Our next slow jam will be Friday, March 9, at 8:00 pm.
Haven't been to a slow jam, and interested in coming? Send me an email, and I can send you further information. The name is "lance.ramshaw" and the email host is "gmail.com".
"Anyone who thinks it's boring to play slow is probably just as boring when they're playing fast--it's just over sooner!" John Krumm
This series is intended particularly for newer players who are just starting to get into playing Scottish tunes, especially including Scottish country dancers who are becoming intrigued by the tunes that they've been dancing to. The goal is to give them an opportunity early in their Scottish-musical careers to play along with other folks in public. Being a dancer myself who got into playing the tunes years ago, I'm trying to provide the kind of opportunity that I wish I had had back then.
That works best when we have roughly 12 to 20 players at a session, with a healthy seeding of more experienced folks, which has been working out just fine recently. However, there have been a couple crowded periods in the past, when the average attendance for a few months in a row was more like 25-30 or more. If we do end up back in a crowded phase some point, more experienced folks might want to moderate how frequently they attend, to leave enough space for the newer folks, but that doesn't seem to be an issue at the moment.
"ABC" is a form of music notation that uses letters to stand for notes, with numbers to show length. The beginning of "Flowers of Edinburgh", for example, looks like this in ABC:
GE|D2DE G2GA|BGBd cBAG|FGEF DEFG|AFdF E2(Lower-case letters are a higher octave than upper case; the vertical bars are measure lines.) There are free programs that can turn those letters into black dots on staff lines.
Sources for this kind of music can be hard to find. Here are a few sites, some US and some in Scotland, from which I have ordered successfully. If you know of other good sources, please let me know.
I find it useful to be able to clock how fast people are playing a tune. Unfortunately, while metronome ticks are the most useful measure, I often don't have a metronome with me, or don't want to make noise that might disturb the players. But even pretty cheap wrist watches often have a stop watch function (and iPhones do too).
The cards work for duple tunes like reels, jigs, and Strathspeys, but not for waltzes or slip jigs. To use the card, you time exactly four measures with the stop watch, pressing the button, for example, on beat one of bar one and then again on beat one of bar five. Say that's 3.8 seconds. Then they're playing at 126.
This Excel file prints 6 cards on a page, which you can then cut up. Printing on card stock is nice if you have it. (Here's a PDF version, but it doesn't seem to print quite as clearly.)
The underlying formula is to divide the seconds measure into 480. Step by step, the stop watch measures seconds / four-bar-phrase. Inverting that gets you four-bar-phrases / second. Multiplying by 8 gets you half-bars / second. Multiplying that in turn by 60 gets you half-bars / minute, which is what we typically measure.
The early violin makers back in the 16th century figured out how to build instruments that were not only beautiful, but loud. Loud enough to be heard throughout Carnegie Hall, but also perhaps too loud for the left ears of the players themselves. If you remember the inverse square law from your High School physics class, the sound is four times louder at your left ear, since it is twice as close to the strings as your right ear, and that's ignoring the fact that your head also helps shield your right ear.
Anyway, after years of playing, I started noticing that my left ear was ringing after practicing, so now I try either to wear an earplug on my left side or to use a mute when I practice. Etymotic Research is a company that makes earplugs for musicians that try to reduce the volume of all frequencies by the same amount, which makes them bit nicer to use than drugstore earplugs. I've also had good luck with "Hocks Noise Breaker" earplugs, available here, which claim to block only loud noises.
Many excellent fiddle players ignore this issue, and I'm sure that different people's ears are different, but my experience is as stated above.
Back to ramshaw.info home page
Updated 2012-02-11