Jam Report #59: 3/26/06
Mar. 26th, 2006 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperIn which a new official Jam takes place, but in a new part of MurkSouth, and in which ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wrog shows up for his first jam! Songs: "Mari-Mac", "Trois Navires de Ble", "Captain Kidd", "Jolly Butcher", "Old Black Rum".
(And if I'm going to be semi-regularly doing these again, I clearly need a Jam Reports icon. I'm not sure whether it should be a picture of one of my instruments, something involving pie, or perhaps Weebl and Bob. Because mmmmmm pie. Pie good.)
Our first official jam session in quite some time was surprisingly not terribly sloppy, given that we hadn't played for something on the order of TWO AND A HALF YEARS. Go us! And we had a couple new things about Jam this time around: one being that while this was located at MurkSouth, we were playing down in the space jointly shared bymamishka (Mimi) and solarbird (Dara), and the other being that wrog (Roger) joined us for the first time. Dara was not able to join us unfortunately due to being ill, and so it wound up just being Meems, Roger, auntmonkey (Monica), and me.
I got there early since Meems had errands to run, and armed with a key from Dara, I let myself in and snarfed down some lunch while I waited for the others to show. I was settling in to tune my guitar when Roger arrived, and since Meems and Monica weren't on hand yet he had a bit of time to get acquainted with the keyboard graciously loaned us byspazzkat (thanks Paul!). But Monica and Meems weren't far behind him, and so I introduced Monica and Roger. Monica was amused and startled that despite his knowing me, Roger was not in fact yet familiar with the works of Great Big Sea. (Aside from "John Barbour", the chord progression of which Roger helped me with a couple summers ago. Thanks again on that, Roger!) If he keeps coming to Jam, we are confident this little deficiency will soon correct itself. ;)
Anyway, since it had been so long since Monica and Meems and I had played together and since Roger was new to the songs, we mostly spent time reviewing the ditties we'd played in the past. Which meant we had to riffle through our music folders for appropriate chords and lyrics and stuff, and that we needed to play appropriate tracks for Roger so he could get an idea of how various and sundry songs went. The really neat part of this is that Roger has an excellent ear and was able to pick up very quickly on chord progressions and melody lines, and I could just hand him the sheet music bits of various bridge-y bits of songs and he could play them! So he needed only a time or two through the songs we hit to figure out how he wanted to fiddle around with the keyboard.
First up was "Mari-Mac", since that had been an old favorite of ours. Meems and her djembe took the lead, and at least on the first time through Monica was the only guitar since I wanted to see if I could remember my piccolo part. I did, mostly, though it was sloppy. Second time through I went to my guitar, since I wanted to see which instrument I preferred with that size of a group. I was sloppier on the guitar, as it turned out--and neither Monica nor I remembered until it was too late what we'd been doing before with the instruments dropping out completely on the latter choruses. We'll have to get back into the swing of that.
I'm still undecided about instrument, though. The good thing about having me on the guitar was that I could join Meems on the choruses, though I think I really needed to be on the piccolo with that particular set of instruments. (Or, we needed to up the volume on the keyboard. Half the time we couldn't make out what Roger was doing when we had both the guitars going at once. That'll be an interesting thing to keep in mind for future jams.) With a bigger group, though, I may keep to the guitar. Having Dara around with her flute part would be good, or Cyn with her fiddle part, orsolcita if she wanted to improvise something fiddle-ish as well.
Meems asked for "Trois Navires de Ble" next, at which point we filled Roger in on the amusement value of hearing French Canadian lyrics sung in a Newfoundland accent. (I have remarked in past Jams, y'all may recall, that it gets funnier when I try to sing this song, since my Seattle-blunted Kentucky accent mimicking Alan's Newfoundland accent pronouncing French Canadian lyrics just adds another layer of mangling.) Working on this proved a bit interesting, though, as Roger heard some different chords in places than we'd been used to playing before. I'll have to try to play through the song with a couple of his suggested changes and see how they sound to me. He was very good at going by what notes the bass line was hitting, which I can buy shifting the chords around slightly. And Am and C really are similar chords, you just have the different nuances of flavor.
Getting back into the swing of this song was just about as adventurous as "Mari-Mac", but in a different way. With "Mari-Mac" you have adventures with tempo; with "Trois Navires de Ble", you have adventures with trying to remember where the hell all the bridges (of which there are THREE, or at least two and a bridge-like bit at the end) occur, and how many measures go in between which verses. I think it was during this song at least that Monica teased me about knowing all of these ditties backwards and forwards, to which I acknowledged, why yes, I am a Great Big Sea Nerd. ;) But at least in the case of "Trois Navires de Ble", I have a special fondness for this one since it was pretty much the first GBS song I learned how to play.
And with me on the guitar, I was able to sing harmony with Meems. Woot!
