Resonant Constellation

The Irish/Celtic/Folk band 2Duos is coming through town this weekend, and I couldn’t be more excited. First off, I’ve had my tickets since the beginning of the summer (or thereabouts), so I’ve been awaiting this concert quite a while. I’ve been big fan of Aaron Jones, the Bouzouki/Guitar player and lead singer of this group since I first heard him in one of my other favorite bands, Old Blind Dogs, around 2003/04 when they came through Albuquerque on tour. Since then, his playing style has vastly influenced my own and I’d go so far as to call him a musical hero of mine.

All of which is to say that I was extremely excited to learn that I could actually get a private lesson with Aaron on guitar when he came through town. I instantly jumped at the idea, and I found myself at the house of a gracious Tucson host to the musicians of 2Duos on Thursday. We began with an hour long lesson in which I learned more about trad. music on guitar than I have in the last eight months combined. Recently, I feel I’ve been on a kind of plateau and that my playing proficiency hasn’t really gone anywhere, but this lesson certainly got me past that blockage. I’m still trying to work out where to go with all of the options that have opened up for me.

After this excellent lesson, I shared a beer with Aaron, and we discussed a wide variety of topics. At one point he related a story in which he was awed by being able to watch some of his favorite musicians from different bands play together at a festival, and it was at this point when I realized; here I am, sharing a beer and trading stories with one of my musical heroes! It is not something I will soon forget.

Afterwards, everybody (people there for lessons and the band) got together for a little session. It was a truly great night. Now I look forward to seeing the show tomorrow night.

[rant]
I was reading an article today on Gizmodo in their Week of Audio Tech section, and I ran across this article on “The World’s Most Beautiful Audio Equipment. Some of the stuff on there is interesting, some is completely useless, some is great, all of them are expensive. One particularly intriguing idea caught my eye: that of Opera Sonora Speakers. This company makes very visually pleasing speakers (really sounding boards) out of expensive and rare tonewoods.

At first, I was very intrigued by this idea. As it often does, my mind began running with the concept. You could carve each of the pieces like an instrument sounding board and have interesting resonation boxes, there could be big, bass-like ones, and little, violin-like ones. It could sound really cool, I thought. In fact, you could practically build stringed instruments without the strings and it would probably sound fantastic-if you drive the pieces in the correct places. There are problems with even this idea, though. The volume and tone is severely limited by the types of the wood, and even without that, these “speakers” would only be good at reproducing stringed instrument sounds, winds wouldn’t come through as well. For an amateur audiophile like me, that’s a cringe-inducing thought.

One quick inspection of the site, however, makes all of these points moot. Here is an excerpt from one of their descriptions of their first product:

The idea was born thinking to the wind which blows among the spruces and accompanies day and night the life of the forest.

The point stretching to the top imitates the leap of the tree towards the sky and the curving lines seem to capture the wind like a sail swelling with the energy of nature.

The reduced dimensions confer a gentle response to the music, which can rise at the right time in the richest and swiftest pieces.

Wow, the bullshit is tangible. This is obviously an idea designed by an artiste with little to no background in audio equipment or luthiery. Now, I realize that there’s a place for pretentious artists (I think), but that place is sadly not in the home music entertainment industry. It could have been a very intriguing, if somewhat limited, concept, but it turned into a waste of rare and expensive tonewood. To everybody considering wasting tonewood: Stop That. It’s rare enough already, and those of us who use it in instruments would like to be able to afford new additions to the herd.
[/rant.]

Well this took too long to get up here, but here it is. This week at the session (which was held at my apartment), the usual group was joined by Eric, a local Uileann piper (okay, the local Uileann piper, or at least the only one I’ve found). I think this made our session a few orders of magnitude more awesome, as good pipers always do. Anyway, here’s a clip of four of us (Anton left early). Don’t mind my ineptitude on guitar in various spots (nor the rocky beginning of the second tune), I’ve been in going back and forth between tunings so much recently that I barely know where I am anymore.

The tunes being played are Garret Barry’s and Auld Hag You’ve Killed Me.

