A Tune A Week

This one from a Mary MacNamara album, where it is placed before Kerfunten. She plays it in G# on a C#/G# box, so presumably along the first row. If I play it that way I get C, G, or D, depending on which row and which box (C/G or G/D). If I want it in D on the shiny new 30-button C/G, I have to learn it across the rows. . . tricky. Aren’t they all, on the concertina.

Here’s one I dug up out of the depths of my skull to rework the fingering on. It’s surprisingly tricky with my default fingering - lots of bellows changes in awkward places. Good practice! (I tell myself.)

All right - I’ll shut up about the excellent minidisc player for a while, I guess. Here’s a nice jig in D, with plenty of spots for me to play with cuts and such.

Or “The Regent.” Grabbed it with my super-handy minidisc recorder last weekend. And now I am back into the Tune Groove.

I finally got the entirety of this one at the McGuinness session the other day. (Thanks, Gretchen!) I’ve been hearing it there for months. In fact I wasn’t sure it was an Irish tune as such until I saw that Martin Hayes and Mary MacNamara had both recorded it, which quieted the reluctant hide-bound traditionalist voice in my head enough that I’m willing to count it for this project.

I heard this on Farewell and Remember Me, from Boys of the Lough. I knew the tune in high school, but couldn’t play it, if you know what I mean…

Yet another from the used-to-know-it list. Now I can play it with something like rhythm, so I can take it to the sessions. (Although I’m tempted to retract that remark about rhythm, now that I’ve listened to the recording…) I have a version on a William Sullivan tape that’s interestingly different in a couple of places from the current “standard” I’m playing here.

I picked this one up from Ray, Brian, and Paul of Selmer, Tennessee. They were up in Nashville for a few tunes with a bodhran maker and a bodhran player who were on the way from Florida and Dallas to Asheville for the Swannanoa Gathering… it’s complicated. Anyway, after they had played it 3 times, I had already picked up three quarters of it, so I pestered them to teach me the last few measures. I’m getting better at picking tunes up by ear—or else this is a really easy one.

Here’s a nice tune to mark the quarter-century. I learned the first three parts of this from a Geraldine Cotter whistle tutor CD (don’t waste your money on that one) and the fourth part from Sharon Shannon’s Out the Gap. The first part was really hard until I learned to cross my third finger under my second to get the B on the left side. All the notes of the ascending arpeggiated bit in the fourth part are available on the push, but I am stubbornly refusing to abandon my base scale to play them that way.

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.

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.

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.