Archive for 'music'
Fylde Alexander Guitar
Almost 6 months ago now, after a lot of trialling, some borrowing, and a serious think I order a new guitar. This time, it’s a Fylde Alexander guitar. It’s hand made, and now that it’s arrived – absolutely gorgeous and a joy to play.
First things first though, I’ve managed to figure out how to work the H2 recorder to get decent sound … have a listen, these two tunes are a slow waltz-like “Heritage Close” and a hornpipe I can never remember the name of;
The tuning is DADGAD, played low to get a feel for the bass. As an experiment, I’ve made a video .. the sound quality isn’t as good, but you can get an idea of the kind of pull-offs and ornamentation the guitar enables, maybe this will get across just how much easier it is to play.
I also have one other recording – done through the pickup, of a jig in E-minor that I also can’t remember the name of – it gives a good sense of how great the pickup sounds.
I ordered the guitar through Monastery Music. If you’re ever thinking about getting a hand-made folk instrument, I’d give Fylde a serious look. Very very happy with it so far.
The Wild Mountain Thyme
Posted on January 5, 2009, under creative commons, music.
The Wild Mountain Thyme is a well-known folk song from Scotland that I’ve been playing for a few years now, with various singers. It’s always been one of my favourite songs, it’s got a wonderfully simple melody, so I’ve recorded it.
MP3.
That’s me singing, and the arrangement is my own, which I’ve tried to make more interesting than the usual version.
The guitar and vocal were recorded simultaneously, with a dodgy USB attachment that won’t let me record two channels without it being a stereo pair, which is why the vocal is in the left channel. The bouzouki part was recorded later (it’s what you can hear in the right channel). The guitar is tuned DADGAD, the Bouzouki is in ADAD, and the song is in F major.
The ticking cat
Posted on January 4, 2009, under creative commons, music.
I’ve been playing with Garageband again, and trying to get more music recorded, with some success. First up, is a new tune, called “The Ticking Cat”, a nice (hopefully) simple reel.
MP3.
This time the melody was played first, on a banjo (which I’m steadily learning, so excuse the poor playing), and accompaniment recorded over – on a DADGAD guitar. The tune is in A-major, and it’s named after a funky-looking metronome.
The Britches Full of Stitches
Posted on April 7, 2007, under creative commons, general, music.
The first traditional tune I ever learned was a great polka called “The Britches Full of Stitches”. I learned it when I was 7, on the Fiddle, from a great man called Des Carty, there’s now a school of music named in his honour in Tallaght. It’s a very simple tune, I learned it after Twinkle Twinkle, and it took about 2 weeks of practise.
Because it’s a starter tune, there are very few recordings of it, so I’ve decided to make at least one. I’ve chosen a really simple tune because I want to record something which gets across how important accompaniment is in traditional music. I play the melody pretty straight, with cuts, the occasional roll and slurs being the only forms of ornamentation (I’m no Seamus Egan), and I’ve left a piece without any accompaniment at all, so that you can tell just how primitive my melody playing is under it all.
But the accompaniment itself is where the magic is, and trust me, playing like that is hard. Despite playing the tune 7 times over, the accompaniment is never the same, and for the most part it’s syncopated and the right hand is doing a lot of work. The aim is to lead the beat, to make it easier to dance to, or rather to want to dance to. When I play polkas like this, a lot of people remark that it’s similar to the playing of Steve Cooney or Jim Murray, but personally I don’t it much resembles it (apart from being 2/4 and fast). In parts, it can sound like Donogh Hennessy’s style, but I guess really it’s my own.
What I find most fun about being able to play accompaniment is that you can light up even the simplest or dullest of tunes (or players, being honest!) if you do it really well, you can layer enough interest and dynamism into the harmonics to achieve an awful lot! It’s brilliant fun.
