Jam Report #45: 5/19/02
May. 19th, 2002 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperAs originally posted to the OKP. Transcribed to Livejournal 1/30/06.
In which we wax sophistimacated by changing time signatures and key signatures in a ditty; in which we have seven of us, except then we have six; in which Fred breaks a string, and provides a new flavor of pie. Songs: "Molly's Lips"/"The Red-Haired Hag", "Jolly Butcher", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Judas Cart", "Trois Navires de Ble".
Three words: embrace the lateness!
Well, okay. Given that this Jam Report is in fact a full week late, I will indulge in a wee bit of explanation as to why I'm so late this time.
But! To actually address the topic at hand, the Jam Session for 5/19 was one of the biggest we'd had in some time, with a total of seven of us present, though Dara had to bugger out fairly early in order to go downstairs and sand the new floor she and our housemate Chris were working on putting in in that part of the house. Aside from Dara and me, we also had Patrick, Monica, Dana, Cyn, and Fred, though we all trickled in even more slowly than usual thanks to the annual University District Street Fair making traffic as well as parking in the immediate neighborhood rather entertaining.
Before we were all present, Monica launched into an impromptu performance of a song that is near and dear to her heart due to her sister being named Molly, i.e., "Molly's Lips". This wound up being sufficient excuse for us to try to play this song officially for the first time in a Jam, since Monica had been making noises about wanting to try it for some time.
Once we all got on hand, picking up the rhythm of this song was fairly easy -- because it has two whole chords in it. A and E. Back and forth all the way through the song!
Dara came up with some really nice flute twiddles, which helped round the song out very nicely. It's a pretty simple song, but since it's a bright and perky and upbeat song it can benefit from the additional enhancement -- as opposed to "Judas Cart", which doesn't want much enhancement at all.
I couldn't decide what to play on this instrument, though. Monica and Patrick had the guitars covered, so I didn't want to try to break out Rags; plus Fred had the dulcimer, so I need to be careful not to duplicate him too closely. I'd thought the little mand was too twangy, but I tried to play with a bit of fingerwork anyway on it. I didn't need to do rhythm with all of us present, especially with Cyn on the bass covering the bottom end of the register. Fred, I determined, is below me on the register in terms of highness of pitch and twanginess; furthermore, I also determined if I get way up my neck, I start sounding like a ukelele.
And let's hear it for backup vocals on the choruses! Patrick even sang some harmony; go Patrick!
Most of the fun had with this song, however, was the result of Monica having the amusing idea that we should stick a jig in the middle. We promptly attempted to do this -- just because if Great Big Sea can change time signatures in the middle of a ditty, SO CAN WE! And so we whipped out my book of Irish songs arranged for the flute, to see if we could find something that would have a prayer of working as a bridge for this song. Unsurprisingly, none of them were in the key of E, but we did find two things in A and deemed them decent transitions for a melody in E: "The Red-Haired Hag" and "The Miller's Daughter". We settled on the Hag on account of we liked the title, and although Dara was being primary flute for the body of the song, we decided that I'd try to play the Hag first since I could read music, and later would be able to teach it to Dara.
It made for a challenging musical exercise, trying to figure out how to get a proper transition going between the melody in E and cut time, and the bridge in 6/8 played as 2 and in A. We needed to stick in an extra measure right after the second chorus, since the Hag starts off with a pickup note, and we needed to figure out how to connect it with the main body of the song. We also had some debate about how much of the Hag to play, since we had concerns about the song's length; also, keeping the key changes from E to A was voted on. As Cyn pointed out, such a segue would be "sophistimacated".
However, it was also pointed out that Fred's dulcimer, which was tuned to D and already wearing a capo to kick it into E, would have a bit of a time following into A. Dar observed that Fred needed explosive emergency release bolts on his capo, though Monica answered that then he'd have the issue of getting the capo back ON.
