Jam Report #52: 9/8/02
Sep. 8th, 2002 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperAs originally posted to the OKP. Transcribed to Livejournal 2/4/06.
In which we have hardcore wedding rehearsal, play almost everything we know and then some, and in which EVERYBODY SINGS! Songs: "Old Brown's Daughter", "Acres of Clams", "Lukey", "General Taylor", "Trois Navires de Ble", "Judas Cart", "Dancing With Mrs. White", "Mari-Mac", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Old Black Rum", "Jolly Butcher".
As has been mentioned in previous Jam Reports, we are actually about to play in public at Monica's upcoming wedding -- and accordingly, we've commenced hardcore rehearsal for said wedding and have even rehearsed between Session #51 and this one. However, I won't be recording notes for all this next week's upcoming rehearsals, for the sake of preserving my sanity and actually, like, having time to practice and stuff.
I will, however, note here that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mamishka (Mimi) has taken the liberty of being Girl Who Makes Lists for the sake of helping us get our collective act together, which is contributing greatly to us approaching this Scary Public Performance in an organized fashion. This has led daspatrick (Patrick) to tell Mimi that she needs to remember to make a note to make some more lists, but because we do in fact need Patrick and his hands for the wedding performance, we haven't killed him yet. ;)
At any rate, our usual contingent minus Monica were our attendees yesterday as we had a combined Regular Jam and Wedding Rehearsal: me,solarbird (Dara), ssha (Cyn), Mimi, Patrick, and Fred.
First up, since Monica has had her heart set on this ditty being sung at her wedding on account of her name is Brown and she uses it as her handle on the Online Kitchen Party, we went to work on "Old Brown's Daughter". Happily,kathrynt (Kathryn) had provided us with an arrangement of harmony, and after Mimi had tweaked on it a bit it turned out that we had a workable harmony indeed. What proved especially helpful was that Meems wrote out the actual notes everyone needed to be hitting, which let both Patrick and me plunk out our parts on whatever instrument was handy. Moreover, Mimi got out spazzkat's (Paul's) synthesizer, which let her play everyone's part at them for easy determining of whether we could sing it. Yay Mimi!
Although we had originally thought perhaps that Patrick could sing the tenor part with Cyn and Fred could sing bass, it actually turned out that Patrick would take the bass line and Fred the tenor, except Fred would do his part an octave down.
It also turned out that while I've got the alto part down cold, I stand out real well on the end of every line of the chorus. This amused us all immensely, including me, since I was blatantly obvious at the end of all those phrases.
After working on this for a bit we moved on to "Acres of Clams", and Patrick is still fairly sure he may keep missing choruses on this. Even with the lyrics actually physically in front of him, and the word "chorus" scribbled in where the choruses are supposed to occur, he kept dropping where said choruses come in. We're hoping that since Dara and I make a distinct change to what we're doing when we swing around to the choruses, he'll be able to follow us.
We do still continue to miss Cyn's bass part, though, and she is hoping to borrow an acoustic bass for the wedding performance.
Next up was "Lukey", which we have only passingly played with before -- but which Monica had also requested, so we gave it a shot. The good thing about "Lukey" is that this is one of the songs I have practiced a great deal along with the GBS recordings, so I have the chord progression down without having to much think about it.
We're trying this song in A, since that seems to be easier for both Cyn and Mimi to sing. However, this also means that we'll probably not have a bridge. I'm used to playing the chord progression GBS uses for the Fire in the Kitchen/Road Rage version of this song, in which the bridge played is "Gone by the Board" -- but since we're transposing it into A, the bridge would kick into E, and that's not a key Cyn is used to playing in. And since I'm on the mand on this, I can't play it on the piccolo. Oh well. The others seem to think we'll have a decent enough bridge anyway, and Mimi has declared that she'll just go to town on the drum if we don't have any other sort of bridge -- which would be cool, since she doesn't get to do a drum solo that often.
Patrick didn't know the chords, but this wasn't a problem. We were able to get the chords written out for him in the proper key, and he knows all the relevant chords (which, for the interested, are A, D, E, F sharp minor, E7, and B7). I am not too terribly happy with the sound of my mandolin capoed as opposed to uncapoed, but then again it didn't sound as bad as I thought it did when we listened to the recording later; I've also determined that the big mand stands out much more clearly when I'm playing against just one guitar on a song I know very well.
