Jam Report #69: 2/17/08
Feb. 17th, 2008 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperIn which having my brain back really helps quite a bit in playing coherently; in which Ellen brings her Big Dulcimer and a shiny new toy; in which Dara shows off a new piece; and in which we take on our second serious attempt at a GBS ditty. Songs: "Elf Glade", "Web of Love", "Leaffall", "Lukey".
So yeah, it's quite a bit obvious that my brain is officially back now, a few weeks out of being done with radiation. My playing has gotten notably more coherent and I'm a lot better able to figure out how to make my instrument blend with everybody else's in the group. This time around, we had some new challenges in that area, too!
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sutures1 showed up with her larger dulcimer this time, wanting to pursue some different concepts for both "Web of Love" and "Leaffall". But she also had a new toy: a djembe she'd bought off of Craiglist, and which met with the general approval of us all. It was quite strikingly patterned in bold colors, matching the bag it came in, and as near as we could tell made entirely out of synthetic materials cunningly crafted to look like wood and hide. This means this drum isn't temperature sensitive and she can take it outside into drum circles and the like without having to worry about its tone changing. And it's a nifty tone the thing's got, too, deep and full and resonant. solarbird and technoshaman both gave it a bit of a workout throughout today's Jam.
I'd started practicing before everybody showed up, since I wanted to be tuned when everybody arrived, and since I wanted to work independently on "Elf Glade" some as well. Listening to the recording let me nail down finally that it's in B flat minor, which means I have to capo on the first fret, since the songbook has it written out in A minor. For our purposes, we'll be keeping it in A minor; Callie and I can both sing comfortably in that key, and it's a helluva lot easier on Dara and Ellen to keep that key as well. But the recording has proven useful to me in other areas. There are some nasty, lovely little flourishes on the guitar all throughout the thing and I'd really love to play them--and, and!, the bit at the end that was giving me trouble is clearer now that I've listened to it closely a few times.
The song started coming together for Dara and Ellen as well after I played the recording for everyone. Ellen's got this thing she's doing now on the dulcimer, echoing me on the guitar riffs just after I do them--which puts more pressure on me to do them right, which I'm not always capable of doing yet, but hey. I noted to all that while the bridge in the recording is essentially a guitar solo, it doesn't need to be when we do it--and in fact kind of shouldn't, since I'm not yet a strong enough guitarist to carry the entire bridge myself. Dara came up with a nice little variation on the chorus to play there, which worked especially well, especially as she did a bit of a flourish coming back out into the next verse.
Some drumming came together here, too. Dara tapped out a drum part on Ellen's new drum, and Glenn liked that, so hopefully we'll be running with that. As with the guitar, so with the drumming for this song; it needs to be primal and driving.
Dara and I will have to independently work on this some, though. This was one of the very first things Dara learned to play, ever, and she told us how she was having issues always wanting to play the melody since that's what her hands are used to doing. But now that she's got something else to do in the bridge, she and I will need to break it down together, probably more slowly than normal, until we're both solid on what we're doing. It should be fun.
"Web of Love" was next, which also had some gratifying pulling together as we all reached several helpful conclusions about how to handle this. Echo's Children did this song, as they did all of theirs pretty much, with words. We're doing it instrumentally, three passes through, and coming up with some nice variations on what flutes Dara and Callie are playing when. Ellen's also now working on playing more complicated things on the second and third passes through, to give it more of a progression.
Me, I learned that I need to back the hell off on the guitar while I'm playing my part. The guitar chords are easy, a lot of E minor and A minor and D, but in order to not drown out the other instruments, I need a very delicate hand on Rags. This is good practice for me. I'm not nearly as skilled with arpeggiating as I'd like, but playing more softly and figuring out interesting ways to play the same three chords in different ways in different parts of a song make me sound like a rather better guitarist. ;)
Same notation, really, for the next thing we did: "Leaffall". Ellen did further dulcimer twiddling here, figuring out with Dara's help that it sounds really neat if she plays with the hard side of her mallets. Callie experimented with filling in low flute notes following the chord line, though we discovered that her Big Kid, the bass flute, just sort of vanishes behind Dara's and Ellen's parts. My main contribution to this song this time around was realizing that a G chord written in on the very last line sounds wrong--since it's starting a new phrase in the song, and since this thing's in D and all its phrases are starting with D chords. It was quite satisfying to be able to make that sort of musical observation; yay for having my brain back, indeed.