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I’m always on the lookout for new material to help my guitar playing along. I consider myself a rank amateur on this instrument: I may have a decade of transferable (to one degree or another) skills on a LOT of other instruments, but each instrument has it’s own ticks and wierdness that must be worked out individually-you can’t apply a universal formula to playing all musical instruments. Guitar is a perfect example of this: when you first learn it, the strings are tuned in a very unnatural, brain twisting manner (at least to a classical cellist, which is what I was when I first picked up guitar). The best part of guitar, however, is that there is an enormous body of literature on alternate tunings for it. Learning and playing in these alternate tunings is challenging, but insanely fun.

My first foray outside of standard tuning was to Drop-D, a very common tuning in Irish music. Drop-D tunes the lowest string down one note from E to D (if standard tuning is EADGBe, Drop-D is DAdGBe), hence the “drop” title. I find that Drop-D is a great tuning for accompanying driving music, and can really get tunes going. The lower harmonies available really make good use of the guitar’s larger body (larger than, say, a fiddle or mandolin). Similar to Drop-D is Double-Drop-D, in which you drop the highest string (an e two octaves above the standard tuning lowest string) to a d two octaves above the already dropped low D. I find that this tuning is only minimally useful in the music I play, so I don’t use it all that much.

My short investigation of blues led me to learn the Drop-C# tuning, wherein all of the strings are dropped a half-step from the Drop-D tuning. If Drop-D utilizes the resonance of the guitar better than standard tuning, Drop-C# maxes out the guitar’s resonant capabilities. Some truly incredible sounding music can come out of this tuning, but also some weird buzzing artifacts can show up too. As it stands, I know about three blues tunes in Drop-C#. I would play it more, except that tuning all six of the strings back up again can be tedious and is sometimes hazardous (strings almost always break during tunings like these).

Currently, I’ve been keeping both of my guitars in Drop-D and dividing my time about 2 parts Drop-D and 1 part standard tuning. Today, however, I discovered a new tuning-DADGAD. It differs from Double-Drop-D by only one note, dropping the second highest “B” string to an “A.” Despite this seeming minor difference, this opens up incredible new melodic worlds. If you play guitar and you haven’t yet tried DADGAD, I highly recommend it. Take a look at this website: Han’s DADGAD Guitar Page.

I found this page today with only three hours to go before my usual weekly session, so I frantically scrambled to learn some chords and put together some progressions before I had to leave. The result, you will find below:

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I hope you’ll agree that it sounds pretty good for having picked it up three hours previously.

On Sunday I was lucky enough to attend a great concert given by the Irish band Danú. When the concert was over and we were leaving, my first thought was:
Why haven’t I heard of these guys?

I was absolutely blown away by the talent displayed by every member of the group. The button box playing was spectacular, the fiddle was wonderful, the guitar and bouzouki were as good as I’ve ever heard (and that’s saying a lot, since I seek these instruments out), and the flute/whistle playing were excellent. The highlights of the evening, however, were the singing and the drums. I hear a lot of both of these in sessions and more often than not they’re just disappointing. Out of the dozens of Bodhran players who’ve come through our local session or who I’ve met outside of it, I’d say I’ve only met one who has truly musical sensibilities and talent. For singers, I might increase that number to two. The singer for Danú, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh (don’t ask me how to pronounce it) has an incredible voice, and moreover, she knows how to use it-her ornamentation is nothing short of perfect.

The drummer with the band that night (he’s not part of the band, he’s just touring with them), Martin O’Neill, is famous enough that I actually have heard of him, though I didn’t connect the face with the name until after the concert (he played on the album Secret Orders by Claire Mann and Aaron Jones which I reviewed a while back). This man did things with his drum that I am still not sure are physically possible. Beginning with a jazz-like bit of brush work, he did a solo set in which he actually played a walking bass line on his drum. His pitch was impeccable.

So, my recommendation? Go see this band if you have the chance, you’ll have a blast.

Well, last night a few friends and I got together to play a session, and as promised I recorded a few of the tunes we played. Here’s a sample:

This is my friend Gordon on the flute and me on guitar. I have no idea what the name of the tune is. The talking in the background is the other members of the session:

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This next is the Star of Munster played by Anton on his Bulgarian tambora (this is not strictly Irish, but it sounds awesome), Claire on fiddle, Gordon on flute, and myself on guitar again:

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My mandolin was a bit out of tune that night, so there aren’t any good tracks with me playing. Perhaps next time.