Moving on from there, we tackled a new ditty just to stretch our musical legs a bit--"Captain Kidd", from the new GBS album. Thanks tofredpdx (Fred), I had chords and lyrics to share--though the additional notes I'd added to the file kind of confused things a bit, especially in the last verse where I'd stuck in a bit of question about how long Alan extends a beat, and my notes were practically indistinguishable from the lyrics. Those of you who know the song, imagine if you will Mimi singing "the note's held out here for a few extra beats, but I'm not sure how long yet" to the tune of the verse, and you can imagine how we wound up laughing ourselves silly.
Anyway, this song is fun. The chords are very easy, lots of D and A and G, though you need to capo on the third fret to kick it up into F, which is the key in which the B'ys actually play it. The hard part is getting down the rhythm of the strums, especially in all the bits where you have three hard, swift downbeats. I think Monica and I both got at least the basic idea, and if we work on it a while we can probably polish it up. What I'd really like to do is be able to jump in in some harmony on the choruses, but I haven't managed to figure out yet how the harmonies work in the song.
Next up we thought about playing "Acres of Clams", just to give Roger an example of something not-GBS we've played, but the problem with that was that Monica wasn't really solid on remembering what the chords were and I completely forgot what the hell I was doing on the piccolo with that song. I will clearly have to review the public take we have of this song and try to remind myself how my part went, for next time!
Since we couldn't do Clams, we decided to Butcher the Butcher instead. And happily I actually remembered most of my piccolo twiddles for this one--though I did not remember the fingering for all of the bridge. But! I did have the sheet music for it, "Salmon Tails Up the Water", which I was able to provide for Roger's benefit as well as for the refreshing of my own memory. And yeah, we all pretty much winced at my high G's, too. Good thing I didn't actually consistently hit them in that tiny space. Heh.
We did a couple of takes of this, and the second time through I tried guitar for comparison purposes just because I'd never played guitar on the Butcher before, all the way through. I had the chords for the verses and choruses--but not the bridge. When I've tried to play this on my own before, it's always been on the bouzouki--when I've tried to pick out the whole bridge on my strings rather than just playing the chords. I may try that on future takes, again depending on what set of instruments we have at any given time.
And Monica was cheerfully eager to bellow "That sovreign that you gave to me, well HERE'S YOUR FUCKIN' CHANGE!" on the last chorus, too. Snicker.
Last up: "Old Black Rum". Which meant another run through a track for Roger's benefit, and our sheepishly having to explain that we had the damndest time figuring out the proper chords for this thing. And also that the recorded key of the studio version of the song is actually not what we were playing! In fact, it isn't even the same as the recorded live versions of the song, which are solidly in F. Roger's excellent ear informed us that the studio version really kind of came out between F and F#, which I think would explain why the hell I had a devil of a time trying to figure out piccolo twiddles to this thing in long-ago prior Jams.
At any rate, we wound up playing it in D, since that's the key I can sing it in, and I even mostly managed to keep up enough breath control to do the whole song. Mostly--I fell apart at the tail end of the second take, and wasn't able to join Monica on her blithe Road Rage-y addition of "And Iiiiiii drank sixteen doubles for the price o-of OOOOOOOOOOONE!" Someday, I will be able to do that. Hee.
The pie: strawberry rhubarb. There were actually two different kinds of strawberry rhubarb pie down at the University Village QFC, and I bought the pricier one because it looked tastier. We're here to tell you--it was tasty indeed.
Jumping back outside the cut for this--for the record, interest has been expressed in doing more of this, folks. So there will be another Jam; it's just a question of when. Norwescon is coming up fast, so the next Jam will not be until after that. Watch this space for a poll on good upcoming dates. And thanks towrog and auntmonkey for coming, and to mamishka for hosting!
wrog shows up for his first jam! Songs: "Mari-Mac", "Trois Navires de Ble", "Captain Kidd", "Jolly Butcher", "Old Black Rum".(And if I'm going to be semi-regularly doing these again, I clearly need a Jam Reports icon. I'm not sure whether it should be a picture of one of my instruments, something involving pie, or perhaps Weebl and Bob. Because mmmmmm pie. Pie good.)
