A Tune A Week

A good one for a bellows-driven instrument, I daresay: I’ve heard it from Dermot Byrne on button accordion, and the Noel Hill/Tony MacMahon duo as well, and both recordings sound great.

The reel. I’ve been promising myself I’d learn this one for at least a year now. My stubborn insistence on sticking to one scale means the A part has 11 bellows changes in two measures the way I’m playing it. In a reel. I’m sure it’s good practice.

A nice fellow for the Tournmore, with some equally odd key changes in it. Tune two of a Johnny O’Leary track.

Not the same as my very first post, but strangely similar in parts, considering it’s a completely different tune. Despite what is claimed at The Session, this tune is not on my Jackie Daly CD - that’s the other one. The very best record-keeping is always to be found at Alan Ng’s.

Finally… I’ve been promising this one for months. I’m still pretty slow with it, though. I got it from a Kevin Burke album. I often wonder how much difference the source makes - do I play a tune more legato, with more repeated notes and fewer cuts, if I learn it from a fiddle recording? I’m pretty sure so. Anyhow, learning the second part was right grievous.

A four-parter, which I didn’t realize until I already had half of it under my belt. It fits nicely after Ormond Sound, which is where I heard it first.

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 Paddy O’Brien’s. Half a century in the first month of the new year! Minidisc, minidisc… this gadget is very handy. I am using the slow-down feature again - it’ll go from recorded speed all the way down to half in six steps without changing pitch. There are just some digital resampling artifacts to contend with. They are a moderate problem with flutes and a small problem with pipes.

A slip jig from the same session as Boys of the Town. Both of them were pretty easy to pick up - they use bits and pieces that are pretty familiar to me already, I guess.

Update, 21 Nov. 2006: I had this one under “Ryan’s.”

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

I’m not adding MP3s anymore because my spiffy Mac laptop was stolen. It would be possible to record them on my old Toshiba linux box, but I think I’d have to recompile the kernel with sound drivers - not worth it right now. I could probably get them online from my minidisc player somehow, but the effort curve is pretty steep for that, too. So for now this is just a list.

After Bill Malley’s on Under the Moon. I have finally learned it in F so I can play the two together and have them sound good.