Cyn has been designated to sing lead, since while we decided that both she and Mimi sound good in different ways singing the lead on this song, for wedding purposes she seems to work better. Mimi sings it "brighter" and with a bit more character to the lyrics, while Cyn is mellower and rounder, and this has been designated as appropriate for a wedding setting.
The first take on this sort of fell apart since Mimi wasn't expecting the final verse, but the amusing thing there was that we did actually all fall apart more or less in the same place. Which gave us a new musical motto: "If we're going to fuck, at least let's fuck together". (Wait, did I type that in Outside Voice?)
Ahem. Er. Anyway, we do seem to be solid enough on it that it's doable, which pleases me, as I am very fond of "Lukey". Even if we're not yet up to doing "Gone by the Board" on the bridge!
One last note on "Lukey": Dara hasn't yet come up with a decent flute part for this song and isn't going to try. However, she may well be joining us on the choruses, which is a switch for Dara!
Onward, then, to "General Taylor", which we are doing despite the fact that we'll be singing it for a wedding. Sean McCann's quote about this song comes to mind:
"This is a song about burying a dead person. I'm great fun at parties, folks, any time!"
Unlike Mr. McCann, however, we're singing this in F. Probably. It is a decent range for Mimi, though she is not entirely certain about her high notes in this key. We will be trying it in D or E during this coming week's rehearsals, and we'll have to see what key we settle upon.
We wound up doing a pretty good knockoff version of this without too much effort, which is nice, though I found myself overlapping Cyn on harmony some and I want to not do that. She and the boys have the lower end of the harmony covered fairly well, and I want to be in the middle between them and Mimi. Which means that at least for these purposes I'm going to have to see if I can echo the harmony generally sung by Mr. Doyle on this song -- which was in turn swiped by Monica when she sings with us. It'll help us round out the final chord, especially.
Another good result of this song turned out to be watching Mimi for visual cues as to when she is going to stretch out the last verse and chorus, as Mr. McCann is wont to do in concert. She doesn't quite have his staying power, but well hey, there are six of us and one of him (counting Dara joining us on the flute while the rest of us are singing). ;) One more idea we may also swipe from GBS is using a drum to set a pulse beat underneath the voices, as can be heard in GBS's studio version of the song.
On "Trois Navires de Ble", Mimi was quite pleased to get through all of the lyrics in the proper order, and with the proper spacing. She has found it a challenge to get in all of the syllables in an approximation of the proper rhythm; on previous takes she's been finding herself going, "ACK! Where'd the rest of the line go? Aw screw it... 'sur le bord de l'eau...'", etc. ;)
We did a second round of practice of "Old Brown's Daughter" just for the sake of giving it as much practice as possible - and Mimi figured out that the reason I got so loud at the end of every line was that I could hold out those notes, and so was doing so. I'll have to be sure to practice not doing that, so as to better blend with everybody else.
Cyn and I then went through one run-through of an instrumental version of "Judas Cart". Monica is very fond of "Si Bheag Si Mhor" (as am I), but "Judas Cart" is the version of this song we've practiced. However, the lyrics are completely inappropriate for a wedding -- since they're about a divorce after all -- so we're going to do an instrumental version, with me on the mandolin and Cyn playing the melody on her violin. Dara is not prepared to learn the harmony I've been singing on the flute, but since we do have it written out, we'll see about giving it to Mimi since she, too, can play flute. This should be serving us for a processional.
('Inappropriate for a wedding' is also why we've shot down "The Chemical Worker's Song" -- despite the fact that we can actually belt that one out pretty well, too. We're all like, "Yeah, this is a totally cheerful song to playing for a WEDDING!" Of course, this isn't stopping us from singing "General Taylor". Go figure. ;) )
"Dancing With Mrs. White" came out actually sounding fairly decent, though we had to twiddle with the structure of the song a bit. This is to be serving as the recessional, but we are fairly sure that one run-through of the song will be too short. So we're adding in an extra repetition of the C part, followed by a complete second run-through of the entire song, to round out the song as much as possible and give everybody time to get back down the aisle.
