Sailors Hornpipe wasn't fast enough. I could still recognize the tune.
Sailors Hornpipe wasn't fast enough. I could still recognize the tune.
Whenever I see a double-neck mando-guitar, I'm reminded of John Lennon's illustration for "The Fat Growth on Eric Hearble" . . .
Yes, it's a funny machine. I once remarked that the logical consequence of marrying these two instruments would be an octave mandolin, but he just answered "No compromises!"
the world is better off without bad ideas, good ideas are better off without the world
I love that first clip! Including the facial expressions. He's having a lot of fun!
I can see what you mean about the first two tunes working nicely together in a set. I'll try it slowly.
My session group played a charity gig (we got fed at least!) for a big crowd this week. We had one full time guitar/rhythm player, two fretted instrument people who played rhythm on some tunes and melody on others, three flutes, a whistle, an accordion, and two percussionists. So on any given tune, melody players were just a little more than half and rhythm/percussion a little less than half. We intentionally sat the accordion player, who is very good, in the middle and asked him to play the loudest and be the "lead melody instrument." We all followed him. Everyone took pains to fit in, we sounded great and the crowd loved it. It was very satisfying and great fun. I think it goes to show there are no hard and fast rules. It's about musicianship.
Well, it goes to show that there are no rules when you're putting together a group for performance. It sounds like your group and the audience had a great time, so congratulations on the gig!
I don't think it demonstrates any general principle that can be applied to sessions, because every session will have a different take on the "how many backers before there are too many?" question. Having the best musicianship in the world doesn't matter, if the members of a given session simply have an aesthetic preference for the group sound created by a very low ratio of backers to melody players.
Its not an aesthetic preference. Not at all. Its an entirely different goal. The session's goal is for everyone to play music together. It i not, by and large, intended to be a performance. That it may look like a performance to someone not knowing who feels like an audience, is of no concern to the session players.
Jeff, in what way is it not an aesthetic preference, if the members of a session prefer to have just one guitar player and one bodhran player instead of several? It's a preference for a particular flavor of group sound, as opposed to an army of guitars, zouks, and multiple Bodhran players in the background. At other sessions, the group may prefer the sound of more backers. It varies. Each session has its own group aesthetic, even if it's "free-for-all jam."
And yes, I'm talking session, not performance: A gathering of like-minded players having a musical conversation, with emphasis on the "like-minded" part.
One good accordian player can carry a lot of accompanists, volume-wise. That applies for both gig and session. You might say he does not participate in a session, he IS the session.
The downside is that if he fails to turn up, everybody else is suddenly very lonely with their attempts at music.
the world is better off without bad ideas, good ideas are better off without the world
Following the best musician in the group is what all sessiun players do. That's if they have any musical sensibilities. Beginners need to learn this sometimes as well.
Another example is that we had a hard time as beginners learning how to create the lilt and backbeat in the music because we had no one to provide an example. It all sounded as if we were reading notes or a machine was playing the music. There is so much to learn and it is not apparent to the new folks. Online stuff like this discussion, really helps. I wish it were around when we started in 1990.
Well to my experience, (and mine alone), the choices of who is welcome and who isn't (setting aside totally inappropriate instruments, which is a separate discussion) is based on the mix of musical personalites and how much fun or tension they bring to the experience. I have never been in the circumstance here a guitar was made to feel unwelcome because there were already several playing, or a fiddle was not welcome because there were enough on lead. Has never happened to me. But again, that is me. (Many times I have known multi-instrumentalists who make their own choice as to what to play based on the sonic mix, but that is different, and even there it is often based on what is it more fun to play in this group at this time.)
I suppose it may happen at the higher reaches of talent, but even there it has to my experience been self policing - i.e. a great and venerated fiddler is playing away and so other fiddlers of their own free will take a back seat or decline to play and just listen.
I have been to more than a few sessions where there was a core center group of a few musicians, calling the tunes, sounding great, and having a blast, surrounded by an ocean of bodhrans, zouks, and guitars that added mostly mud and fog to the overall sound. The core group listened intently to each other, sat close together, and more or less ignored the background noise much as they would ignore the background noise of a crowded bar, and did not appear to be having the least bit less fun for all the mash up mess the overall sound had become.
And have had the distilled ecstacy to be in the core group of such a session, on several occations, and found that it was not that hard to do, and yea it was a ripping good time. Not that you would want to record it however.
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