Anyway, both the guitar accompaniment and melody were recorded in the DADGAD tuning, with the capo at the 7th fret to put it in A (the tune is in A major). The Bouzouki is tuned ADAD, with a capo at the 7th fret again. The backing was recorded very first (accompaning nothing) and then the melody played over. I cheated and used a metronome to count out the gap though. Like everything on my blog, it’s CC licenced (Attribution 2.0)
Let me know what you think. It sure is lively!
Change is Possible
Posted on May 23, 2006, under general, meta, music, photography.
If you’re ever in Dundrum’s massive shopping centre, pay close attention as you pay for your parking (if you happen to have driven there). It doesn’t tell you that change is available, but rather the far more optimistic message, that change is possible.
It’s nice to see, it brought a smile ot my face, and clearly it’s intentional. Maybe it’s part of a car parks against conservatism movement, or maybe it’s religious subliminal messaging, or maybe just a fun meme to lighten the day but whatever it is, it’s good fun.
So, Nóirín helped me change this blog – to Wordpress 2 – which is going very well so far. I’ve made it easier to post comments too, which was always a bit too hard for my liking (but I like comment spam even less).
On another note of change; on my travels I got a new Camera, which I’m having some fun with. My shots from San Francisco were taken with it, along with the two shots in this post (The papal cross in the Phoenix Park, and our good friend Conall O’Brien).
And yet again in the spirit of change, I went on my first successful geocaching expedition on Saturday, and it was great fun, I’d highly recommend to anyone. As it was my birthday over the weekend, we went to see two great Gigs in Airfield House. The first was Kevin Burke and Ged Foley and the second was Liz Carroll and John Doyle. Both were excellent, it was great to hear some master fiddlers playing and John Doyle’s guitar playing is truly amazing.
And I think the last note of change, is that yesterday, I finally got IP connectivity into the datacentre we’ve been building for the last few months, which means we are now officially in the migration phase. I might even have free time soon!
Piano Chords OS X widget
A long long time ago, when Netscape 2 was cutting edge, before AJAX, before IE won the browser wars and while many people still called Javascript “livescript”, I wrote a ridiculously complex Javascript implementation of a piano tutor, called “Virtual Piano Chords”. For something that I last touched in 1998, it’s kind of amazing that it still works in any browser I try these days. A google search for Virtual Piano Chords shows a load of websites still using it, one of the more faithful examples is here.
The code isn’t great (it would have been a lot better if switch statements and enums had of worked), but the music theory is pretty solid, and since I was studying music theory at the time, it was a great help for exploring new chords, enharmonics, scales and (my favourite) modes. And now, 8 years later, Alexander Griekspoor has created an OS X widget based on the work. Cool!
The PianoChord widget, true to OS X form, looks great and it’s got all of the Chord shapes. From experience these apps can be very useful for exploring inversions and trying to put a slightly different spin on an accompaniment or harmony piece.
Monolithic stupidity
I just caught this via digg, http://monolith.sourceforge.net/, man are these guys dumb.
Not only is what they’re doing incredibly illegal (those mono files certainly can be considered derivative works, and regardless transitive copying is involved), but they actually think they’re the first people to come up with this. Anyone remember the XOR encrypted DeCSS code that used the US Bill of Rights as its pad?
This really really is not the way to go about fighting these things.
Highly Recommended
The last 16 CDs I’ve bought:
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All superb, particularly recommended are Kate Rusby and Danu, if you’ve never listened.
New Guitar
My latest Guitar arrived today. It’s a tenor guitar (four string) tuned in 5ths. It’s all-solid, with rosewood back, sides and fretboard. That and the maple top on it give it a rich full tone, it really rings like a bell.
It arrived in the “standard” CGDA tuning, which I really don’t like, so straight on with some new nickel strings (I prefer the tone nickel-wound strings give, even when not using a magento pickup) and lowered by a fourth to give GDAE and it was sounding much better. Right now it’s tuned ADAD, and that’s proving useful also.
For anyone looking for tenor guitar gauges with Google, I used; .40w, .30w, .20w and .12, my scale length is 552mm. I’ll write a much better entry about the guitar, where I got it from, as well as some tenor guitar history in the next few days.