Midnight Sun

Yesterday I picked up the following:
The Classic Guitar Collection Volume One - Four Easy Pieces (Joseph Kuffner)
Frankly it was easy, and dull and uninspiring. I didn't have time to rack my brains to find a way to bring it alive. I actually don't like much music from this era. I love baroque, rennaissance, early, mediaeval and so on, and I love romantic and modernism and 20th century and minimalism. I hate almost all classical though. No idea why, I just find it twee, dry, flat, monotonous, and some of the cadences Mozart uses induces a negative physical reaction in me. I think I'd rather listen to rap.
Anyway, that done I scooted out of the door up to Seussical rehearsal where we are still bashing through the music, which is growing on me with every small bit of exposure.
Today:
The Four Winds (Matt Seattle) - Midnight Sun Waltz (mandolin)
I originally tried it on a guitar but it lacked a certain something. It's intended as a duet for violins so I took the easy step of doing it for mandolin. The result is here:

It's a brittle sound, and with a couple of errors considering it's practically sight reading, but a lovely lilting melody. I may do this with my lil' sis' on fiddle when I next see her.

Cars Complete

Well I've allowed myself a little break from the challenge and the blog. I think I deserved it, as I was pretty knackered. I mainly spent the time in the recording studio with Greg the Electrickery drummer laying down nice meaty guitar tracks.
Back with a vengeance though. Yesterday's tune was:
Popular Songs for the Classical Guitar (Green Edition) (John Zaradin) - Stars Fell on Alabama (classical guitar)
This is a great book of jazzy arrangements of standards plus some latin numbers thrown in. I bought it years ago, before I could sight-read so I got nowhere with it. It's really satisfying to be able to plough through it now with a newfound confidence and ability. Today I actually picked out another tune and played that - "Tico Tico" which I have a staggeringly good showpiece version of by the box player out of Altan, Dermot Byrne. I'm going to stick with this piece for a bit I think as it has a latin sparkle which makes me go a little gooey inside. In fact here is him doing it live, and I strongly advise you check it out. If you don't play the box, let me assure you that tune is hard as nails.
Today's tune is this:
The Classic Guitar Collection Volume 2 - Recuerdos De La Alhambra (Francisco Tarrega) (classical guitar)
This piece involves a technique which I have never worked on - the repeated picking of the same note with consecutive fingers of the right hand, with the melody being plucked with the thumb in the bass. It is really hard and takes years to perfect. I didn't have years this evening sadly, but I was quite pleased with my progress. Nice Spanish sounding tune it was too. Here is a version being played at roughly 10 times the speeed I can do it by a lass called Kaori Muraji. I'm jealous.
The real meat of tonight's work however was finishing my orchestral version of Cars by Numan, and committing it to mp3 for posterity. I guess it's different enough from the original to allow me to post here without invoking the wrath of A&R:
It's just occured to me on posting this that this is the first recording to feature my voice. This is quite a stylised performance and I'm kind of putting on a voice for it. I've also used a vocoder for the word "Cars" every time it appears.

Setting a misery-guts.

Mel Bay's Complete Fingerstyle Jazz Guitar Book - There are no actual tunes in this book, just loads of short examples, so after picking my way through a few I gave up and moved on to yet another new project. I'm writing a fairly bleak minimalist setting of Where Once Poe Walked by H.P.Lovecraft. I'm setting it for piano, clarinet and soprano. Obviously not being a pianist, I'm unable to imbue their part with any playability or musicality, so all they get to do is play big octaves and long clashing chords. The reason for creating this ugly monster? I've been commissioned by a soprano (Ailsa Mainwaring) to write a tune for her to yodel. However, I know how fussy singers can be so I'm going to write a suite of numbers so she gets to choose, or take them all if she so desires. The tune so far is "modern" in sound (whatever that means), but I find I'm unable to avoid tonality (which I'm sure the singer will be pleased about). I don't actually think much of the brand of modernism that completely rejects tonality, but I do love the darker, edgier sounds of, say, Bartok, in his fabulous two-handed opera, Bluebeard's Castle, so that is the level I'm aiming for. Nowhere near the sophistication of course. I'll give her a chance to sing it before posting any instrumental versions up here.