Those of you who actually read this blog (I’m amazed there’s any, actually) may remember from my post on the 1st that I said:

I had a hell of a lot of fun, and I look forward to continuing this session. Next week I’ll try to get a recording of the action and post it here.

The moment I wrote those words and pressed the “Publish” button on my WP-admin page, I began an epic quest to find a suitable field recorder. I did not sleep (beyond my usual 7 hours), I did not eat (any more than I usually would have), I spent every waking moment (that wasn’t otherwise occupied by, for example, contemplating naval lint) searching for my next gadget.

Like a true geek, I did my research on this one. I laid out a spreadsheet to compare the properties of each individual gadget to the next (things like frequency response, sample rate, recording format, storage size, stereo mics, price, etcetera). There turned out to be three distinct categories of devices I considered: fully dedicated, hi-fi, super expensive, multi-directional, multiple microphone recorders (Example: Zoom H2, which I still may get if I can scrape together money [ha ha!]), stereo and mono voice recorders which were slightly smaller, and less high quality (usually “CD” quality at 44.1 kHz sampling and ~800Hz-1kHz response), though consistently $50 cheaper (Example: Olympus DS-40), and finally the iPod attachment variety, which is basically a device that you plug into your iPod and record directly onto it (Example: Belkin TuneTalk).

This last category had many sub-categories (mono, stereo, power adapter capable, external source, various quality settings), but the most outstanding feature is that they are practically all dirt cheap compared to the other gizmos I was looking at. My dilemma at this point was that there was no one device which clearly was superior in the price versus quality department, so I turned to the mandolin cafe message boards where I’d seen posts about this kind of product. My question was instantly addressed, and I found a very nice guy by the name of Fred who was willing to send me some recordings made with the Belkin iPod device. The sound quality of these far surpassed my expectations, so I ended up getting the Belkin TuneTalk from Amazon for about $30. Just a few days later, it has arrived and is in my hands! Here’s a quick little recording I made:

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I hope you’ll agree that, besides the playing, it sounds pretty good (quality-wise). Hopefully I’ll get some good recordings at the session this weekend and I’ll be able to share them with you here!

A friend of mine recently (Saturday, February 28) invited me over to a local pub to play with a small group for a party being held for one of his friends. I met a few people I haven’t seen before, and a few with whom I’ve played many times. The fallout of this is that we had so much fun playing together, we’re going to make this a weekly thing-starting with house sessions and moving up to bigger and better things as membership/interest grows.

The nice thing about all of this is that it gives me a good place to work on my playing: other sessions are too crowded and most of the people don’t listen to what others are doing. This is particularly a problem with guitar: some people completely dominate the sound with their ‘accompaniment,’ playing louder than everybody else. This is highly contrary to my style of playing, so I rarely get to play guitar-until this session. I think people were truly amazed that:
1) There is an amateur guitar player who understands accompaniment (at least a little).
2) That I play guitar (I’m really known as a mandolin player).

I had a hell of a lot of fun, and I look forward to continuing this session. Next week I’ll try to get a recording of the action and post it here.

I have a peculiar disease that afflicts musicians, especially mandolin players. This is a kind of wasting disease, but instead of afflicting my body, it afflicts my wallet. Those of you who play the mando may have heard of this disease (and likely have it yourselves). I am, of course, referring to M.A.S., or Mandolin Acquisition Syndrome. In layman’s terms this means that mandolin players are never quite satisfied with the instrument they have, often lusting after other makes, models, designs, etcetera. Symptoms may include inordinate amounts of time spent perusing the internet to find another mando to gawk at, asking to play any instrument that comes into your sight, just to see if it plays better than yours, and ultimately a large collection of instruments usually known as “the herd.” As you may have guessed, this is expensive. The worst part: there is no cure.

There are effective treatments, however. Of course, getting a new mandolin staves off the effects for a while, though this length of time varies from person to person (I’ve seen guys get brand new mandos and start looking again right away. This is clearly the fatal stage of the disease).