Our first official jam session in quite some time was surprisingly not terribly sloppy, given that we hadn't played for something on the order of TWO AND A HALF YEARS. Go us! And we had a couple new things about Jam this time around: one being that while this was located at MurkSouth, we were playing down in the space jointly shared by
mamishka (Mimi) and solarbird (Dara), and the other being that wrog (Roger) joined us for the first time. Dara was not able to join us unfortunately due to being ill, and so it wound up just being Meems, Roger, auntmonkey (Monica), and me.I got there early since Meems had errands to run, and armed with a key from Dara, I let myself in and snarfed down some lunch while I waited for the others to show. I was settling in to tune my guitar when Roger arrived, and since Meems and Monica weren't on hand yet he had a bit of time to get acquainted with the keyboard graciously loaned us by
spazzkat (thanks Paul!). But Monica and Meems weren't far behind him, and so I introduced Monica and Roger. Monica was amused and startled that despite his knowing me, Roger was not in fact yet familiar with the works of Great Big Sea. (Aside from "John Barbour", the chord progression of which Roger helped me with a couple summers ago. Thanks again on that, Roger!) If he keeps coming to Jam, we are confident this little deficiency will soon correct itself. ;)Anyway, since it had been so long since Monica and Meems and I had played together and since Roger was new to the songs, we mostly spent time reviewing the ditties we'd played in the past. Which meant we had to riffle through our music folders for appropriate chords and lyrics and stuff, and that we needed to play appropriate tracks for Roger so he could get an idea of how various and sundry songs went. The really neat part of this is that Roger has an excellent ear and was able to pick up very quickly on chord progressions and melody lines, and I could just hand him the sheet music bits of various bridge-y bits of songs and he could play them! So he needed only a time or two through the songs we hit to figure out how he wanted to fiddle around with the keyboard.
First up was "Mari-Mac", since that had been an old favorite of ours. Meems and her djembe took the lead, and at least on the first time through Monica was the only guitar since I wanted to see if I could remember my piccolo part. I did, mostly, though it was sloppy. Second time through I went to my guitar, since I wanted to see which instrument I preferred with that size of a group. I was sloppier on the guitar, as it turned out--and neither Monica nor I remembered until it was too late what we'd been doing before with the instruments dropping out completely on the latter choruses. We'll have to get back into the swing of that.
I'm still undecided about instrument, though. The good thing about having me on the guitar was that I could join Meems on the choruses, though I think I really needed to be on the piccolo with that particular set of instruments. (Or, we needed to up the volume on the keyboard. Half the time we couldn't make out what Roger was doing when we had both the guitars going at once. That'll be an interesting thing to keep in mind for future jams.) With a bigger group, though, I may keep to the guitar. Having Dara around with her flute part would be good, or Cyn with her fiddle part, or
solcita if she wanted to improvise something fiddle-ish as well.Meems asked for "Trois Navires de Ble" next, at which point we filled Roger in on the amusement value of hearing French Canadian lyrics sung in a Newfoundland accent. (I have remarked in past Jams, y'all may recall, that it gets funnier when I try to sing this song, since my Seattle-blunted Kentucky accent mimicking Alan's Newfoundland accent pronouncing French Canadian lyrics just adds another layer of mangling.) Working on this proved a bit interesting, though, as Roger heard some different chords in places than we'd been used to playing before. I'll have to try to play through the song with a couple of his suggested changes and see how they sound to me. He was very good at going by what notes the bass line was hitting, which I can buy shifting the chords around slightly. And Am and C really are similar chords, you just have the different nuances of flavor.
Getting back into the swing of this song was just about as adventurous as "Mari-Mac", but in a different way. With "Mari-Mac" you have adventures with tempo; with "Trois Navires de Ble", you have adventures with trying to remember where the hell all the bridges (of which there are THREE, or at least two and a bridge-like bit at the end) occur, and how many measures go in between which verses. I think it was during this song at least that Monica teased me about knowing all of these ditties backwards and forwards, to which I acknowledged, why yes, I am a Great Big Sea Nerd. ;) But at least in the case of "Trois Navires de Ble", I have a special fondness for this one since it was pretty much the first GBS song I learned how to play.
And with me on the guitar, I was able to sing harmony with Meems. Woot!
Moving on from there, we tackled a new ditty just to stretch our musical legs a bit--"Captain Kidd", from the new GBS album. Thanks to
fredpdx (Fred), I had chords and lyrics to share--though the additional notes I'd added to the file kind of confused things a bit, especially in the last verse where I'd stuck in a bit of question about how long Alan extends a beat, and my notes were practically indistinguishable from the lyrics. Those of you who know the song, imagine if you will Mimi singing "the note's held out here for a few extra beats, but I'm not sure how long yet" to the tune of the verse, and you can imagine how we wound up laughing ourselves silly.Anyway, this song is fun. The chords are very easy, lots of D and A and G, though you need to capo on the third fret to kick it up into F, which is the key in which the B'ys actually play it. The hard part is getting down the rhythm of the strums, especially in all the bits where you have three hard, swift downbeats. I think Monica and I both got at least the basic idea, and if we work on it a while we can probably polish it up. What I'd really like to do is be able to jump in in some harmony on the choruses, but I haven't managed to figure out yet how the harmonies work in the song.
Next up we thought about playing "Acres of Clams", just to give Roger an example of something not-GBS we've played, but the problem with that was that Monica wasn't really solid on remembering what the chords were and I completely forgot what the hell I was doing on the piccolo with that song. I will clearly have to review the public take we have of this song and try to remind myself how my part went, for next time!
