Jam Report #64: 11/25/07
Nov. 29th, 2007 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperIn which I am late writing the Jam Report thanks to having a cold this week, and in which I am therefore less sure of the Report than I should be; in which we're down ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
technoshaman but up sutures1; in which I don't play Meg Davis guitar nearly as nastily as I should have; and in which we investigate the possibility of playing stuff by solarbird! Songs: "The Spotted Goat", "Web of Love", "Duncan's Dance", "Chickies in the House", "Elf Glade", "Trois Navires de Ble", "The Road to Lisdoonvarna / Brian Boru".
In honor of this Jam being heavily instrumental and also in honor ofcflute on the recorder, tonight's icon shall be Bob Hallett on the whistle. If for no other reason than because, well, Bob. ^_^
Due to a member of his andcflute's household having unpleasant medical adventures (really, what's up with that, tail end of 2007? QUIT IT), technoshaman was unable to join us. But Callie showed up armed and ready, bearing her formidable array of instruments. Happily, so did sutures1, with dulcimer and guitars.
Once again this Jam turned out to be primarily instrumental, even though we dabbled a bit with some things with lyrics. Mostly, with the exception of "Elf Glade", we went over songs we'd played with before to try to get a better handle on 'em.solarbird in particular looked over Callie's shoulder to read off sheet music for "The Spotted Goat"> out of the Echo's Children songbook, while I tossed copies of the Heather Alexander trio of instrumentals we've been doing and "Elf Glade" over to Ellen. So, in the order of play as near as I can remember after a handful of days and my brain being fried by a cold:
"The Spotted Goat": kind of a partial attempt, since Dara and Callie played with the sheet music for this while I was trying to get the chords nailed down for "Web of Love".
"Web of Love": Ellen started writing out chords of her own until I finally found the copy on which Callie had hand-written her previous set of chords, at which point I just copied all of those chords into my songbook. I need to run through this thing a few times myself, since we'd previously discussed having a guitar intro that's basically the chords for the very last line. And, there's a fermata that I need to get solid on--though we had a bit of fun with that, as Callie's previous chords had a D on that and the D didn't sound right. D7, we decided instead, after mutual consideration. There are a couple other places in the chord writeup I may tweak too just because I'm not entirely sure of 'em.
"Duncan's Dance": We jumped over to the Heather Alexander book after that, though we wound up on this one for no particular reason and took a spin or two through it. It's a good ditty. I still don't have the C part down, though. I need to practice that, too.
"Chickies in the House": Lesson of the afternoon for me on this was that when the chords say for me to play B flat, I do not, repeat, not want to be playing F minor. I mean, seriously. But at least the good news was, I was a little more solid on that D minor chord.
"Elf Glade": Not the first time we've tried playing this in Jam, but it's been ages since the Three Good Measures grouping of us did it, not to mention ages since I've tried to play the song in general. I kept screwing up the nasty little opening riff that's supposed to open the song, and I'm not entirely solid on the song structure either. Intellectually I know how it goes, but I had a hard time keeping up. We had to break out the Meg Davis recording, too, so we could all hear how she'd done it in the first place. The bridge is especially long and is going to require me to get a little fancier with the guitar than I usually do. Definitely, definitely need to practice this. And, practice actually singing it. I tried coming in on some of the "response" lines, but not with the proper power.
"Trois Navires de Ble": You would think that after the hundreds of times I've listened to this song (iTunes thinks I've played it 114 times, but that only counts my current iPod and the play count inherited from its predecessor, but not my first MP3 player or all the times I played my GBS mix tape in the car while we still had a cassette deck), I'd know the damn thing by heart. Not so. Not even when I have the lyrics right in front of me. No excuse. None. I blame The Doyle. He is clearly distracting me with his general lead vocal goodness on this ditty.
I feel weird being the only voice on it, though. This is only partly the fault of The Doyle, even though GBS and the Chieftains join together in mighty harmony on the recording. I miss havingauntmonkey singing with me on it, too! (And yes, Monica, if you're reading this, that's a HINT. ^_^)
Neither Dara nor I are entirely sure of where this came in in the proceedings, but at one point she broke out snippets of things she'd been writing for her NaNoteWriMo efforts--to our general approval. There's one bit of thing she wrote that both Ellen and I could see coming together with an A, B, and a C part. Dara needs to do arrangement on that first, but once that's done, then maybe I'll be able to whip up some guitar chords. Which would be most excellent, to pursue playing instrumental stuff written by One of Us. ^_^
"The Road to Lisdoonvarna / Brian Boru": This was definitely last, though. Good instrumental pairing, lots of fun for Callie and Ellen on this. The chords are boring, though--lots of E minor and D. I need to find some decent writeups of these ditties somewhere to see if I can get better and more interesting chords. I was kind of surprised to find that neither of these things were in my mandolin fakebook!
We closed on that, and on some discussion of playing with O'Carolan ditties next time, which ought to be fun. We're tentatively scheduled for the 9th, though this may fall by the wayside as we are heading into Wackyfun Holiday Schedule Disruption. We shall see what happens when the 9th rolls around.
