A Tune A Week

Also off Live from Patrick Street, also with not too much identifying info. I’ve known the first one for some time, but worked it up with different fingering. The second one I just learned so I’d have a tune to put after the first one. They play this set at blinding speed (okay, 135 bpm) but I don’t.

From Live from Patrick Street—it’s the first one on track 7. I can’t find it anywhere else, not that I’ve looked too hard, and there’s no history in the liner notes. It’s a simple one in some sort of modal D key. Or A. I can never figure out what key to put to tunes like this. For this one, I’m playing D on the draw instead of the push, in both octaves, just because I like the bellows changes better that way.

Update, June 11, 2005: This tune is also on Johnny O’Leary’s disc Music For the Set, as Murphy’s. Alan Ng has it as Denis Murphy’s Slide, listed separately from the Denis Murphy’s I showed off in January! No wonder I’m always forgetting what tunes are named…

A nice one to follow The Fair-Haired Boy. There’s a tough bit at the end of the B part, where I’m changing bellows direction, button, and hand all at once a couple of times. That’s the change from high E, (left index finger draw) to high G (right index finger push) and the reverse. Tricksy, trickssssy.

See, I’ve been learning tunes, just not posting them on any kind of regular schedule. The past month’s tunes were fairly easy ones, but I made up for that by putting sets instead of single tunes for a couple of the weeks. Why do I care? Who knows.

Here’s another one I picked up from the Rogues. Lots of bellows work on this one—a switch on every note for a bit in the first measure. In a reel! But I can still almost play it up to speed, from which I infer that I’m getting better at the bellows. Lovely.