Jam Report #54: 11/17/02
Nov. 17th, 2002 12:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperAs originally posted to the OKP. Transcribed to Livejournal 2/6/06.
In which we do a lot of chord geeking, and a lot of general just messing around, and a lot of discovering that trad lyrics can sometimes just suck. Songs: "Whiskey You're the Devil", "The Christians and the Pagans", "Acres of Clams", "Mari-Mac", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Goin' Up", "General Taylor".
Yet another late Jam Report... but life has gotten spastic for the Jam Reporter again as of late, and as I have posted recently on my Livejournal, my ducks are not in a row. They are all squawking about me in a frantic flock. Today, at any rate, I attempt to get one of my musical ducks back into place by getting this Jam Report out!
Everyone's schedules in the group have gotten somewhat erratic lately, truth be told, and we weren't entirely sure how many of us would actually show up for this session -- but happily, we did have five, and that was enough for Jam to happen, so Jam happened! Specifically, Jam with me,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird (Dara), daspatrick (Patrick), Monica, and ssha (Cyn), though Cyn showed up a bit late. Fred RSVP'ed in the negative because of visiting with a friend, and mamishka (Mimi) of course is still on the east coast. Whoo boy howdy, did we miss her too! As pretty much expected, we had tempo issues all over the place without her.
First up, since we'd been playing with this a little bit before, was "Whiskey You're the Devil". There was much musical satisfaction to be had in just generally futzing around with this song -- first and foremost because Dara has been rediscovering the ability to not only sight-read music as of late, but also to transpose things out on the keyboard!
The rest of the musical satisfaction came in just futzing around with the chord lines. As I believe I've mentioned in previous Jams, we've got two versions of this thing at our disposal: the one has an easier chord progression but is more difficult rhythmically to sing, while the other has an easier rhythm but a far more complicated chord progression. Patrick and Monica wound up opting to play with the easier chord progression at least for the time being, though general agreement that maybe later we might be able to sneak in the cooler chords was reached. Me, I'm particularly fond of Cdim, having learned that that chord goes extremely nicely between F and C.
Dara's ability to transpose got exercised, though, as we determined that the song's native key of C had some issues for those of us singing. We tried it again in D and in E, with Dara discovering that she could not only transpose on the keyboard on the fly, but she could also do it without looking. Which was a very impressive accomplishment, and worthy of much egoboo for Dara! The only problem with transposing, though, came out in that I was the one best familiar with the lyrics (by virtue of actually having looked at them a couple of times outside of regular Jam), but it turned out that neither C nor E were really comfortable keys for me to belt this one out. I can manage the key of C somewhat, but it requires me to get a bit warmed up. E turned out to be right out, as it was well and thoroughly into the realm of "too high if I sing my upper octave, too low if I sing my lower".
The longer we worked with the song, though, the less satisfied we got with it on the grounds that the lyrics sounded fairly dorky to us. Two thumbs up on the chorus -- but the verses didn't fit too well together for us. Individually they're not bad, but taken as a whole we decided they felt sort of randomly stuck together; Cyn, too, really dislikes the second verse, maintaining that it blows so many donkeys that there is not a single remaining unsatisfied donkey in all of Snohomish County after us having played with this song.
(We are not, in fact, in Snohomish County. However, it's a fair bet that there are actually more donkeys in Snohomish County than there are in King County, which is where we are.
But I digress.)
After more or less bailing on this song, we wandered over to play with the other new thing we've taken on as of late, which is Dara Williams' "The Christians and the Pagans".
Had I been a cleverer bunny I would have actually gotten Mimi to leave us a copy of her recording of this before she took off on her vacation, but I was not as clever a bunny as I could have been! This meant that we couldn't exactly remember where all the little breaks in between the various lines of the various verses went, though we still more or less managed to get the overall idea of the song. I'm still not sure what I want to play on it though.
We fell into a take of "Acres of Clams" almost by accident; it just sort of started happening, and we all collectively went 'Well okay, we'll play this'. I was in the middle of trying to look up better lyrics for "Whiskey You're the Devil" at the time, so I actually came in partway through this song. The sad result of this was that I was not able to play for all of the song, as I had to frantically dig for my sheet music for "Fisherman's Frolic". The happy result was that despite not having actually dug up said sheet music, I was able to more or less fake my way through the Frolic anyway, indicating that the thing has in fact been more or less emblazoned into my brain. It's not perfect, but it's there!
