ramshaw.info/slowjam

Slow Jam Sessions of Scottish Tunes in Concord, MA

"Marvelous tunes at moderate tempos"

Our next slow jam will be Friday, March 9, at 8:00 pm.

Schedule
8:00-9:30 pm: Learner focus on just a few tunes
9:30 on: Round robin tune suggestions
Current Standard Tunes List
Tunes played regularly and likely to be played again.
Alternate Tunes List
Tunes played occasionally, and suggestions for the future.
Former Favorites List
Tunes not played recently, but which may become popular again.

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


Goals and Focus

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.


Tune-Related Web Resources

Boston-Area Scottish Fiddle Information

Barbara McOwen's website
The Events button on Barbara's website points to an extensive listing of Scottish fiddle jam sessions, workshops, and performances.
Boston Scottish Fiddle Club
The BSFC has monthly Sunday workshops and jam sessions in Arlington.
Strathspey and Reel Society of New Hampshire
The SRSNH has monthly Sunday afternoon meeting in Concord, New Hampshire.
Passim School of Music
Passim sponsors sets of Scottish fiddle classes in Harvard Square taught by Hanneke Cassel, Laura Cortese, or others.

Tune Indexes

Fiddlers' Companion
This excellent source gives historical notes about each tune, books and page numbers where the tune can be found, info on recorded versions, and often the actual tune in ABC form. An older version of this index that supports a search function is still available here, if you only know part of the tune name.
Tune Index
This index covers a wider range of sources, but only lists the books and page numbers where the tune can be found.

ABC Resources

"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.
John Chamber's ABC Tune Index
Our own John Chambers maintains a site that indexes ABC tunes available anywhere on the Web. You type in (part of) the name of a tune, and then hit the "find (wide)" button, and it lists all the versions that it finds of tunes that match that name. You can then get the tune, either in ABC form or rendered into black dots. "GIF" or "PNG" are the options to try if you want to view or print the black dots from your browser. The "MIDI" option, depending on your browser, may be able to play the tune for you.
John Chamber's ABC Tutorial
Here's John Chambers' description of how ABC works.
ABC Home Page
This page, maintained by Chris Walshaw, the original devisor of ABC notation, describes how the notation works and gives pointers to programs that you can download to work with it.
The Session
This active site has both ABC and black dots for lots of Celtic tunes, though many of them are Irish, rather than Scottish. Be aware, too, that most of tunes here are posted by eager amateur musicians, who may not be especially good at transcribing what was actually played.

Commercial Sources for Scottish Music Books/CDs

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.

Fiddlers Crossing/Mountain Music
Jan Tappan of the Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles founded this store many years ago, and then sold it a few years back to Mountain Music, which continues to operate it. They sell both CDs and music books, with a particular emphasis on historical sources, including their own "Scotcopy" series of photocopies of out-of-print collections.
Celtic Music USA
This organization in Oklahoma is mostly a wholesale importer, but they also have a retail catalog with a pretty wide selection of Scottish and Cape Breton CDs. Note: Their web catalog is pretty minimal, and their order page is not encrypted, so I tend to FAX orders to them instead. (This used to be Portland America Distributing, an importing business founded by Ed Perlman, which he then sold to these folks.)
Elderly Instruments
This very large folk music source in Michigan carries some Scottish CDs and music books, and sells items at a bit of a discount.
Foot Stompin' Music
This Scottish source stocks some music books and lots of CDs. You get a 10% discount off their listed prices on orders after your first order.
Music Scotland
A Scottish supplier of CDs and music books, including pipe bands and dance bands.
Highland Music Trust
This group is republishing a number of major historical collections, along with some new music.

Tempo Cards

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.


A Note from the Left Ear Defense League

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.


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Updated 2012-02-11