The pie: apple, courtesy of Ellen. Though if we'd been clever bunnies, we'd have warned her that we had plenty of pie left over from Turkey Day!
But then, you can never have too much pie.
technoshaman but up sutures1; in which I don't play Meg Davis guitar nearly as nastily as I should have; and in which we investigate the possibility of playing stuff by solarbird! Songs: "The Spotted Goat", "Web of Love", "Duncan's Dance", "Chickies in the House", "Elf Glade", "Trois Navires de Ble", "The Road to Lisdoonvarna / Brian Boru".In honor of this Jam being heavily instrumental and also in honor of
cflute on the recorder, tonight's icon shall be Bob Hallett on the whistle. If for no other reason than because, well, Bob. ^_^ Due to a member of his and
cflute's household having unpleasant medical adventures (really, what's up with that, tail end of 2007? QUIT IT), technoshaman was unable to join us. But Callie showed up armed and ready, bearing her formidable array of instruments. Happily, so did sutures1, with dulcimer and guitars.Once again this Jam turned out to be primarily instrumental, even though we dabbled a bit with some things with lyrics. Mostly, with the exception of "Elf Glade", we went over songs we'd played with before to try to get a better handle on 'em.
solarbird in particular looked over Callie's shoulder to read off sheet music for "The Spotted Goat"> out of the Echo's Children songbook, while I tossed copies of the Heather Alexander trio of instrumentals we've been doing and "Elf Glade" over to Ellen. So, in the order of play as near as I can remember after a handful of days and my brain being fried by a cold:"The Spotted Goat": kind of a partial attempt, since Dara and Callie played with the sheet music for this while I was trying to get the chords nailed down for "Web of Love".
"Web of Love": Ellen started writing out chords of her own until I finally found the copy on which Callie had hand-written her previous set of chords, at which point I just copied all of those chords into my songbook. I need to run through this thing a few times myself, since we'd previously discussed having a guitar intro that's basically the chords for the very last line. And, there's a fermata that I need to get solid on--though we had a bit of fun with that, as Callie's previous chords had a D on that and the D didn't sound right. D7, we decided instead, after mutual consideration. There are a couple other places in the chord writeup I may tweak too just because I'm not entirely sure of 'em.
"Duncan's Dance": We jumped over to the Heather Alexander book after that, though we wound up on this one for no particular reason and took a spin or two through it. It's a good ditty. I still don't have the C part down, though. I need to practice that, too.
"Chickies in the House": Lesson of the afternoon for me on this was that when the chords say for me to play B flat, I do not, repeat, not want to be playing F minor. I mean, seriously. But at least the good news was, I was a little more solid on that D minor chord.
"Elf Glade": Not the first time we've tried playing this in Jam, but it's been ages since the Three Good Measures grouping of us did it, not to mention ages since I've tried to play the song in general. I kept screwing up the nasty little opening riff that's supposed to open the song, and I'm not entirely solid on the song structure either. Intellectually I know how it goes, but I had a hard time keeping up. We had to break out the Meg Davis recording, too, so we could all hear how she'd done it in the first place. The bridge is especially long and is going to require me to get a little fancier with the guitar than I usually do. Definitely, definitely need to practice this. And, practice actually singing it. I tried coming in on some of the "response" lines, but not with the proper power.
"Trois Navires de Ble": You would think that after the hundreds of times I've listened to this song (iTunes thinks I've played it 114 times, but that only counts my current iPod and the play count inherited from its predecessor, but not my first MP3 player or all the times I played my GBS mix tape in the car while we still had a cassette deck), I'd know the damn thing by heart. Not so. Not even when I have the lyrics right in front of me. No excuse. None. I blame The Doyle. He is clearly distracting me with his general lead vocal goodness on this ditty.
I feel weird being the only voice on it, though. This is only partly the fault of The Doyle, even though GBS and the Chieftains join together in mighty harmony on the recording. I miss having
auntmonkey singing with me on it, too! (And yes, Monica, if you're reading this, that's a HINT. ^_^)Neither Dara nor I are entirely sure of where this came in in the proceedings, but at one point she broke out snippets of things she'd been writing for her NaNoteWriMo efforts--to our general approval. There's one bit of thing she wrote that both Ellen and I could see coming together with an A, B, and a C part. Dara needs to do arrangement on that first, but once that's done, then maybe I'll be able to whip up some guitar chords. Which would be most excellent, to pursue playing instrumental stuff written by One of Us. ^_^
"The Road to Lisdoonvarna / Brian Boru": This was definitely last, though. Good instrumental pairing, lots of fun for Callie and Ellen on this. The chords are boring, though--lots of E minor and D. I need to find some decent writeups of these ditties somewhere to see if I can get better and more interesting chords. I was kind of surprised to find that neither of these things were in my mandolin fakebook!
We closed on that, and on some discussion of playing with O'Carolan ditties next time, which ought to be fun. We're tentatively scheduled for the 9th, though this may fall by the wayside as we are heading into Wackyfun Holiday Schedule Disruption. We shall see what happens when the 9th rolls around.
The pie: apple, courtesy of Ellen. Though if we'd been clever bunnies, we'd have warned her that we had plenty of pie left over from Turkey Day!
But then, you can never have too much pie.