Further challenge and sophistimacation came in as I discovered that I'd have to play the bridge really fast, too, and I hadn't played anything that fast and rhythmic since high school. It helped me a lot when Monica and Patrick changed their strum patterns, though, to something over which I could play at a reasonable speed. Some fun was had with the G's in this piece, as some of them were natural and some of them were not, and I kept wanting to hit them natural in certain places to make them sound sort of pentatonic-y and blues-y, but that didn't work with the chord progression -- especially when I was trying to do this on top of an E7 chord.
Transitioning out of the Hag back into "Molly's Lips" was debated, as well -- whether or not to kick it back into E at that point, and whether to stay in triple for the last bit. We wanted to be able to go back to duple, and by the end of it managed to figure out how to make that work, though we will have to practice it to make it go smoothly. Monica came up with a funny little last couple of measures to kick back into triple for a few before the final notes are hit, too.
We had a bit of wisdom out of Cyn, who pointed out very wisely that we would have a better chance at getting a decent take of the song if we worried less about screwing around with it and just did it, because otherwise we'd just keep screwing around with it.
We also had a bit of merriment as we wondered whether our usual selves were starting to merge with our alter egos of Crime and the Forces of Evil; this song was considered something of a mix, though, since we were tossing a jig in the middle of a pop ditty, so we deemed this a performance of Crime and the Forces of Three Good Measures.
However, during our work on this song, Dara had to leave us to go downstairs and sand the new floor being laid down in the hallway. So Dara was out of most of the rest of the session, and her absence made a distinct difference in the feel of several of the songs, despite the fact that it's very easy to overlook Dara's flute parts while we're actually playing; her flutes have mellower voices than my Shine does, and often while we're playing her parts get drowned out by the bigger instruments so far as we can tell amongst ourselves, especially if we break out the electrics. Where Dara's absence really comes through though is listening to the recordings of ourselves. We may have to move Dara closer to the mike!
But at any rate, sadly Dara-free though we were, we headed on around to butcher the Butcher.
Cyn and Monica have settled fairly well into doing the lead singing together on this so that they can harmonize. This time around, Cyn wasn't sure either that she could remember all the words.
Aside from a couple of screwups in a couple of places in different takes, I was pretty pleased with my piccolo holding its own for once. Cyn and I both need to go into a Zen space to play the bridge, we have discovered. Because lots of notes. If we don't think about it actively, we have a lot less of a problem playing it.
Apparently, I also elected myself to be the person saying "HEY!" on the intro -- listening to the recording again, I noticed I kept doing that. ;)
Pretty much as per usual we had tempo issues all over the place -- so we had a moment of silence for the Missing of the Mimi, Mistress of the Tempo. On the other hand, on the latter two takes of the three we did, Cyn was actively trying to pull us along, which helped a lot. So there is some potential for us being able to figure out how to keep together eventually, one hopes, even if we don't have a drummer on hand to help us keep the time.
Monica grooved a lot on Fred's new dulcimer, which, along with him sitting nearer to her in Jam, made Fred stand out a lot better while we were playing the Butcher.
Onward to "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", on which we not only actively missed Dara but Mimi as well. Dara's transitions into the choruses add some dimension to the music, and Mimi's voice is much purer than mine on her little vocal bit of "till it grew cold" on the bridge. One also really misses her drumming on this song, but we miss Mimi's drumming in general when she's not around!
Patrick took to playing the Colonel, since he didn't bring his electric and Paul opted not to join us this session. The Colonel's voice is different than his guitar, too, which made for a slightly mellower feel to this session's takes; it was grand to have Patrick's cheesy bits on the end, though, becaue then I can do MY cheesy bits on the little mand, and Cyn can do her little whisper of a final note as well.
Fred broke a string in the middle of our second take, which distracted the heck out of Monica; fortunately, Fred had a spare. Our third take had some issues, but we also had some bits that came together nicely. Patrick remarked that a contributing factor here was very likely his playing the RIGHT CHORDS.
Patrick had to leave us so I had to switch to the big mand, so's we could do "Judas Cart", as Cyn thought that Patrick ought to hear us do that before he took off.