By the time we got to "Mari-Mac", the disc had run out and Dara didn't bother to put another disc in, as all we had left were songs we were all fairly comfortable with and we didn't think we'd need to listen to ourselves. Which is a bit of a shame, because this of course meant that we'd wind up doing one of the best takes of "Mari-Mac" we've had in a while. And since we don't have a public take yet of Mimi singing lead on this ditty, it was a particular shame! Still, the tempo was really solid, and we didn't fall apart anywhere, or at least nowhere that didn't still sound like a plausible part of the song.
"You Woke Up My Neighborhood" gave me a bit of a challenge. Since I am now lead rhythm instrument on this, I seem to be getting way ahead of myself with tempo. So we determined that I need to play close attention to Mimi as she's singing to keep in sync with her as best as possible, to keep myself from running away with the beat. We'll have to see if I can pull this off while singing backup and strumming. I was a little shaky on the last few chords of the song, but we were able to work that out as well; I need E minor on the last four beats of the chorus, and then need to hit a D on beat 1 of the very last measure.
Yet again, razzing on Patrick's little cheesy close-out for this song occurred -- but we did decide that people would LOVE that little added flourish at the end and that Patrick's future groupies will come up to him and gush, "I LOVE that thing you do on the end of 'You Woke Up My Neighborhood'!" And Patrick will look earnest and inform them that it is an expression of his SOUL, at least when the groupies in question are actually AROUND.
"Old Black Rum" again proved that I seem to have two decent takes of this in me as long as I'm singing at a mike -- and since we're going to sing this towards the end of our set, this'll mean that neither Cyn nor Mimi will have to worry much about preserving their voices, so they can help me really belt it out on the choruses and the all-important "ON HER HAIR?!" bit on the second verse. Hurray!
Last up was "Jolly Butcher", which required a bit more finagling between Cyn and Mimi as they needed to figure out whether they would both sing the thing all the way through, or continue with the dialogue trade that Cyn and Monica have been doing on the last verse.
The pie: apple berry, which despite being a QFC-bought pie was deemed surprisingly good for a QFC pie, almost on par with the Snohomish pie company. What was particularly impressive about this was that that very pie had been in the refrigerator since before Dara and I had taken off for Worldcon, as it had been purchased for the 8/25 pie! Let's hear it for preservatives, folks. ;)
Next time: post-wedding report!
Anna the Piper
In which we have hardcore wedding rehearsal, play almost everything we know and then some, and in which EVERYBODY SINGS! Songs: "Old Brown's Daughter", "Acres of Clams", "Lukey", "General Taylor", "Trois Navires de Ble", "Judas Cart", "Dancing With Mrs. White", "Mari-Mac", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Old Black Rum", "Jolly Butcher".
As has been mentioned in previous Jam Reports, we are actually about to play in public at Monica's upcoming wedding -- and accordingly, we've commenced hardcore rehearsal for said wedding and have even rehearsed between Session #51 and this one. However, I won't be recording notes for all this next week's upcoming rehearsals, for the sake of preserving my sanity and actually, like, having time to practice and stuff.
I will, however, note here that
mamishka (Mimi) has taken the liberty of being Girl Who Makes Lists for the sake of helping us get our collective act together, which is contributing greatly to us approaching this Scary Public Performance in an organized fashion. This has led daspatrick (Patrick) to tell Mimi that she needs to remember to make a note to make some more lists, but because we do in fact need Patrick and his hands for the wedding performance, we haven't killed him yet. ;)At any rate, our usual contingent minus Monica were our attendees yesterday as we had a combined Regular Jam and Wedding Rehearsal: me,
solarbird (Dara), ssha (Cyn), Mimi, Patrick, and Fred.First up, since Monica has had her heart set on this ditty being sung at her wedding on account of her name is Brown and she uses it as her handle on the Online Kitchen Party, we went to work on "Old Brown's Daughter". Happily,
kathrynt (Kathryn) had provided us with an arrangement of harmony, and after Mimi had tweaked on it a bit it turned out that we had a workable harmony indeed. What proved especially helpful was that Meems wrote out the actual notes everyone needed to be hitting, which let both Patrick and me plunk out our parts on whatever instrument was handy. Moreover, Mimi got out spazzkat's (Paul's) synthesizer, which let her play everyone's part at them for easy determining of whether we could sing it. Yay Mimi!Although we had originally thought perhaps that Patrick could sing the tenor part with Cyn and Fred could sing bass, it actually turned out that Patrick would take the bass line and Fred the tenor, except Fred would do his part an octave down.