We also sort of fell into playing with "Mari-Mac" a couple of times, interspersed with playing with other songs. This was mostly silly, though, since without Mimi on her drums we had the expected major tempo issues... but it was all rather gigglesome anyway, just because Monica very deliberately got silly with the tempo on the latter verses and it was fun just to see if we could keep up. For a switch I actually played the big mand on "Mari-Mac" this time, just to see if I could, and determined that playing the chord line for this ditty at ridiculous speeds is quite hard on the wrists; apparently the boys of Great Big Sea have wrists of steel, or something!
On around to "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", on which I did not sing as solidly as I would have liked due to having sung hard on "Whiskey You're the Devil" earlier in the session, but we did wind up coming up with a very, very good rhythm line this time around. Patrick did some nice little ornamentation on the chord line on his guitar, and we finally seem to be getting the hang of the new 'I come in first on the big mand' intro, and if we hadn't had a couple of rough spots here and there we might almost have had a publically listenable take of this.
(Dara and I have subsequently discussed that we should do updated public takes of the stuff we have posted already, on the grounds that with several of these songs we have actually improved significantly and we'd like to be able to show that off. We're doing "Neighborhood" noticeably slower than the public take goes right now, because it seemed to feel appropriate to do that; the song seems to want a good jaunty tempo, but not necessarily a blazing one.
First though, we need to get some of the wedding mp3's up!)
And speaking of up, we took a stab at "Goin' Up" again, and most of what could be said about this involved Cyn and Monica asserting that they came out sounding like twelve-year-old girls singing this ditty. This is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but it is a consequence of the song having been written in G. I still can't manage to sing this thing and play at the same time, though.
Last but not least we took one turn at "General Taylor" because Dara wanted to, now that this has become in a very real sense the song that helped her rediscover singing. She has been experimenting with different keys, and even shows signs of getting a little fancier on the final chorus than Sean McCann himself! More bulletins on this as events warrant. ;)
The pie: red raspberry.
Next time will be a bit yet as this coming Thursday is Thanksgiving, and we're not entirely sure yet whether we'll be meeting the following Sunday. We may all still be in turkey comas; we'll let you know if we Jam!
Anna the Piper
In which we do a lot of chord geeking, and a lot of general just messing around, and a lot of discovering that trad lyrics can sometimes just suck. Songs: "Whiskey You're the Devil", "The Christians and the Pagans", "Acres of Clams", "Mari-Mac", "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", "Goin' Up", "General Taylor".
Yet another late Jam Report... but life has gotten spastic for the Jam Reporter again as of late, and as I have posted recently on my Livejournal, my ducks are not in a row. They are all squawking about me in a frantic flock. Today, at any rate, I attempt to get one of my musical ducks back into place by getting this Jam Report out!
Everyone's schedules in the group have gotten somewhat erratic lately, truth be told, and we weren't entirely sure how many of us would actually show up for this session -- but happily, we did have five, and that was enough for Jam to happen, so Jam happened! Specifically, Jam with me,
solarbird (Dara), daspatrick (Patrick), Monica, and ssha (Cyn), though Cyn showed up a bit late. Fred RSVP'ed in the negative because of visiting with a friend, and mamishka (Mimi) of course is still on the east coast. Whoo boy howdy, did we miss her too! As pretty much expected, we had tempo issues all over the place without her.First up, since we'd been playing with this a little bit before, was "Whiskey You're the Devil". There was much musical satisfaction to be had in just generally futzing around with this song -- first and foremost because Dara has been rediscovering the ability to not only sight-read music as of late, but also to transpose things out on the keyboard!
The rest of the musical satisfaction came in just futzing around with the chord lines. As I believe I've mentioned in previous Jams, we've got two versions of this thing at our disposal: the one has an easier chord progression but is more difficult rhythmically to sing, while the other has an easier rhythm but a far more complicated chord progression. Patrick and Monica wound up opting to play with the easier chord progression at least for the time being, though general agreement that maybe later we might be able to sneak in the cooler chords was reached. Me, I'm particularly fond of Cdim, having learned that that chord goes extremely nicely between F and C.
