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Fiddling
I've played violin for a bit more than 30 years -- except that for about 20 of them, I wasn't playing violin. Suzuki lessons from about 5 years old to about 14 years old, quit in disgust, took it back up when I was 35. I have a lot of fun with it nowadays.
If you're looking for abc notation of fiddle tunes, be sure to check out The Fiddler's Companion.
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Listening to "Sweet to Mama" in the car today, and then replaying it in my head all day at my desk. And thinking, that's really a song I could play pretty well on my violin. I came up with a nice-sounding rhythm part consisting of an eigth-note rest followed by a triplet of sixteenths followed by eighths -- it sounds catchy and unusual. So when I got home I tried playing it on my violin -- and was a bit disappointed in the sound. Put it down, and an hour or so later I wanted to try it again, but only the viola was handy -- so I picked it up and was amazed by how natural it sounded. The key is G minor, which I think fits just as well to a violin as a viola; but something about the lower register is just fantastic for this song.
Update: Well, tonight I tried it on the violin in D minor and it sounded just as good -- so it was a matter of finger positions rather than register. Unfortunately it seems pretty hard for me to sing it in either G or D, I'm going to need to work out fingerings for it in some other key.
posted evening of March 18th, 2008: 2 responses ➳ More posts about Songs
The open mic went ok. We played three songs; I thought we did really well on the two songs that Jerry sang ("Bed on Your Floor" and "K.C. Moan"), but had trouble keeping in time together when I sang "John Hardy was a Desperate Man". Not sure exactly what to make of that -- I want to work more on that, it's one of my favorite songs.
The space is nice and there was a decent crowd. A couple of really good guitarists. Too many poorly-done Beatles covers, alas. My favorite performance for utter weirdness, was the tightly-wound guy strumming guitar and singing "All Through the Night".
Listening this evening to MS John Hurt playing "Stagger Lee", and it hit me that his guitar part would translate really well to violin. Going to try it out when I go downstairs later on.
I like to sing and to play violin; what I am aiming for is a style of playing where I can sing, play rhythm in between the lines of the verse, and play melody on breaks and between verses. I only have two songs where I can really do this, viz. "The Louisville Burglar" and "John Hardy was a Desperate Man"; I have mapped out how to do it for "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "Stagger Lee", and I think those two will come fairly quickly with practice; in Blues, I am close to knowing how to do it for "Sweet to Mama" and "Rising Sun Shine On". With this and a couple more songs, I would have a set -- but I need to find a partner, preferably either a guitarist or a banjo player. Jerry is not satisfied with the progress we've been making together and wants to play on his own. Hopefully I will be able to find somebody at one of the folk music jams around here.
I discovered, during my violin lesson today, that I am not moving my wrist at all when I pull and push the bow. This seems like something that will be pretty easy to fix now that I know about it, and should have a very beneficial effect on my sound.
Janis lent me a CD of Jelly Roll Morton's music, which I'm loving. Today after listening to it for a while, I played this on my violin, which I think is supposed to be kind of a take on the music I was listening to:
So what do you think? I was really enjoying playing that piece and I think if I had some kind of accompaniment (and -- of course -- spent more time on polishing the performance and the arrangement) it could be really worthwhile music. But I'm not sure how I would find someone that was interested in playing like that. Or for that matter what the instrumentation should be.
Let me know what you think about the sound.
Update: Two songs that I think I could play and that would go really well with this, are "Gimme Pigfoot" by Bessie Smith and "They're Red Hot" by Robert Johnson. (Thinking about it, these two songs are very similar to one another -- but not exactly the same.)
Today, for International Children's Day, Gladney has organized a talent show at the Chinese consulate in Manhattan. Sylvia and I are going to be playing "Ashokan Farewell", which she learned in in Overture Strings this term. Fingers crossed! I think it will go well, we've been practicing it a lot over the last few days.
Inspired by Apostropher and by Dave B., I have put together a mix tape of music that makes me feel happy. It's uploading right now, I probably won't get a chance to link it until we get back from our performance. So come back this evening to listen!
...The performance went very well indeed! We both made our entrances correctly (and I just want to point out that this was Sylvia's first experience with arranging -- she worked out who would play what part where) -- played in tune and kept time and all. Here's a photo:
So more songs on the Feel Alright mix tape than I would have expected, turn out to be fun to play along with, even for a group with talents as strictly limited as myself, Bob and Greg -- we were listening to it this afternoon and of course the fast jazz is just nice for listening, and of course the rock-ish tunes like "Ophelia" and "Caldonia" and "It's Alright With Me" were easy to play along with -- but there were a couple of surprises too, like "Arpay" which Greg and I did pretty nicely I thought -- a harmonica and pan pipes have something in common -- and "Boogie-Woogie Blues"; and we all jammed pretty nicely on "The Museum of Sex".
We also did some nice stuff on our own, without the tape -- great version of "Ophelia" after we stopped listening, "Dock of the Bay" with this weird-but-appealing sort of accidental key change on the break, "Mr. Spaceman".
Here are some songs that get played almost every time at the Menzel Violins jam. If I would learn them, I would get a chance to play leads there more frequently.
(A song I did get a chance to play tonight, with a guitarist whose name I did not learn -- Robert maybe? -- was "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", which turns out to be a lot of fun.)
Somebody commenting at (IIRC) Matt Yglesias' blog posted a link to this entertaining cover version. (If you're not familiar with the original Flea Market Montgomery commercial, by all means check it out.) Oddly, Gabe reports that the rest of Groves' recordings are in the "adult alternative contemporary christian" genre and make him feel creepy.
