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Songs
Some songs I like to play. See also my Charts page.
READIN
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.
This was fun. As always I find myself in need of a rhythm instrument behind me. If I were playing with a pianist and a singer or something, that could be a moderately long song with lots of verses and choruses. (And with fewer missed notes and beats.)
Update ...and in this tune, I go on without benefit of rhythm for a number of verses:
posted evening of December 7th, 2007: 4 responses ➳ More posts about Fiddling
So I've decided to post working versions of songs I am learning and/or writing here. It will give me a point of reference, which is a handy thing to have. So far I have been recording with Windows Sound Recorder and my laptop's microphone. Ideally I would have a good microphone and a more usable piece of software -- I don't really know what software there is, but will look into it. Short of buying a microphone, Mike suggested that I could plug in my violin's pick-up into the computer -- all I need for this is a ¼"-to-⅛" jack converter.
posted morning of December 8th, 2007: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
I worked out a little melody on my viola this evening, and wrote it down! Thanks to the magic of ABC Notation, I can make it available here, in ABC format or PDF. I used ABCEdit to enter it, and boy is that useful -- I had thought the 3-note runs were triplets but ABCEdit's playback feature showed me that was wrong, and that I wanted two short notes and a longer one.
You can repeat the verse many times, there are a lot of rhythmic variations and note-order variations that are pretty easy to find. Also I think there was a bridge when I was playing but I could not find it when I was writing the tune down.
Update: Ok, I expanded it a little, found a part that sounds kind of like a bridge. Again, to make this sound at all interesting when you're playing it you will need to add in a lot of variations on your own.
Another fun thing about ABCEdit is it makes it pretty easy to play around with the time signature and stuff. I tried this out in 12/8, with a sort of swingy feel -- it sounds really corny that way.
I need to come up with more descriptive titles than "Melody 1", "Melody 2" and so forth for the tunes I come up with. Sylvia suggests that the most recent one be called "Sandwich Song", and so it shall be.
I'm starting to use my new mixing program, Audacity. In the spirit of audacity, I'll post a working version of "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning". Not satisfied with much of this but I think some individual bits work very well. My laptop's microphone captures my fiddle surprisingly well; I think for further vocal work I am going to need to get a microphone. And a better sense of rhythm -- it's surprisingly difficult to figure out where to come in when you are listening to a track you laid down previously.
posted evening of December 21st, 2007: 2 responses
Ok, I'm pretty happy with this recording. Not perfect, there are several places where I have rhythm trouble and I generally have a little trouble with starting the verses; but the ratio of moments that work to embarrassing gaffes is a good deal higher than on the previous attempt.
(I re-recorded this tune. See the new post for the recording.)
Here is a story about "John Hardy Was a Desperate Man": It is my very favorite Carter Family song out of those that I have heard, which is a fair portion of their catalog. (Yes -- I even like it better than "Will the Circle be Unbroken".) Listening to it just puts me into a trance. Sadly I have not listened to it in a couple of years because I lost the disc on which it is recorded -- but this has a very nice upshot. In all that time of not being able to listen to the original I feel like I have come up with a very worthwhile version that is properly my own. The chords are different from the Carter Family's version, the key is different, the melody is different. This is about the only song that I cover where my version is really substantially different from the version I am covering. (Not to imply that my covers are of similar quality to the originals, just that they are imitative.) Anyway, listen to it and let me know what you think.
I am thinking maybe I should try playing this in A minor or G minor, that that might be better suited to my vocal range. I had originally chosen D minor because the guitar part is really easy there; but seeing as that's not a concern currently....
Yes! It sounds way better in G minor. I will re-record it later this morning.
posted evening of December 22nd, 2007: 2 responses
Very much a working version -- I am not particularly happy with the integration between the vocals and the fiddle; and I don't think I am singing this one very well right now. But there is the germ of something that sounds good in it.
I think The Louisville Burglar is by the Iron Mountain String Band. I heard it on a CD from Jeffrey Davidson's radio show. So now you know.
I wrote out the fiddle part for "Weary Day" -- you can read it in ABC format or PDF. Note the time signature change in the middle of the chorus -- I wasn't sure how else to represent two extra beats in one of the measures. (In the Corelli piece we were playing in the chamber music workshop, the extra-long measure was just written in to the music with no warning, but that seemed a little hard to get used to.)
I'm pretty happy with this. I tried putting a solo in but it just doesn't work that way. So I'm just playing it straight through. A couple of bars of solo before the first verse might be something to think about.
Background on this song: it is by an old Country band called the Stanley Brothers, but I have never heard them play it. I heard John Miller's cover on the same disc where I heard The Louisville Burglar -- Thanks Jeffrey! This was Sylvia's favorite song for a while so we listened to it a lot.
The cool thing about this song is, I had been looking for a fiddle part for a while; and then yesterday I just heard the part exactly in my head, and how it would fit in with the vocal. I think it sounds really good together.
Update: Huh, I just listened to the John Miller version again for the first time in a while, and my cover is different in some pretty key ways. That's nice to see. He does a two-bar intro, I'll try and add that next time I play this.
