Our next session will be Friday, January 8, 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 primarily 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 very 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. Having upwards of 25 folks present starts not to work as well, for both space and sound reasons, so we need to try to manage things depending on the current level of interest. (Experience also indicates that things work better when I stay at the piano, since switching pianists throws off the melody players.)
If you're a newer player, just getting into this scene, this series is for you. You can skip the next couple paragraphs, and we're looking forward to seeing you.
On the other hand, more experienced players should aim to adjust how often they attend to best support the newer players. If you've been playing these tunes for many years, if your technical level is well above that of the target audience, or if you already have other opportunities to jam with folks, you should not be coming regularly to this series. Come once in a while, by all means, to help carry the melody and because we'd love to see you, but don't come every single month. If you're looking for more chances to play Scottish tunes, join up with some friends and start your own session, and then invite us to come. The long-term goal is that we all have lots of varied opportunities to play tunes together.
Let's work together to manage things so that we have room for newer players while also having enough experienced folks here each time to support the tunes and to give them a good taste of the musical community that they're joining.
"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.
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.
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.
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Updated 2009-11-21