I bought my most recent mando back in the summer of 2007 from Bill Bussmann in a complicated four-way trade that made my head spin. The fallout was that I got Old Wave #83, an A-model from 1995. The guy who traded it in got #412 or somesuch, an F style that I played when I was last down at Bill’s place. Let me just say this: I got the better end of the deal.

The weird part of this whole thing is that since I got OW #83, I haven’t wanted another mandolin. Oh, sure, I still have a wishlist for when I win the lottery and I’ve always coveted my friend Dave’s Nugget (but who wouldn’t?), but I haven’t had a serious desire to purchase another mandolin for quite some time.

“So what’s the problem?” you ask, “M.A.S. hasn’t shown up in a long time, you’re practically cured!” If only it were that simple.

You see, M.A.S. never goes away. Sometimes it is temporarily sated, sometimes it morphs into another form. In my case, it morphed into G.A.S. (not what you’re thinking), Guitar Acquisition Syndrome. This is precisely why, this past November, I purchased a Taylor 214-CE. Now, I’ve only ever owned two mandolins (and one mandola), so this is a rather quick transition. One would normally expect me to stick on guitars for a little while now.

This is where the bad news comes in.

Whilst surfing my usual mandolin-related websites, I discovered that “Zouk-Fest,” a New Mexico based festival for Bouzouki, Mandolin, Guitar, and other random instruments, had moved its summer festival from its usual Santa Fe residence to the University of New Mexico campus in Albuquerque. Since I’m from Albuquerque, I was very intrigued. Upon further inspection, I found out that this festival will be an “Irish Mandolin Weekend.” As a mandolin player who plays predominantly Irish traditional music, I often feel in the minority of mandolinists (and rightfully so, most play bluegrass), so a festival perfectly aligned with my interests, and in my hometown no less, is an opportunity not to be missed.

It was then I saw the instrument raffle. There’s 100 tickets, $30 each, and they enter you in a contest to win a beautiful Herb Taylor Bouzouki. I have long toyed with the idea of buying a cheap Zouk to try it out for myself, and I’ve played a few over the years, but this opportunity sent me over the edge. I now have full blown Bouzouki Acquisition Syndrome (B.A.S.). Oh my poor wallet.

Let’s hope I win the raffle.

I have strange musical tastes, ranging from classical to rock to bluegrass and most recently blues.  But my favorite type of music is Irish/Scottish Traditional.  My interest started when I took a summer class on Irish music in middle school.  It was only later that I realized that I am a quarter Irish.  Since the very early days of my acquaintance with this music, my favorite band has been the Old Blind Dogs, a scottish folk group hailing mostly (or at least they used to) from Aberdeenshire and Northern Scotland (as opposed to another of my favorite bands, Breabach, a newer discovery).  OBD have been an inspiration to me musically, nearly every member of the band contributing significantly to how I play.

When I went to see the Dogs in concert last year, they were as awesome as ever, even though their piper and whistle player Rory Campbell had just left the band and the lead singer Jim Malcolm had left in 2006.  The new piper, Ali Hutton, acquitted himself excellently, and the band played many of my old favorites.  However, there were a few new tunes, and one particularly stood out.  It was a quiet vocal number called “Saints and Sinners.”  I went home humming the tune and playing it over in my mind with the few lyrics I remembered.  Thus began a several-month-long-quest to find a recording of this tune, finally ending in this album by Aaron Jones (Old Blind Dogs guitar and bozuki player and sometimes lead singer), and Claire Mann, an award-winning flute player, fiddler, and singer with an impressive list of accomplishments.  Despite this high level of achievement and the high expectations, they managed to exceed anything I could have hoped for.  I may have bought it for one track, but I keep listening to it for the rest: this is simply a great album.

It begins with a moderately paced set of three reels called McElvogue’s between fiddle, flute, and bozuki.  These tunes show off exactly what I love about Aaron Jones’ accompaniment.  It drives the melody forward, but isn’t overbearing.  The middle reel is wonderfully minor and twisty, switching back to a wholesome major key for the finish.