Dara's ability to transpose got exercised, though, as we determined that the song's native key of C had some issues for those of us singing. We tried it again in D and in E, with Dara discovering that she could not only transpose on the keyboard on the fly, but she could also do it without looking. Which was a very impressive accomplishment, and worthy of much egoboo for Dara! The only problem with transposing, though, came out in that I was the one best familiar with the lyrics (by virtue of actually having looked at them a couple of times outside of regular Jam), but it turned out that neither C nor E were really comfortable keys for me to belt this one out. I can manage the key of C somewhat, but it requires me to get a bit warmed up. E turned out to be right out, as it was well and thoroughly into the realm of "too high if I sing my upper octave, too low if I sing my lower".
The longer we worked with the song, though, the less satisfied we got with it on the grounds that the lyrics sounded fairly dorky to us. Two thumbs up on the chorus -- but the verses didn't fit too well together for us. Individually they're not bad, but taken as a whole we decided they felt sort of randomly stuck together; Cyn, too, really dislikes the second verse, maintaining that it blows so many donkeys that there is not a single remaining unsatisfied donkey in all of Snohomish County after us having played with this song.
(We are not, in fact, in Snohomish County. However, it's a fair bet that there are actually more donkeys in Snohomish County than there are in King County, which is where we are.
But I digress.)
After more or less bailing on this song, we wandered over to play with the other new thing we've taken on as of late, which is Dara Williams' "The Christians and the Pagans".
Had I been a cleverer bunny I would have actually gotten Mimi to leave us a copy of her recording of this before she took off on her vacation, but I was not as clever a bunny as I could have been! This meant that we couldn't exactly remember where all the little breaks in between the various lines of the various verses went, though we still more or less managed to get the overall idea of the song. I'm still not sure what I want to play on it though.
We fell into a take of "Acres of Clams" almost by accident; it just sort of started happening, and we all collectively went 'Well okay, we'll play this'. I was in the middle of trying to look up better lyrics for "Whiskey You're the Devil" at the time, so I actually came in partway through this song. The sad result of this was that I was not able to play for all of the song, as I had to frantically dig for my sheet music for "Fisherman's Frolic". The happy result was that despite not having actually dug up said sheet music, I was able to more or less fake my way through the Frolic anyway, indicating that the thing has in fact been more or less emblazoned into my brain. It's not perfect, but it's there!
We also sort of fell into playing with "Mari-Mac" a couple of times, interspersed with playing with other songs. This was mostly silly, though, since without Mimi on her drums we had the expected major tempo issues... but it was all rather gigglesome anyway, just because Monica very deliberately got silly with the tempo on the latter verses and it was fun just to see if we could keep up. For a switch I actually played the big mand on "Mari-Mac" this time, just to see if I could, and determined that playing the chord line for this ditty at ridiculous speeds is quite hard on the wrists; apparently the boys of Great Big Sea have wrists of steel, or something!
On around to "You Woke Up My Neighborhood", on which I did not sing as solidly as I would have liked due to having sung hard on "Whiskey You're the Devil" earlier in the session, but we did wind up coming up with a very, very good rhythm line this time around. Patrick did some nice little ornamentation on the chord line on his guitar, and we finally seem to be getting the hang of the new 'I come in first on the big mand' intro, and if we hadn't had a couple of rough spots here and there we might almost have had a publically listenable take of this.
(Dara and I have subsequently discussed that we should do updated public takes of the stuff we have posted already, on the grounds that with several of these songs we have actually improved significantly and we'd like to be able to show that off. We're doing "Neighborhood" noticeably slower than the public take goes right now, because it seemed to feel appropriate to do that; the song seems to want a good jaunty tempo, but not necessarily a blazing one.
First though, we need to get some of the wedding mp3's up!)
And speaking of up, we took a stab at "Goin' Up" again, and most of what could be said about this involved Cyn and Monica asserting that they came out sounding like twelve-year-old girls singing this ditty. This is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but it is a consequence of the song having been written in G. I still can't manage to sing this thing and play at the same time, though.
Last but not least we took one turn at "General Taylor" because Dara wanted to, now that this has become in a very real sense the song that helped her rediscover singing. She has been experimenting with different keys, and even shows signs of getting a little fancier on the final chorus than Sean McCann himself! More bulletins on this as events warrant. ;)
The pie: red raspberry.
Next time will be a bit yet as this coming Thursday is Thanksgiving, and we're not entirely sure yet whether we'll be meeting the following Sunday. We may all still be in turkey comas; we'll let you know if we Jam!
Anna the Piper