Monica and I are having a bit of a debate as to which instrument I should be using to play lead on this song for our arrangement. If I'm playing it by myself, my own guitar is starting to make loud demands to be the new channel for this ditty... but if I've got Monica with me to play along, I do need to go over to the mand to better stand out against her strumming. The only question is, which mand. Monica likes Summer, though I think it makes the song come out a bit too music-box-y, so I tend to prefer Autumn. On the other hand, after listening to our recordings of us playing this song this past session, I could barely hear myself on the big mand against the guitar. So I'll need to figure how to solve this problem: play the little mand, or play louder.
Cyn was in excellent voice on this song, this time. The bluesy, sultry quality of her voice when she's in fine form works amazingly well for this song, especially when Monica and I are harmonizing with her, but we need to nail down when we come in on the harmonies. When we have Fred and Dana around, too, we'll need to figure out where others should sing as well.
Having Dara out of the room turned out to have one other unexpected side effect that I only discovered as of writing the Jam Report tonight: i.e., we ran out of minidisc in the middle of working on "Judas Cart", and I totally spazzed on remembering to put a new disc in the player. So although I'm still fairly sure I remember that we did "Trois Navires de Ble" after "Judas Cart", I'll end on this note -- mostly because I'm also still fairly sure I remember none of us were too thrilled with how the French ditty came out, either. Ah well!
The pie: rhubarb, courtesy of Fred! It was a better pie than the rhubarb custard pie that Monica had brought, but I think we probably have a group majority opinion that rhubarb really requires strawberry to go with it in a pie for maximum tasty goodness.
More in a week, hopefully, but until then go check out my Folklife report too, folks!
Anna the Piper
In which we wax sophistimacated by changing time signatures and key signatures in a ditty; in which we have seven of us, except then we have six; in which Fred breaks a string, and provides a new flavor of pie. Songs: "Molly's Lips"/"The Red-Haired Hag", "Jolly Butcher", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Judas Cart", "Trois Navires de Ble".
Three words: embrace the lateness!
Well, okay. Given that this Jam Report is in fact a full week late, I will indulge in a wee bit of explanation as to why I'm so late this time.
- Lots of writing I'm trying to get done.
- Lots of me fretting about having a car accident on Thursday, and the kicker of this is, this was the day we FINALLY got the car back from getting the damage repaired from the accident Dara had had several weeks ago.
- Lots of me being a very silly person and walking all the way home from the bookstore where I'm working in Bothell, which made for a 13.5 mile walk that took me four hours.
- Season finales for Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and series finale for The X-Files (even if that did turn out stultifyingly dull IMHO, so I can't really offer that as an excuse for failing to write up the Jam Report, but well hey there ya go).
- My little brother's fourth child has just been born! (Well, okay, granted, my little brother lives in Kentucky and the only impact the birth of this child had on my time was the time spent talking to my brother about it, but work with me here, people, work with me!)
- Going to Folklife this afternoon and spending amusing time there participating in the Band Scramble with Dar, to make up for not having a Jam Session today. See this entry on my personal journal for details on that!
But! To actually address the topic at hand, the Jam Session for 5/19 was one of the biggest we'd had in some time, with a total of seven of us present, though Dara had to bugger out fairly early in order to go downstairs and sand the new floor she and our housemate Chris were working on putting in in that part of the house. Aside from Dara and me, we also had Patrick, Monica, Dana, Cyn, and Fred, though we all trickled in even more slowly than usual thanks to the annual University District Street Fair making traffic as well as parking in the immediate neighborhood rather entertaining.
Before we were all present, Monica launched into an impromptu performance of a song that is near and dear to her heart due to her sister being named Molly, i.e., "Molly's Lips". This wound up being sufficient excuse for us to try to play this song officially for the first time in a Jam, since Monica had been making noises about wanting to try it for some time.
Once we all got on hand, picking up the rhythm of this song was fairly easy -- because it has two whole chords in it. A and E. Back and forth all the way through the song!