Rawhide!

Of all the tunes in all the books:
Bluegrass Fiddle Styles (Stacey Philips and Kenny Kosek) - Rawhide - Bill Munroe (mandolin)

So an opportunity to brush down my bluegrass mandolin licks. I absolutely love this stuff. I think I even prefer it to Irish folk were I pushed. This tune is a showpiece as this staggering version attests. Just watch for the little Rasputin like character on mandolin. His bluesy improv. skillz make me weep. *edit* a little web stalking has given me a name (Andy Statman) and I have myself a new hero. Klezma and bluegrass. Lovely stuff. *end edit* The book suggests the absolutely blistering pace of 165 crotchets a minute. I have managed to get a comfy 100 going. Slow and accurate is better than speedy and rubbish. But I must lay it aside before getting the metronome to any decent place due to a rehearsal tonight for a new show. Yes you heard right, yet another endeavour that I, the glutton for punishment am putting myself through. This time it's Seussical, as in Dr. Seuss, the Cat in the Hat etc. and I'm playing th Grinch the moment I put down my baton for Iolanthe. Two show weeks in a row may well kill me, if the green makeup doesn't get me first!

Numan's a New Man

Beyond the Compass (Roy Palmer) - The Flying Cloud (voice, acc. guitar)
I rushed through this tune today. One day my voice will grace these pages. Not this week though. No real effort made, as I was rushing on to the next exciting project.
Where I work, four of us who sit in the same office are keen amateur musicians (some more amateur than others!) and we decided on a mutual challenge - to each record a cover version of the same well known tune in our own inimitable styles. We chose a song each and voted on which we wanted to do. The winning tune was "Cars" by Gary Numan. Judging by the styles of the participants, that means we get one proggy keyboardy version, a strummed acoustic one, and a soulful pop number. As for my version, well I'm not going to give anything about my arrangement away until it's actually finished, but I got disappointingly little done this evening - only a few bars progress.
n34 is coming on apace.
Here is a tune to keep you going:



This is a sampled rendering of the first movement of a string/clarinet ensemble I wrote last year for my friend Becky. It is a kind of fugue and rips off both Bach and Shostakovitch without even coming close to their quality. I'd love to hear this done by live musicians one day.

Too many smoothing irons in the fire

I have been keeping up my challenge, I've just not got round to blogging it, so a quick catch up:

Thursday
Iron Maiden Songbook (Arr Ray Donato) - Prodigal Son (classical guitar)
I mostly spent my time complaining that the arranger, whilst probably trying to make his transcription easier to play, has done precisely the opposite. I worked this out by ear, and this guy has written the opening:
E-------------------------------0-
B----4-------4--5----2-0-----2-0--
G---4--4----4--4----2-------2-----
D--4-------4-------2-------2------
A-2-------2-------0-------0-------
E---------------------------------

Which to my ears is plainly wrong, and quite difficult. The reason is, you get open string ringing and they'd have used a block pattern and shifted it down like this:

E---------------0---------------0-
B------0-------0-------0-------0--
G----8-------8-------6-------6----
D---9-------9-------7-------7-----
A--9-------9-------7-------7------
E-7-------7-------5-------5-------
etc.

How much easier is that? I don't *know* this of course, but it's what 20 years of guitar playing tells me.

I also had last rehearsal of term, and very good it was too.

Friday
Not a book, just a piece of paper I had lying about - Fly Me too the Moon (classical guitar)
I did it as a kind of waltz. My housemate told me it sounded like lift music so I stopped.
Also lots of good work on n34 which I'm chuffed to bits about so far

Saturday
Liasons Diatonique (Alexandra Browne) - Coconut Dance by Alan Lamb (melodeon)
Pretty cool book this where she's tried to annotate the inflections on the melodeon. Quite a nice tune, clearly written for the box.