Last but certainly not least, we played with the second GBS song this group's tried to tackle: "Lukey", one of my long-standing favorites. I have remarked before that when I play this one, I tend to prefer the live arrangement, the one where the B'ys kick into D and tear through "Gone By the Board", the bit Bob wrote that appears on the very first GBS album. For our purposes, though, we're actually going to go with the arrangement off the Rant and Roar album--because Ellen knows "Staten Island", the tune they use for the bridge there.
This required me to do something I haven't done in ages, too: print out Great Big Sea lyrics! I went back to the very site the TGM jamming group used to print these off, and ran off the Rant and Roar page for everybody. And to my chagrin I probably should have damn well done it for myself as well--because as soon as we started playing, I completely spazzed on most of the verses. Despite having listened to this song hundreds and hundreds of times.
It was fun, though, trying to figure out exactly how to play this arrangement. Ellen whipped out a basic chord line for the bridge, and I had to listen to the recording a time or two to figure out exactly how it flows, but it clicked in easily enough. More finagling had to be done with the key, as well. We tried it briefly in G with Callie singing lead, only to discover that she came out really too high for this song's purposes; we tried it in A, too, since that's what we've been doing with it before. But after going through it once, I came to the realization that even though my voice likes A better than G for this song, it's still a little low for me and I don't feel like I've got the proper vocal power.
Callie therefore suggested C--with the capo on the fifth fret, at first, but then I dropped that in favor of losing the capo completely and just rechording the song. I can definitely muster better vocal power in C for this, but the new chords will take me a bit to work out, especially G7. I haven't played anything with G7 regularly at all, and my fingers are going to have to get used to that.
But the others seemed quite happy to tackle it, and Glenn and Callie in particular, it must be said, sounded fabulous singing harmony on the choruses. As I realized when I dropped my damn pick in the middle of the second to the last verse, and found myself suddenly better able to hear everybody else. *^_^*;;
Once we finished up, though, my hands were starting to say "no more", so we called it Pie. Dara played a new flute piece of hers, "Dream of an Incomplete Flute", while we all had strawberry rhubarb pie. Yum.
March is going to get a little challenging schedule-wise since Potlatch, Consonance, and Norwescon are all coming up. But we're tentatively pencilling in a mini-Jam for the 9th with a hopefully full Jam on the 16th. Noting these dates for the benefit of any locals on the Friends list who might want to show! Let me know if you do.
So yeah, it's quite a bit obvious that my brain is officially back now, a few weeks out of being done with radiation. My playing has gotten notably more coherent and I'm a lot better able to figure out how to make my instrument blend with everybody else's in the group. This time around, we had some new challenges in that area, too!
sutures1 showed up with her larger dulcimer this time, wanting to pursue some different concepts for both "Web of Love" and "Leaffall". But she also had a new toy: a djembe she'd bought off of Craiglist, and which met with the general approval of us all. It was quite strikingly patterned in bold colors, matching the bag it came in, and as near as we could tell made entirely out of synthetic materials cunningly crafted to look like wood and hide. This means this drum isn't temperature sensitive and she can take it outside into drum circles and the like without having to worry about its tone changing. And it's a nifty tone the thing's got, too, deep and full and resonant. solarbird and technoshaman both gave it a bit of a workout throughout today's Jam.I'd started practicing before everybody showed up, since I wanted to be tuned when everybody arrived, and since I wanted to work independently on "Elf Glade" some as well. Listening to the recording let me nail down finally that it's in B flat minor, which means I have to capo on the first fret, since the songbook has it written out in A minor. For our purposes, we'll be keeping it in A minor; Callie and I can both sing comfortably in that key, and it's a helluva lot easier on Dara and Ellen to keep that key as well. But the recording has proven useful to me in other areas. There are some nasty, lovely little flourishes on the guitar all throughout the thing and I'd really love to play them--and, and!, the bit at the end that was giving me trouble is clearer now that I've listened to it closely a few times.
The song started coming together for Dara and Ellen as well after I played the recording for everyone. Ellen's got this thing she's doing now on the dulcimer, echoing me on the guitar riffs just after I do them--which puts more pressure on me to do them right, which I'm not always capable of doing yet, but hey. I noted to all that while the bridge in the recording is essentially a guitar solo, it doesn't need to be when we do it--and in fact kind of shouldn't, since I'm not yet a strong enough guitarist to carry the entire bridge myself. Dara came up with a nice little variation on the chorus to play there, which worked especially well, especially as she did a bit of a flourish coming back out into the next verse.