Dara came up with some really nice flute twiddles, which helped round the song out very nicely. It's a pretty simple song, but since it's a bright and perky and upbeat song it can benefit from the additional enhancement -- as opposed to "Judas Cart", which doesn't want much enhancement at all.
I couldn't decide what to play on this instrument, though. Monica and Patrick had the guitars covered, so I didn't want to try to break out Rags; plus Fred had the dulcimer, so I need to be careful not to duplicate him too closely. I'd thought the little mand was too twangy, but I tried to play with a bit of fingerwork anyway on it. I didn't need to do rhythm with all of us present, especially with Cyn on the bass covering the bottom end of the register. Fred, I determined, is below me on the register in terms of highness of pitch and twanginess; furthermore, I also determined if I get way up my neck, I start sounding like a ukelele.
And let's hear it for backup vocals on the choruses! Patrick even sang some harmony; go Patrick!
Most of the fun had with this song, however, was the result of Monica having the amusing idea that we should stick a jig in the middle. We promptly attempted to do this -- just because if Great Big Sea can change time signatures in the middle of a ditty, SO CAN WE! And so we whipped out my book of Irish songs arranged for the flute, to see if we could find something that would have a prayer of working as a bridge for this song. Unsurprisingly, none of them were in the key of E, but we did find two things in A and deemed them decent transitions for a melody in E: "The Red-Haired Hag" and "The Miller's Daughter". We settled on the Hag on account of we liked the title, and although Dara was being primary flute for the body of the song, we decided that I'd try to play the Hag first since I could read music, and later would be able to teach it to Dara.
It made for a challenging musical exercise, trying to figure out how to get a proper transition going between the melody in E and cut time, and the bridge in 6/8 played as 2 and in A. We needed to stick in an extra measure right after the second chorus, since the Hag starts off with a pickup note, and we needed to figure out how to connect it with the main body of the song. We also had some debate about how much of the Hag to play, since we had concerns about the song's length; also, keeping the key changes from E to A was voted on. As Cyn pointed out, such a segue would be "sophistimacated".
However, it was also pointed out that Fred's dulcimer, which was tuned to D and already wearing a capo to kick it into E, would have a bit of a time following into A. Dar observed that Fred needed explosive emergency release bolts on his capo, though Monica answered that then he'd have the issue of getting the capo back ON.
Further challenge and sophistimacation came in as I discovered that I'd have to play the bridge really fast, too, and I hadn't played anything that fast and rhythmic since high school. It helped me a lot when Monica and Patrick changed their strum patterns, though, to something over which I could play at a reasonable speed. Some fun was had with the G's in this piece, as some of them were natural and some of them were not, and I kept wanting to hit them natural in certain places to make them sound sort of pentatonic-y and blues-y, but that didn't work with the chord progression -- especially when I was trying to do this on top of an E7 chord.
Transitioning out of the Hag back into "Molly's Lips" was debated, as well -- whether or not to kick it back into E at that point, and whether to stay in triple for the last bit. We wanted to be able to go back to duple, and by the end of it managed to figure out how to make that work, though we will have to practice it to make it go smoothly. Monica came up with a funny little last couple of measures to kick back into triple for a few before the final notes are hit, too.
We had a bit of wisdom out of Cyn, who pointed out very wisely that we would have a better chance at getting a decent take of the song if we worried less about screwing around with it and just did it, because otherwise we'd just keep screwing around with it.
We also had a bit of merriment as we wondered whether our usual selves were starting to merge with our alter egos of Crime and the Forces of Evil; this song was considered something of a mix, though, since we were tossing a jig in the middle of a pop ditty, so we deemed this a performance of Crime and the Forces of Three Good Measures.
However, during our work on this song, Dara had to leave us to go downstairs and sand the new floor being laid down in the hallway. So Dara was out of most of the rest of the session, and her absence made a distinct difference in the feel of several of the songs, despite the fact that it's very easy to overlook Dara's flute parts while we're actually playing; her flutes have mellower voices than my Shine does, and often while we're playing her parts get drowned out by the bigger instruments so far as we can tell amongst ourselves, especially if we break out the electrics. Where Dara's absence really comes through though is listening to the recordings of ourselves. We may have to move Dara closer to the mike!