Today
I'm still actually practicing variation 6 (Wednesday's tune) like mad on my guitar, and it's coming on a treat. I may have to redo the recording at some point. I also found a better way of fingering the most tricky bit.
Today's tune however is:
Folk Songs for Choirs (John Rutter) - Dashing away the Smoothing Iron (mandolin, acc. guitar, bouzouki, bass)
I've recorded the first few bars of this here:

Quite pleased with this really, I think it's bordering on sounding like Mike Oldfield, who I admire, if not worship.

Ill Still

I' was off work today, mainly sleeping, so I feel slightly guilty still keeping this up.
Today's offering is:
The Guitar Music Of Spain Volume 3 (J.Nin-Culmell) - Seis Variaciones Sobre Un Tema De Milan - Variation 6 (classical guitar)
Played on the beautiful guitar I bought in Barcelona on a work trip once. Unfortunately its intonation is a little knackered, but it has a fabulous tone.
I've bitten off a real hard one today as these books get harder throughout the series, and my fingers just arent' strong enough to do these incredible stretches justice. The worst culprit is this baby(it's a tab chord for those guitarist out there:

E-2-
A-3-
D-2-
G-5-
B-5-
E-X-

Getting both fingers across to the 5th fret whilst barring with the first is a challenge. Consequently this performance is sub standard. However I really wanted to get this up here as the variation I chose is absolutely gorgeous. Big full melancholy chords and a lovely take on the simple hearty original theme, which I should record one day for comparison. I put in so much effort to get this to this stage I may keep playing it in the hope that one day it'll trip off my fingers:

Feeling a little peaky.

Well I missed today's rehearsal as I'm not feeling brilliant, probably over working myself.
Still managed a tune though:
Jazz Guitar. Swing to Bebop (Doug Munro) - Solo #10

Jazz guitar represents an Everest sat a pretty long way over my horizon at the moment. I bought this book over 5 years ago. I decided to start at the beginning, so I opened it at page 1 (well 6, but that's not the point).
"Example 1 shows a C major scale in 1st position"
Nice and easy. Example 1 falls under my fingers immediately as I know it already.
"Example 2 shows the C major scale played in every position across the fingerboard using three notes per string."
Oh my god! Example 2 represents 10 years of hard labour. Every scale in every position on the fretboard - don't even think of turning the page until you've learned this. So I still bang through these scales regularly, but I'm not nearly as fluent or comfortable as I should be, or able to just pick out where to play in any given key - which are fairly essential skills for your jazz dude. Oh well it's not fun if it's not a challenge.

Lonesome Road

Today's tune is:
A Complete Guide to Learning The Irish Mandolin (Padraig Carroll) - The Lonesome Road to Dingle (Acoustic guitar)
No recording today as my effort wasn't really worth it, but I was experimenting a little with playing chords along with the tune at the same time, trying to emulate the style of American flatpickers. I didn't really succeed in this as this tune is a Slide (Single Jig) which rarely get this treatment, so I'm not exactly overwhelmed by examples to copy.
It's occurred to me that most of the sheet music I own is for Irish/Folk tunes. My favourite kind of music, which I end up listening to 90% or more of the time is metal, and my interest in folk has only recently spread outside of the one week a year that is the Sidmouth Folk Festival. In the last few years though I have acquired more and more folk instruments, and have mastered none!

Last night's rehearsal was excellent - I noticed ages ago that if you want to get a dynamic effect out of an amateur chorus you have to really over exaggerate the dynamics in practice - I'm doing this in one bit in Iolanthe where I want the sound to grow out of nowhere, so I'm getting them to going from whispering to almost shouting across the course of a couple of bars. It sounds amazing though.

