A Tune A Week

Right after McGreevy’s on John Williams. He did some interesting things with chords that made it tricky to pick out the melody in a couple of places, so I’m looking forward to playing this one with somebody else to see how they think it goes.

I’ve known this one for a goodly while in D; now I’ve learned it in C. Turns out it’s pretty easy if I’m careful not to run out of air, but the different bellows changes give it a bit of a different sound. Stand back, I’m branching out.

Also from the Jackie Daly album, tastily placed after Rising Sun. This one’s a bit tricky. It’s using parts of the A scale I’m not used to, like the high G# on the right side. I’m accustomed to having my right hand sit in one place, not dance all around like some kind of crazed spider.

A nice E minor tune that Arcady plays after Toss the Feathers. If I tried to play this with my usual D scale, there would be too many notes in the same direction, and the keys would be too close together; so I’m moving the high B and D to the C row. That means some tricky bits with the bellows in the B part, so I may have to re-evaluate this once I start picking up speed. We’ll see. Em is a tricky key on this instrument.

From Jackie Daly. I’ve actually known this one for a while, and I’m just brushing up on it and sneaking it in for this month-long spell when I didn’t actually learn any new tunes… Heh. I’m honest, I swear.

There was a bit of discussion on the Nashville irish session Yahoo group about this tune—or more accurately, this group of tunes. There are at least two or three distinct tunes with this name, and probably some additional variations. This particular tune is the one that “everybody” plays in E minor. Everybody except Arcady, that is, on Many Happy Returns. They play it in D minor, and so do I because I like where the notes fall on the concertina.

I have been using Audacity to play four-note snippets of the tunes over and over again. With them broken into bits that short, I can hear all the notes even at full speed. Mostly. I’ve decided I prefer this to the digital slowing-down tools, because I get the tune just as fast and don’t have to put up with any unpleasant signal processing artifacts in the process.

I stumbled over this one when I was learning The Congress Reel, and quite liked it. The second time through the A part is not the same as the first - unusual, but cool.

Prompted by a close friend in SC, who’s been promising me a good session when I get down to Columbia. I got it from The Irish Tradition’s album The Corner House, where I think it’s played on the concertina, though there’s no mention of concertinas in the album description and I don’t have the liner notes. It’s a Billy McComiskey disc; does he play the concertina as well as the button box? Anyhow. My rendition is still pretty slow, but I’m sounding okay.

I used to know this tune years ago. I learned it from a Micho Russell book called “The Piper’s Chair,” which has little tidbits of folklore and such in amongst the music. I worked it up properly today, because I heard it at a session last night and couldn’t quite play along. And a certain Elizabeth Crotty disc has just moved up on my list because I notice it contains this tune played on the concertina—it’s fun to compare the versions I work out with the versions other concertina players do.

The two groups I have played with in Nashville play this one two different ways, as I discovered when I picked this up at McGuinness and took it to Sherlock Holmes. The version I’m playing here has fewer contiguous notes on the push in the first part. When I play the other one, I tend to run out of air.

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.

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.