But at any rate, sadly Dara-free though we were, we headed on around to butcher the Butcher.
Cyn and Monica have settled fairly well into doing the lead singing together on this so that they can harmonize. This time around, Cyn wasn't sure either that she could remember all the words.
Aside from a couple of screwups in a couple of places in different takes, I was pretty pleased with my piccolo holding its own for once. Cyn and I both need to go into a Zen space to play the bridge, we have discovered. Because lots of notes. If we don't think about it actively, we have a lot less of a problem playing it.
Apparently, I also elected myself to be the person saying "HEY!" on the intro -- listening to the recording again, I noticed I kept doing that. ;)
Pretty much as per usual we had tempo issues all over the place -- so we had a moment of silence for the Missing of the Mimi, Mistress of the Tempo. On the other hand, on the latter two takes of the three we did, Cyn was actively trying to pull us along, which helped a lot. So there is some potential for us being able to figure out how to keep together eventually, one hopes, even if we don't have a drummer on hand to help us keep the time.
Monica grooved a lot on Fred's new dulcimer, which, along with him sitting nearer to her in Jam, made Fred stand out a lot better while we were playing the Butcher.
Onward to "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", on which we not only actively missed Dara but Mimi as well. Dara's transitions into the choruses add some dimension to the music, and Mimi's voice is much purer than mine on her little vocal bit of "till it grew cold" on the bridge. One also really misses her drumming on this song, but we miss Mimi's drumming in general when she's not around!
Patrick took to playing the Colonel, since he didn't bring his electric and Paul opted not to join us this session. The Colonel's voice is different than his guitar, too, which made for a slightly mellower feel to this session's takes; it was grand to have Patrick's cheesy bits on the end, though, becaue then I can do MY cheesy bits on the little mand, and Cyn can do her little whisper of a final note as well.
Fred broke a string in the middle of our second take, which distracted the heck out of Monica; fortunately, Fred had a spare. Our third take had some issues, but we also had some bits that came together nicely. Patrick remarked that a contributing factor here was very likely his playing the RIGHT CHORDS.
Patrick had to leave us so I had to switch to the big mand, so's we could do "Judas Cart", as Cyn thought that Patrick ought to hear us do that before he took off.
Monica and I are having a bit of a debate as to which instrument I should be using to play lead on this song for our arrangement. If I'm playing it by myself, my own guitar is starting to make loud demands to be the new channel for this ditty... but if I've got Monica with me to play along, I do need to go over to the mand to better stand out against her strumming. The only question is, which mand. Monica likes Summer, though I think it makes the song come out a bit too music-box-y, so I tend to prefer Autumn. On the other hand, after listening to our recordings of us playing this song this past session, I could barely hear myself on the big mand against the guitar. So I'll need to figure how to solve this problem: play the little mand, or play louder.
Cyn was in excellent voice on this song, this time. The bluesy, sultry quality of her voice when she's in fine form works amazingly well for this song, especially when Monica and I are harmonizing with her, but we need to nail down when we come in on the harmonies. When we have Fred and Dana around, too, we'll need to figure out where others should sing as well.
Having Dara out of the room turned out to have one other unexpected side effect that I only discovered as of writing the Jam Report tonight: i.e., we ran out of minidisc in the middle of working on "Judas Cart", and I totally spazzed on remembering to put a new disc in the player. So although I'm still fairly sure I remember that we did "Trois Navires de Ble" after "Judas Cart", I'll end on this note -- mostly because I'm also still fairly sure I remember none of us were too thrilled with how the French ditty came out, either. Ah well!
The pie: rhubarb, courtesy of Fred! It was a better pie than the rhubarb custard pie that Monica had brought, but I think we probably have a group majority opinion that rhubarb really requires strawberry to go with it in a pie for maximum tasty goodness.
More in a week, hopefully, but until then go check out my Folklife report too, folks!
Anna the Piper