Jam Report #63: 11/11/07
Nov. 11th, 2007 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperIn which we're back down to just four of us; in which we're mostly instrumental; and in which I get my fingers around some D minor. Songs: "Chickies in the House", "Napoleon's Rant", "Duncan's Dance", "Creature of the Wood", "The Spotted Goat", "Trois Navires de Ble".
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sutures1 was unfortunately not able to join us today, due to getting pulled into a concom meeting for Foolscap. And since I'm on the very tail end of recovery mode, we took it easy and mostly stuck to instrumental stuff.
On the theory that if I actually played some stuff with D minor in it I'd better learn the chord, I worked for a bit with "Chickies in the House" out of the Heather Alexander songbook beforecflute and technoshaman showed up. This led into this being the first thing we officially played with, too, which was fun. The D minor turned out to be not so bad, since the changes that involve it aren't too difficult. And another fun thing with this song: it's got a B flat in it. I haven't played too much with B flat at all, so it was amusing to deal with a B flat chord at a reasonably swift tempo.
We futzed around with the tempo on it, too, since the recording of this song and the other two pieces tear through them at quite the swift pace. I was able to more or less play through the chord lines on it as well as the latter two pieces, but I'm thinking I'll need to see if I can keep up with the entire recording. If I play through it often enough, hopefully I'll be able to memorize the chord progression for the whole thing.
"Napoleon's Rant" is a bit trickier with the chords, though. The B part does some interesting things with syncopation; the chords follow the syncopation in the melody line, and since Callie had a bit of a challenge working out the melody line and I had an equivalent challenge with the chords, this piece didn't quite mesh well enough for us yet. It'll take some more work.
And we went through "Duncan's Dance" again just to round everything out, too. The possibility of us going through the set of these three ditties is within reach, I think.
After that we waffled a bit about what to do. We touched briefly on "Creature of the Wood", but mostly long enough for Callie to show me a few pointers about how to mimic how the intro is played by Heather (or these days by Alexander James) in performance. To wit, it involves trying to strum without a pick and hitting the chord pattern with the other hand after the strum... and coordinating both of these things in interesting ways. Callie was able to demonstrate how to do it on the guitar, and I kind of got the idea; describing it in words was harder. I sympathized, since I have a similar issue trying to describe to someone how to get a noise out of a flute. I'm going to have to practice this, though. It's a style thing I haven't really done before on the guitar; it should be fun to learn.
Next we jumped over into the Echo's Children songbook for a ditty called "The Spotted Goat". Most of this work was done by Callie andsolarbird as the thing's written out as a duet, and Callie invited Dara to play the second part. Dara doesn't usually read music, though, so working through it took a bit. Me, I just needed the chords, and Callie wrote out the chord line she and Cat (the other member of Echo's Children) had worked out before in my copy of the songbook. I got the chords down easily enough: a lot of D, G, and A. I think my brain kept trying to stick some A7 in there, though, and I may have to play around some to see if I can make the chord line more entertaining. I also mentioned to the others that my brain totally wanted to speed this thing up and slap a reel in the middle as a bridge. This is, after all, a song about a goat from hell. It needs to be, IMHO, a lot jauntier. ;) (It's the GBS influence in me talking, what can I say? I want to play everything faster. Well, except ballads. But everything else!)
Last and probably least, one pass through "Trois Navires de Ble"... but by then, I was starting to feel a bit worn out. My voice sounded thin to me on the singing, and my fingers were starting to hurt on the strings. So we called it Pie.
This week's pie: apple, courtesy of the Kittyhugs Baking Company. They were selling pies made by these folks at the Thriftway grocery store over on Ballinger Way, where we shop sometimes for stuff a cut above what we can get at Albertson's. General verdict on the pie: quite tasty, in that spiced-apple sort of way that really wants to be heated up with some vanilla ice cream on top. Next time I get any of that pie, there will definitely be vanilla ice cream.
