A Tune A Week

I stumbled across the BBC’s Virtual Session tonight. It’s terrific for what it is, and a good way to learn a few tunes. It’s a flash app that plays actual recordings of good musicians, not that horrible rhythm-less MIDI stuff you find sometimes, and—the key feature—there’s a clickable progress bar, so you can pause and repeat tunes pretty easily. Just ignore the accompanying sheet music, which (as usual) doesn’t really represent anything an Irish musician ever played. Anyhow, the site has this week’s tune and 49 others, and I can recommend it unreservedly as a learning tool.

This particular tune has been on my list to learn since before I moved to Nashville. The Madison musicians played it quite a bit, too, but I never managed to get it until now.

The only word I know with three double letters in a row. Anyone else read Encyclopedia Brown at a tender young age? I’ve gone back and redated all the tune entries to match the associated week instead of the actual day of entry. That’s to make the January archives contain the January tunes, and so on, since I’ve been pretty sloppy about posting regularly. The unfortunate side effect of that decision is that all existing links to my archives are now broken, but I don’t think there actually are any. Readership here is currently pretty low. And yes, I’ve learned four more tunes, so my repertoire is up to date; it’s just the page that’s lagging a bit.

I’ve really been feasting off the John Williams disc lately. Here’s another. The associated puzzle: when he starts playing in a higher octave midway through, has he changed instruments or changed octaves on the same instrument? I can’t quite tell. There’s a good bit of studio work on a number of these tunes.

This one’s been nagging me for months. It’s one of those where the second time through the B part is the same as the A part, so it’s not even hard to learn. I got it all by ear at the sessions except for the first bit of the B part, which I had to look up at The Session.

I was listening to a John Williams album and heard a tune I wanted to learn, which happened to be this one, so here she is. My rendition is kinda choppy: I’m having a hard time getting those repeated notes to sound good, and I’m a little off with the timing when I’m changing the bellows direction, too.