet, so she improvised bits and pieces to see what sounded good, and she has some good potential going on for something to play along with the flutes that isn't the melody, which is a good idea.
We wound up doing several takes of this, kicking the tempo up each time, though we definitely can't match GBS's speed quite yet.
After that, we moved on to "Old Woman from Wexford".
We hadn't touched on this one in a while, so we had to dig up the lyrics and the chords. It's very simple, so we also pulled out my Irish Descendants/Fables tape to listen to the Fables' version to see how they'd dressed it up, in search of inspiration for what we might try to do with it ourselves. As part of this effort, after we started to play it straight through I stopped us in the middle to suggest we stick some breaks in between choruses and verses, so it took us a while to talk about that in general.
I also wound up printing off the Fables' set of lyrics for this ditty to compare against the lyrics in my songbook, and Cyn and Mimi worked for a while to get lyrics out of both versions that they liked while Monica and I played around with the chords. There's some instrument or other doing some tremolo work under the initial verses on the Fables' version, so I tried something vaguely like that on my little mandolin, doing some tremolo on my open D string and with my fifth fret down on the A; Monica and I decided I'd try that on the first couple of verses before I joined her on the chords later on, so that I won't have to be quite so terribly bored playing the same note all the way through the song. However, I'm not sure yet whether even that will entertain me or whether I'm going to have to improvise a bit more fingerwork. It's definitely the little mand that I want for this song, though.
Dara had no clue yet what she wanted to do on the bridge, though she's pretty much going to have to carry the bridge for us; having several of us chant "something something something something something something something something" in 6/8 just doesn't cut it. ;) I'll have to go poking through my Irish Flute songbook to see if I can dig up something in the key of D and in 6/8 time for her to play with.
It was also during this ditty that Dara started channelling cats and frogs, meowing when Cyn asked for her starting note -- since the vocals and the drums are coming in first, she and Meems don't have the chord progression to set the key for 'em. Then she followed that up by hopping around like a frog on the floor. Later on, too, Dara and Monica had a parrot fight, making parrot noises at each other. The alarming thing about this is that she was not, in fact, on Nyquil, which has been the prior explanation for such behavior in previous jams.
In general we have decided we like this ditty a lot, and we think it has a bunch of potential, but we definitely need to spice it up; we may not be able to play it for Folklife assuming we do in fact get to busk there, but we could maybe busk it later on during the summer.
Onward! Next on the roster: "You Woke Up My Neighborhood".
I appear to be about >< this close to being able to sing the chorus while I'm playing the mand on this, but I'm not quite there yet; I have to practice this ditty some more. However, the fun thing is that the chords are falling on the upbeats in it, as they do in a lot of GBS ditties, and this whole notion seems to finally be starting to make sense to me. So there's hope that I can join on the vocals.
(Addendum, added in on 3/16/02 to follow up on the notes I took during the last session: I have in fact practiced this ditty some more since last time, and yes, I will be able to sing backup on the choruses. In fact, I may even have a harmony I can try, which is very satisfying. I want something backup-flavored on the bridge as well, maybe to help Mimi with the lovely "till it grew cold" she has wafting over Monica there, as well as maybe arpeggio-ing my way up through the "old" sung over the A chords coming out of the bridge.)
I really do have to make sure I've got the chords solidly enough, though. Right now I don't. I kept falling apart forgetting when I should change chords on this past session's takes, and I still forget the A - G - Bm - D sequence in the bridge.
On the other hand, Dara felt really solid on her flute part, which she was quite happy about, and Cyn has some numminess going on with her violin; in general, aside from the very noticeable bits where I fell apart on the mand (and it continues to be quite obvious when the little mand drops out on our records), we had some good music going on with these takes even if we didn't get anything printable.
Lastly, we wanted to practice "Mari-Mac", since Mimi can in fact belt it out rather nicely indeed, and if Monica doesn't have to sing we do have at least one guitar available -- which means we can do it busking. Mimi on her djembe was a much-missed, much-welcome presence with this song -- and yet, despite the presence of the drum, I still managed to fall all over the place with the tempo. This is apparently what we get for practicing this for weeks without a drum to keep our tempo in line.
Monica's trying to do Alan's harmony from Road Rage on the choruses, but isn't quite solid with it yet; Mimi, however, is belting out the words very well. When she knows them at any rate, which she doesn't yet. She reports to us that she can sing at speed, but she can't sing and read the lyrics at speed, so she finds herself falling behind when we get fast towards the end.
The pie: bumbleberry. Complete with the obligatory exclamation from Mimi: "What the heck is a bumbleberry?" We told her they were from bumblebees, though Dara, who is even less friends with bees than Monica is with dairy products, made a face at the idea of bumblebee pie.
Oh, and by the way: "yum yum bumbleberry, bumbleberry pie" does not scan to the Bumblebee Tuna jingle. Just thought you all should know that.
More very soon (because I was so lame writing this that it's almost time for the next session),
Anna the Piper