sutures1 was unfortunately not able to join us today, due to getting pulled into a concom meeting for Foolscap. And since I'm on the very tail end of recovery mode, we took it easy and mostly stuck to instrumental stuff.On the theory that if I actually played some stuff with D minor in it I'd better learn the chord, I worked for a bit with "Chickies in the House" out of the Heather Alexander songbook before
cflute and technoshaman showed up. This led into this being the first thing we officially played with, too, which was fun. The D minor turned out to be not so bad, since the changes that involve it aren't too difficult. And another fun thing with this song: it's got a B flat in it. I haven't played too much with B flat at all, so it was amusing to deal with a B flat chord at a reasonably swift tempo.We futzed around with the tempo on it, too, since the recording of this song and the other two pieces tear through them at quite the swift pace. I was able to more or less play through the chord lines on it as well as the latter two pieces, but I'm thinking I'll need to see if I can keep up with the entire recording. If I play through it often enough, hopefully I'll be able to memorize the chord progression for the whole thing.
"Napoleon's Rant" is a bit trickier with the chords, though. The B part does some interesting things with syncopation; the chords follow the syncopation in the melody line, and since Callie had a bit of a challenge working out the melody line and I had an equivalent challenge with the chords, this piece didn't quite mesh well enough for us yet. It'll take some more work.
And we went through "Duncan's Dance" again just to round everything out, too. The possibility of us going through the set of these three ditties is within reach, I think.
After that we waffled a bit about what to do. We touched briefly on "Creature of the Wood", but mostly long enough for Callie to show me a few pointers about how to mimic how the intro is played by Heather (or these days by Alexander James) in performance. To wit, it involves trying to strum without a pick and hitting the chord pattern with the other hand after the strum... and coordinating both of these things in interesting ways. Callie was able to demonstrate how to do it on the guitar, and I kind of got the idea; describing it in words was harder. I sympathized, since I have a similar issue trying to describe to someone how to get a noise out of a flute. I'm going to have to practice this, though. It's a style thing I haven't really done before on the guitar; it should be fun to learn.
Next we jumped over into the Echo's Children songbook for a ditty called "The Spotted Goat". Most of this work was done by Callie and
solarbird as the thing's written out as a duet, and Callie invited Dara to play the second part. Dara doesn't usually read music, though, so working through it took a bit. Me, I just needed the chords, and Callie wrote out the chord line she and Cat (the other member of Echo's Children) had worked out before in my copy of the songbook. I got the chords down easily enough: a lot of D, G, and A. I think my brain kept trying to stick some A7 in there, though, and I may have to play around some to see if I can make the chord line more entertaining. I also mentioned to the others that my brain totally wanted to speed this thing up and slap a reel in the middle as a bridge. This is, after all, a song about a goat from hell. It needs to be, IMHO, a lot jauntier. ;) (It's the GBS influence in me talking, what can I say? I want to play everything faster. Well, except ballads. But everything else!)Last and probably least, one pass through "Trois Navires de Ble"... but by then, I was starting to feel a bit worn out. My voice sounded thin to me on the singing, and my fingers were starting to hurt on the strings. So we called it Pie.
This week's pie: apple, courtesy of the Kittyhugs Baking Company. They were selling pies made by these folks at the Thriftway grocery store over on Ballinger Way, where we shop sometimes for stuff a cut above what we can get at Albertson's. General verdict on the pie: quite tasty, in that spiced-apple sort of way that really wants to be heated up with some vanilla ice cream on top. Next time I get any of that pie, there will definitely be vanilla ice cream.
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no subject
Date: 2007-11-12 03:02 am (UTC)I think you're right, though. Get it up to speed, and then take off with some sort of a jig after the second verse where the goat runs amok... hmmm... a jig, or a hornpipe? The hornpipe is 4/4 with "swung 8th notes"... hmmmm, "Sailor's Hornpipe?" I have a recording of that I want you to hear.... it's on the Hank Cramer disc Songs of the Constellation, and I think Heather played fiddle.
I'll run it by
no subject
Date: 2007-11-17 08:51 pm (UTC)I'm totally willing to give the hornpipe you mention a try! I should check my mandolin fakebook and see if it's in there somewhere. I've got a boatload of jigs and reels in there.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-17 08:54 pm (UTC)Well, there we go then... if we don't like the way the hornpipe fits in, we've a ready source of a *ahem* boatload of other stuff we can try. :)
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Date: 2007-11-23 10:18 pm (UTC)