It also turned out that while I've got the alto part down cold, I stand out real well on the end of every line of the chorus. This amused us all immensely, including me, since I was blatantly obvious at the end of all those phrases.
After working on this for a bit we moved on to "Acres of Clams", and Patrick is still fairly sure he may keep missing choruses on this. Even with the lyrics actually physically in front of him, and the word "chorus" scribbled in where the choruses are supposed to occur, he kept dropping where said choruses come in. We're hoping that since Dara and I make a distinct change to what we're doing when we swing around to the choruses, he'll be able to follow us.
We do still continue to miss Cyn's bass part, though, and she is hoping to borrow an acoustic bass for the wedding performance.
Next up was "Lukey", which we have only passingly played with before -- but which Monica had also requested, so we gave it a shot. The good thing about "Lukey" is that this is one of the songs I have practiced a great deal along with the GBS recordings, so I have the chord progression down without having to much think about it.
We're trying this song in A, since that seems to be easier for both Cyn and Mimi to sing. However, this also means that we'll probably not have a bridge. I'm used to playing the chord progression GBS uses for the Fire in the Kitchen/Road Rage version of this song, in which the bridge played is "Gone by the Board" -- but since we're transposing it into A, the bridge would kick into E, and that's not a key Cyn is used to playing in. And since I'm on the mand on this, I can't play it on the piccolo. Oh well. The others seem to think we'll have a decent enough bridge anyway, and Mimi has declared that she'll just go to town on the drum if we don't have any other sort of bridge -- which would be cool, since she doesn't get to do a drum solo that often.
Patrick didn't know the chords, but this wasn't a problem. We were able to get the chords written out for him in the proper key, and he knows all the relevant chords (which, for the interested, are A, D, E, F sharp minor, E7, and B7). I am not too terribly happy with the sound of my mandolin capoed as opposed to uncapoed, but then again it didn't sound as bad as I thought it did when we listened to the recording later; I've also determined that the big mand stands out much more clearly when I'm playing against just one guitar on a song I know very well.
Cyn has been designated to sing lead, since while we decided that both she and Mimi sound good in different ways singing the lead on this song, for wedding purposes she seems to work better. Mimi sings it "brighter" and with a bit more character to the lyrics, while Cyn is mellower and rounder, and this has been designated as appropriate for a wedding setting.
The first take on this sort of fell apart since Mimi wasn't expecting the final verse, but the amusing thing there was that we did actually all fall apart more or less in the same place. Which gave us a new musical motto: "If we're going to fuck, at least let's fuck together". (Wait, did I type that in Outside Voice?)
Ahem. Er. Anyway, we do seem to be solid enough on it that it's doable, which pleases me, as I am very fond of "Lukey". Even if we're not yet up to doing "Gone by the Board" on the bridge!
One last note on "Lukey": Dara hasn't yet come up with a decent flute part for this song and isn't going to try. However, she may well be joining us on the choruses, which is a switch for Dara!
Onward, then, to "General Taylor", which we are doing despite the fact that we'll be singing it for a wedding. Sean McCann's quote about this song comes to mind:
"This is a song about burying a dead person. I'm great fun at parties, folks, any time!"
Unlike Mr. McCann, however, we're singing this in F. Probably. It is a decent range for Mimi, though she is not entirely certain about her high notes in this key. We will be trying it in D or E during this coming week's rehearsals, and we'll have to see what key we settle upon.
We wound up doing a pretty good knockoff version of this without too much effort, which is nice, though I found myself overlapping Cyn on harmony some and I want to not do that. She and the boys have the lower end of the harmony covered fairly well, and I want to be in the middle between them and Mimi. Which means that at least for these purposes I'm going to have to see if I can echo the harmony generally sung by Mr. Doyle on this song -- which was in turn swiped by Monica when she sings with us. It'll help us round out the final chord, especially.
Another good result of this song turned out to be watching Mimi for visual cues as to when she is going to stretch out the last verse and chorus, as Mr. McCann is wont to do in concert. She doesn't quite have his staying power, but well hey, there are six of us and one of him (counting Dara joining us on the flute while the rest of us are singing). ;) One more idea we may also swipe from GBS is using a drum to set a pulse beat underneath the voices, as can be heard in GBS's studio version of the song.
