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Sunday, February 5th, 2006
On Friday I was in Borders bookstore on 2nd Ave. and thought I would take a look at their music section, where I have found several interesting records in the past. And boy did I come up lucky this time! My eye was caught by "Will the Circle Be Unbroken", by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band -- I've been working on learning that song lately, and I've always heard good things about that band, so I bought it. Turns out to be one of the greatest things ever. In 1972 the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band hooked up with a lot of older, more established country musicians including Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson and Jimmy Martin. They recorded an album together that just soars -- it has all of the songs I want to hear together, absolutely ideal performances. Well I was listening to that all weekend, and especially liking the songs that featured Mother Maybelle -- "Sunny Side" and "Wildwood Flower" come to mind -- and that made me think I ought to listen to the Carter Family some. I was listening to a record of theirs this afternoon, and thinking this could be the music that I wrap my own musical ideas around -- the sound of it really gets to me, and I think I could play and sing a lot of it in a good and interesting way. "John Hardy Was a Desperate Man" is maybe the first thing I want to learn.
posted evening of February 5th, 2006: Respond
➳ More posts about Fiddling
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Thursday, February second, 2006
Last night I had a second fiddle lesson, this one was with Lisa Gutkin. Good time -- Lisa is very free and easy with the positive reinforcement which I sse as a critical element of lessons that I am taking. We worked on "May the Circle be Unbroken" primarily, and she showed me how I can work on my hand and wrist position holding the bow in order to sweeten my tone. I will be back for more.
posted morning of February second, 2006: Respond
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Monday, January 30th, 2006
ABC Notation is described over here, it's an ASCII system of musical notation. Shareware products are available for translating ABC to standard musical notation and to audio files; of these I have tried abc2ps, abc2win, and ABCEdit. I couldn't get the first two to work properly but ABCEdit is awesome. Very basic user interface but powerful enough to do everything I want it to; I can cut-and-paste from ABC notation on the web and see and hear the music right away.
posted morning of January 30th, 2006: Respond
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Saturday, January 28th, 2006
Pressing ahead with the music-reading -- today I played a couple of the jigs I had been playing yesterday, and learned two new reels -- "Judy's Reel" and "Paddy Handley's Goose". The latter is the first song I have been able to play from memory after reading from sheet music.
posted morning of January 28th, 2006: Respond
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Friday, January 27th, 2006
More music reading tonight -- I learned the A part of "A Wink of Her Eye" and all of "The Cork Road". Both songs are very slightly more complex than "Bundle and Go" (Which I played for Ellen and Sylvia to dance to before dinner). Learning jigs is bringing back a bunch of musical memories -- "A Wink of Her Eye" brought to mind a similar tune (which I don't know the name of), which I was able to play straight off note for note. Also I found the Fiddler's Companion, which has many traditional tunes written out in ABC notation, which I can download shareware to convert to musical notation and to audio files.
posted evening of January 27th, 2006: Respond
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Last night I read music! I bought a book of tunes from Amazon, and when I sat down and looked at it, I surprised myself greatly by being able to translate the notes on the page into sounds. The tune was a simple jig called "Bundle and Go" -- it helped greatly that almost every note in the song had the same time value, and that most of the intervals were thirds.
posted afternoon of January 27th, 2006: Respond
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Wednesday, January 18th, 2006
I have been playing my fiddle increasingly often over the past year, hardly playing guitar at all any more. Today I am going to take my first ever lesson in traditional fiddle playing from Kenny Kosek. Looking forward to it.
posted afternoon of January 18th, 2006: Respond
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Saturday, November 26th, 2005
Last night I was watching a Beatles movie -- I remember at the end of the movie/dream, when John was rushing about trying to produce a film, saying to Belle Waring, "What is this movie? It's better than Let It Be [by which I meant Magical Mystery Tour] but not as good as Help!" -- she agreed but did not know either. I felt aggravated at there being a whole nother Beatles movie about, which I knew nothing of. For part of the film I was onscreen, trying to inveigle my way into hanging out with the lads; my plan was to convince George that I was a friend of John's, and John that I was a friend of George's -- surely I lifted this from the plot of some old sitcom or buddy movie. George and Ringo were rather short, and John and Paul were taller. Everybody was at Coney Island or some similar place, where John was trying to put together a large conceptual art project. I do not remember its precise nature but it involved a lot of props -- scenery, costume jewelry, etc. I was in the process of bullshitting George about my acquaintance with John, when Jim Cross called me on my cell phone -- I pretended it was John and told him to "come on over here, I'm with your friends" (I had suddenly forgotten George and Ringo's names) -- come to think of it this particular sequence had a strong feeling of "I Love Lucy" to it. There was a short sub-dream after this one ended, in which I woke up and feverishly scribbled down the bit about John's conceptual art project on a tablet I kept on my bedside table for the purpose of recording dreams. Ellen woke up too and was reading over my shoulder -- my script was uncharacteristically sloppy and I was misspelling a lot of words. Lots of self-reference in this dream about movies and writing. Ellen said this morning, she thought we should rent "A Hard Day's Night". Update: We are watching "A Hard Day's Night" this evening, and I am surprised at how close the appearances of the Beatles in my dream were to this movie (except for Ringo, who looked more like the Ringo on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's, sans uniform). But: the dream Beatle whom I identified as George, was John; and vice versa, mutatis mutandis. Don't have much clue what this means. Sylvia, in response to the lyric "I know this love of mine, will never die, and I love her": "Sometime you'll die!"
posted morning of November 26th, 2005: Respond
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Monday, June 13th, 2005
I was googling around today and thought I would look for the sentence "I got a girl long and tall, sweet as she could be", which I believe is the first line of a Big Bill Broonzy song I was listening to last night and enjoying. No results... but!!! "long and tall" + "sweet as she could be" brings up only one result, and it is Michael Taft's Pre-War Blues Lyrics Concordance!!! This is huge! I haven't even begun looking at it yet but I'm completely psyched that such a thing should exist and be online. Update: And here is a link to the front page of the concordance.
posted morning of June 13th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Guitar
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Wednesday, January 12th, 2005
My last two posts don't really make sense together, I just realized, without a key bit of information which I omitted -- on Saturday I took the cracked violin to Millburn Music Center, where the repairman quoted me a considerably lower price, $75, for a simple glue-up -- Gagliardi's estimate was for a full repair which would involve taking the violin apart and putting a patch on the inside. So that is what I meant by "my fiddle is still in the shop"; I did not go crazy and send it out for the full repair.
posted morning of January 12th, 2005: Respond
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