Some drumming came together here, too. Dara tapped out a drum part on Ellen's new drum, and Glenn liked that, so hopefully we'll be running with that. As with the guitar, so with the drumming for this song; it needs to be primal and driving.
Dara and I will have to independently work on this some, though. This was one of the very first things Dara learned to play, ever, and she told us how she was having issues always wanting to play the melody since that's what her hands are used to doing. But now that she's got something else to do in the bridge, she and I will need to break it down together, probably more slowly than normal, until we're both solid on what we're doing. It should be fun.
"Web of Love" was next, which also had some gratifying pulling together as we all reached several helpful conclusions about how to handle this. Echo's Children did this song, as they did all of theirs pretty much, with words. We're doing it instrumentally, three passes through, and coming up with some nice variations on what flutes Dara and Callie are playing when. Ellen's also now working on playing more complicated things on the second and third passes through, to give it more of a progression.
Me, I learned that I need to back the hell off on the guitar while I'm playing my part. The guitar chords are easy, a lot of E minor and A minor and D, but in order to not drown out the other instruments, I need a very delicate hand on Rags. This is good practice for me. I'm not nearly as skilled with arpeggiating as I'd like, but playing more softly and figuring out interesting ways to play the same three chords in different ways in different parts of a song make me sound like a rather better guitarist. ;)
Same notation, really, for the next thing we did: "Leaffall". Ellen did further dulcimer twiddling here, figuring out with Dara's help that it sounds really neat if she plays with the hard side of her mallets. Callie experimented with filling in low flute notes following the chord line, though we discovered that her Big Kid, the bass flute, just sort of vanishes behind Dara's and Ellen's parts. My main contribution to this song this time around was realizing that a G chord written in on the very last line sounds wrong--since it's starting a new phrase in the song, and since this thing's in D and all its phrases are starting with D chords. It was quite satisfying to be able to make that sort of musical observation; yay for having my brain back, indeed.
Last but certainly not least, we played with the second GBS song this group's tried to tackle: "Lukey", one of my long-standing favorites. I have remarked before that when I play this one, I tend to prefer the live arrangement, the one where the B'ys kick into D and tear through "Gone By the Board", the bit Bob wrote that appears on the very first GBS album. For our purposes, though, we're actually going to go with the arrangement off the Rant and Roar album--because Ellen knows "Staten Island", the tune they use for the bridge there.
This required me to do something I haven't done in ages, too: print out Great Big Sea lyrics! I went back to the very site the TGM jamming group used to print these off, and ran off the Rant and Roar page for everybody. And to my chagrin I probably should have damn well done it for myself as well--because as soon as we started playing, I completely spazzed on most of the verses. Despite having listened to this song hundreds and hundreds of times.
It was fun, though, trying to figure out exactly how to play this arrangement. Ellen whipped out a basic chord line for the bridge, and I had to listen to the recording a time or two to figure out exactly how it flows, but it clicked in easily enough. More finagling had to be done with the key, as well. We tried it briefly in G with Callie singing lead, only to discover that she came out really too high for this song's purposes; we tried it in A, too, since that's what we've been doing with it before. But after going through it once, I came to the realization that even though my voice likes A better than G for this song, it's still a little low for me and I don't feel like I've got the proper vocal power.
Callie therefore suggested C--with the capo on the fifth fret, at first, but then I dropped that in favor of losing the capo completely and just rechording the song. I can definitely muster better vocal power in C for this, but the new chords will take me a bit to work out, especially G7. I haven't played anything with G7 regularly at all, and my fingers are going to have to get used to that.
But the others seemed quite happy to tackle it, and Glenn and Callie in particular, it must be said, sounded fabulous singing harmony on the choruses. As I realized when I dropped my damn pick in the middle of the second to the last verse, and found myself suddenly better able to hear everybody else. *^_^*;;
Once we finished up, though, my hands were starting to say "no more", so we called it Pie. Dara played a new flute piece of hers, "Dream of an Incomplete Flute", while we all had strawberry rhubarb pie. Yum.
March is going to get a little challenging schedule-wise since Potlatch, Consonance, and Norwescon are all coming up. But we're tentatively pencilling in a mini-Jam for the 9th with a hopefully full Jam on the 16th. Noting these dates for the benefit of any locals on the Friends list who might want to show! Let me know if you do.