On "Trois Navires de Ble", Mimi was quite pleased to get through all of the lyrics in the proper order, and with the proper spacing. She has found it a challenge to get in all of the syllables in an approximation of the proper rhythm; on previous takes she's been finding herself going, "ACK! Where'd the rest of the line go? Aw screw it... 'sur le bord de l'eau...'", etc. ;)
We did a second round of practice of "Old Brown's Daughter" just for the sake of giving it as much practice as possible - and Mimi figured out that the reason I got so loud at the end of every line was that I could hold out those notes, and so was doing so. I'll have to be sure to practice not doing that, so as to better blend with everybody else.
Cyn and I then went through one run-through of an instrumental version of "Judas Cart". Monica is very fond of "Si Bheag Si Mhor" (as am I), but "Judas Cart" is the version of this song we've practiced. However, the lyrics are completely inappropriate for a wedding -- since they're about a divorce after all -- so we're going to do an instrumental version, with me on the mandolin and Cyn playing the melody on her violin. Dara is not prepared to learn the harmony I've been singing on the flute, but since we do have it written out, we'll see about giving it to Mimi since she, too, can play flute. This should be serving us for a processional.
('Inappropriate for a wedding' is also why we've shot down "The Chemical Worker's Song" -- despite the fact that we can actually belt that one out pretty well, too. We're all like, "Yeah, this is a totally cheerful song to playing for a WEDDING!" Of course, this isn't stopping us from singing "General Taylor". Go figure. ;) )
"Dancing With Mrs. White" came out actually sounding fairly decent, though we had to twiddle with the structure of the song a bit. This is to be serving as the recessional, but we are fairly sure that one run-through of the song will be too short. So we're adding in an extra repetition of the C part, followed by a complete second run-through of the entire song, to round out the song as much as possible and give everybody time to get back down the aisle.
By the time we got to "Mari-Mac", the disc had run out and Dara didn't bother to put another disc in, as all we had left were songs we were all fairly comfortable with and we didn't think we'd need to listen to ourselves. Which is a bit of a shame, because this of course meant that we'd wind up doing one of the best takes of "Mari-Mac" we've had in a while. And since we don't have a public take yet of Mimi singing lead on this ditty, it was a particular shame! Still, the tempo was really solid, and we didn't fall apart anywhere, or at least nowhere that didn't still sound like a plausible part of the song.
"You Woke Up My Neighborhood" gave me a bit of a challenge. Since I am now lead rhythm instrument on this, I seem to be getting way ahead of myself with tempo. So we determined that I need to play close attention to Mimi as she's singing to keep in sync with her as best as possible, to keep myself from running away with the beat. We'll have to see if I can pull this off while singing backup and strumming. I was a little shaky on the last few chords of the song, but we were able to work that out as well; I need E minor on the last four beats of the chorus, and then need to hit a D on beat 1 of the very last measure.
Yet again, razzing on Patrick's little cheesy close-out for this song occurred -- but we did decide that people would LOVE that little added flourish at the end and that Patrick's future groupies will come up to him and gush, "I LOVE that thing you do on the end of 'You Woke Up My Neighborhood'!" And Patrick will look earnest and inform them that it is an expression of his SOUL, at least when the groupies in question are actually AROUND.
"Old Black Rum" again proved that I seem to have two decent takes of this in me as long as I'm singing at a mike -- and since we're going to sing this towards the end of our set, this'll mean that neither Cyn nor Mimi will have to worry much about preserving their voices, so they can help me really belt it out on the choruses and the all-important "ON HER HAIR?!" bit on the second verse. Hurray!
Last up was "Jolly Butcher", which required a bit more finagling between Cyn and Mimi as they needed to figure out whether they would both sing the thing all the way through, or continue with the dialogue trade that Cyn and Monica have been doing on the last verse.
The pie: apple berry, which despite being a QFC-bought pie was deemed surprisingly good for a QFC pie, almost on par with the Snohomish pie company. What was particularly impressive about this was that that very pie had been in the refrigerator since before Dara and I had taken off for Worldcon, as it had been purchased for the 8/25 pie! Let's hear it for preservatives, folks. ;)
Next time: post-wedding report!
Anna the Piper