Since we couldn't do Clams, we decided to Butcher the Butcher instead. And happily I actually remembered most of my piccolo twiddles for this one--though I did not remember the fingering for all of the bridge. But! I did have the sheet music for it, "Salmon Tails Up the Water", which I was able to provide for Roger's benefit as well as for the refreshing of my own memory. And yeah, we all pretty much winced at my high G's, too. Good thing I didn't actually consistently hit them in that tiny space. Heh.
We did a couple of takes of this, and the second time through I tried guitar for comparison purposes just because I'd never played guitar on the Butcher before, all the way through. I had the chords for the verses and choruses--but not the bridge. When I've tried to play this on my own before, it's always been on the bouzouki--when I've tried to pick out the whole bridge on my strings rather than just playing the chords. I may try that on future takes, again depending on what set of instruments we have at any given time.
And Monica was cheerfully eager to bellow "That sovreign that you gave to me, well HERE'S YOUR FUCKIN' CHANGE!" on the last chorus, too. Snicker.
Last up: "Old Black Rum". Which meant another run through a track for Roger's benefit, and our sheepishly having to explain that we had the damndest time figuring out the proper chords for this thing. And also that the recorded key of the studio version of the song is actually not what we were playing! In fact, it isn't even the same as the recorded live versions of the song, which are solidly in F. Roger's excellent ear informed us that the studio version really kind of came out between F and F#, which I think would explain why the hell I had a devil of a time trying to figure out piccolo twiddles to this thing in long-ago prior Jams.
At any rate, we wound up playing it in D, since that's the key I can sing it in, and I even mostly managed to keep up enough breath control to do the whole song. Mostly--I fell apart at the tail end of the second take, and wasn't able to join Monica on her blithe Road Rage-y addition of "And Iiiiiii drank sixteen doubles for the price o-of OOOOOOOOOOONE!" Someday, I will be able to do that. Hee.
The pie: strawberry rhubarb. There were actually two different kinds of strawberry rhubarb pie down at the University Village QFC, and I bought the pricier one because it looked tastier. We're here to tell you--it was tasty indeed.
Jumping back outside the cut for this--for the record, interest has been expressed in doing more of this, folks. So there will be another Jam; it's just a question of when. Norwescon is coming up fast, so the next Jam will not be until after that. Watch this space for a poll on good upcoming dates. And thanks to
wrog and auntmonkey for coming, and to mamishka for hosting!![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 05:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 05:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 05:57 pm (UTC)Oh, now that I'd love to hear! ~giggle~ Glad you had a good time!
I should get my bodhran on Thursday. 'Twill be fun to start learning that :) The mister says if I'm gonna be playing that thing, he's getting his trumpet back out. Not sure why he thinks that's a threat...
no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 06:35 pm (UTC)Yay, bodhran! And your husband SHOULD get his trumpet back out. Instruments ought to be played. (I feel guilty letting most of mine sit idle--another reason I'm happy to Jam some more.)
no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 09:40 pm (UTC)Any clue what they're talking about? :)
no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 09:50 pm (UTC)That said, I could make a few guesses that would not be appropriate to relay in a public forum. Snicker.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 10:48 pm (UTC)LOL...well, then...feel free to relay to my e-mail, because I have no clue whatsoever. ;D
no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 11:38 pm (UTC)Wow. How in the hell did that go over my head?! LOL I pride myself on being one of the most filthy-minded individuals out there and yeah...just never occurred to me!
~snerk~ Oh, Séannie... ~shakes head~ :D
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 12:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 06:20 pm (UTC)Riiiight, dimples! ;D Is that what it is?
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-29 05:34 pm (UTC)And seeing as right now I'm really high on paint fumes, it's probably a wise idea to just let that be the final comment on the subject, eh? :D
no subject
Date: 2006-03-29 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 07:24 pm (UTC)I spent yesterday scarfing 222s for the toothache that had swollen one side of my face up to a lovely mutant look.
Can you guess what I'd rather have been doing?
You're right. Anything else!
Great to read a new jam report though!
HH
no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 07:30 pm (UTC)But thanks! It was great to HAVE a new jam, too. I think it's safe to say that Monica and Meems and I missed it, and it was neat to have Roger joining us for the first time as well.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 08:03 pm (UTC)On a whole 'nother subject. I was just sent on what turned out to be a wild goose chase for some chords, but in the process found this link:
http://www.chordie.com/song.php/songartist/Great%20Big%20Sea/index.html
With lyrics/chords for 34 of the boy's songs. Thought you might be interested.
Bear in mind that Chordie.com has a feature that will transpose into whatever key is best for you automagically.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 08:43 pm (UTC)Yay, swelling going down!