I am going to apologize for this once. Then we are never going to speak of it again. Capisce? Good.
I suck at learning reels by sight reading them. I am so, so sorry you'll have one of these inflicted on you every few weeks (the sections in this book go jigs, slip jigs, reels, hornpipes, polkas, airs & waltzes, and the ever-popular miscellaneous). Truth be told, I'm not much looking forward to the hornpipes or polkas, either. As a classically trained musician, the lilting rhythm that is not at all implied on the paper by the cut time is painfully difficult to learn, and it's what convinced me that I had to learn tunes by ear as well as by written notes. It's much easier to pick up the rhythm in the complex meters, because the notes are already begging me to turn them into a dance.
(When I was doing ballroom dance, my favorites were waltz, tango, and jitterbug. This somehow seems not to have translated into as much of a feel for 4/4 and cut time in playing as I would like.)
I also ended up with a recording of last week's tune that, while not clean the whole way through (and oh, for the day that I manage one of those for you guys), has about as strong a start and finish to it as I could hope off a week's worth of practice. This tune turned out to be a really great example of pitch migration: what was on the page in front of me was up a full fourth from what most people played, yet the notes stayed in the same key. If you're mildly confused but think that must have made for a lot of cognitive dissonance, you are 100% correct.
Enjoy. (My humiliation.) I promise to be practicing my ass off starting tomorrow morning; tonight is for digging out different written versions over on The Session and looking for their recommended recordings on Spotify.
Up a fourth, but same... what? That... I don't... BRAIN.
ReplyDeleteWhat exactly is a hornpipe, anyway? I've heard the term but I'm unfamiliar.
Oddly enough, with the Ashplant, I can hear the bones of it solidly. Which weren't as easy for me to hear with your first take at the Cock and the Hen last week.
PRETTY. MUCH. Because it avoided a lot of the notes that would have been sharped in a true transposition it didn't sound COMPLETELY off, just enough to make my head hurt. Think Losing My Religion in A major. :P
DeleteHornpipes... well. To generalize like mad, the main difference between them and reels as a dance is that hornpipes are done in hard soled shoes and reels in soft. The main difference in their playing is that hornpipes USUALLY have a dotted eighth and sixteenth for the main rhythm, where a reel has two eighths. This means that hornpipes are often a little slower and a little more emphatic about beats. They're very... driving, and sort of heavier in feel? If that makes any sense at all.
That's either because I'm getting better, because the bones of the Cock and the Hen were the wrong bones, or both. I'll pretend it's both because that's a balm to my ego.