The next set, The Smiling Bride, is a mixture of jigs in about the same tempo as the first set.  A bit of bodhran changes up the pace nicely, however, and the sudden transition to a minor slip-jig (one that I know but can’t for the life of me place the name of) fits perfectly with the flavor of the album so far.  Back into another 6/8 jig with a vaguely minor B part for that intensely celtic feeling.

The third track, Saints and Sinners, I’ve mentioned before as being the reason I bought the album, and it doesn’t disappoint.  I must say, through all the years of listening to Jim Malcolm’s incredible voice (Scots Trad singer of the year 2004, nominee several other times) with the Dogs, I never realized that Aaron Jones also had a great singing voice.  This song is from the perspective of a man sitting on his steps on Sunday morning and watching people go to church.  It’s wonderfully philosophical in just the way I like:

I remember the lessons of Sunday school

And I can’t help thinking that maybe I’m the fool

And I see no part of a greater plan

Just the joy and the sorrow of my fellow man

See what I mean?  As Ronan Burke would say: Great hurlin’, altogether. (At least that’s what I think he says, he has a really thick accent. Follow the link, and you’ll see…)

The next set is a good return to a moderate pace after the song with two tunes from Brittany (I believe). The first is a tune from Jacky Molard, who I seem to have heard of before (I recognize the style), and the second a great minor tune with the kind of rhythm awesomeness that makes dancers stumble.

The fifth track, Across the Western Ocean, is another standout vocal piece involving Liverpool, a favorite city of Jones. Instrumentally, this tune is rather complicated, building a great undercarriage for the unadorned vocals. The flute and bozuki work better together than I would have thought, as does the guest harmonica provided by Little Al Price (never heard of him). Another great tune.

The sixth set, Tripping, is mostly traditional tunes and all ’session favorites.’ In the second tune, we finally get a burst of speed from Mann’s fiddle playing, displaying excellent use of ornamentation. At the end is a nice little stinger arpeggiated chord, which I haven’t seen used in Irish trad. much, but I must say it works nicely.

Fortune’s Wheel is the seventh track and third vocal selection, and is rather laid-back in its circa minor feeling. Aaron Jones’ voice gets a bit of a workout here with a bit larger dynamic and tonal range as well as much more ornamentation than in the others. Accompanying him here is only light guitar and B flat flute, which has the wonderfully breathy sound of lower winds.

Another tune I know starts off Snappy Guzzlin’. While the liner notes call it Denis Ryan’s, that name just doesn’t click with me. This is the curse of Irish music: every tune has three different names depending on where you are (example: the wedding reel is known as MacLeod’s Farewell, Madonna’s, and even Ms. MacLeod’s Farewell to Chastity in certain parts of Tucson) and there’s six other tunes with the same name. This set does live up to the ’snappy’ title, however, and brings a great happy note the middle of the album.

The last vocal number on the album, Slip Jigs and Reels continues the pattern of outstanding vocal tunes on this album. This is another single song that I would have bought the entire album just to get. Thankfully, I got a whole album of these! The main character of this song leaves his home for New York and has all sorts of adventures, but through it all he finds pleasure in slip jigs and reels. As with most good Irish/Scottish Trad. songs, this ends with the main character dying. It would be a downer if it wasn’t expected in practically every tune (if things end happily, I’m surprised).

The next to last set, Bottle of Whisky, includes YET ANOTHER tune I know by the name of Munster Buttermilk (this name I DO recognize), and two tunes I have to learn. The first if only for the name: “Kitty Got a Clicking Coming to the Fair,” and the second because of the story behind it. Bottle of Whisky refers to a competition between two Uilleann pipers where the prize was…what else but a bottle of Whisky. This last has great major/minor transitions and a compelling melody worthy of a Uilleann competition.

The last tune on the album is a solo air by Claire Mann on the B flat flute called Lament for the Kerry Fisherman. It may not have been my choice as a last tune for this album, but it certainly works, the simplicity of the solo flute giving the listener time to pause and consider the album they have just listened to as an entire work.

I must say that while both of these artists have released albums with other bands, Secret Orders is an incredibly impressive first album. I only hope we can see more from this duo sometime in the near future!