I also started writing a new tune at work today. Working title is N34 (how original) and it's scored for Alto Sax, electric guitar, bass drums and voice. Not sure where it's going yet as I've only written about 12 bars.

It's Dead!

Right. Today's tune is an unusual one. Probably the second time this has ever had a studio recording.

The Jabadaw Tune Book (Jabadaw) - It's Dead But It Won't Lie Down (Played on almost everything!)

Jabadaw were a rather excellent Ceilidh band from Manchester who I have the priviledge to have met on a few occasions. Their extremely talented sax/mandolin player Simon Dew persuaded me to buy their tunebook in Sidmouth folk festival 2006. I haven't really played much from this but I've tried to give this one a go:

I recorded this in Cubase just now and played 2 electric guitar parts, a bass part, a melodeon taking the main theme, accoustic guitar, mandolin, and banjo, and a badly programmed drum synth.
My melodeon being my (second) worst instrument, the performance is again a little shaky, despite the fact that I've played it as slowly as possible. This is compounded by the fact that it has F naturals which require me to visit the half row accidentals on this diatonic instrument, which is pretty much uncharted territory for me. I tried to give it a really simple but heavy feel with the C tuned electric guitars to make it turn out like Glorystrokes, but it's ended up a sounding a bit like early Whapweasel.
Not a bad thing I suppose.
I forgot to mention I had a jam/recording session with the drummer in Electrickery last night. We jammed some pretty cool riffs trying to be like my favourite band Meshuggah or the excellent Hella. Then jammed some Slayer and other assoted thrash goodies, then laid down the drum tracks to an Electrickery tune "Burning Bush" from this album that's taking us forever to record.

I have another rehearsal for Iolanthe to go to this afternoon and I haven't eaten yet today, so time to address that now.

Silvius Leopold Weiss

This site was playing silly buggers on Saturday, so here is the post for then.
Saturday's tune was:
Treasures of the Baroque Volume 2 (Mel Bay) - Fuga by Silvius Leopold Weiss (classical guitar)
I worked on this in between watching England perform terribly in the Calcutta Cup. I only taught myself to read guitar music about 5 years ago, and I'm not brilliant at it, but banging out tunes from this era is probably the one of the most satisfying musical things that I do. It's just so relaxing. Weiss is probably my favourite composer from this era. I don't know much about him beyond this but he wrote for the lute and these versions have been transcribed to guitar.
He's also the most technically challenging to play. Others seem to use the natural characteristics of the instrument more whereas this guy makes you do insane stretches and big chords, probably because they weren't actually written for guitar. I think because he is not constrained to the "box" and forces you to explore the instrument, the melodies and cadences are much more beautiful than those of composers for the guitar such as Campion and De Visee. I've recorded the last few bars here:

It's a slow and clumpy performance, as I haven't had enough time to really get my teeth sunk into the piece (i.e. it's about the 4th time I've ever played it). That's the trouble with this challenge really, I'm not really getting any piece up to performance standard. Good discipline though.

By the way the show on Friday was excellent, and superbly coarse

Menston Thespians

Well rehearsal went very well last night. I mainly drilled the fairies so to speak.
I'll have to park my challenge for a day today though as I'm driving across to Menston near Leeds to watch some old friends larking about very coarsley in some Amateur Dramatics extravaganza with the Menston Thespians.
So instead, have one from the vaults. Well not that long ago to be honest, this is the last song I wrote for the heavy metal band I play in Electrickery. Actually don't bother going to our site it's ridiculously out of date.
Download it here if you dare.

This is a midi file so the sounds will be a variety of bleepy and horrible depending on your sound card. It takes a stretch of the imagination to turn those beeps into electric guitars but have a go. I'm pleased with this song. It's working title is N33, as that's my numbering system for new metal ideas, but one of my colleagues suggested a song about watching the last dying days of the sun as the orange globe burns out over a landscape of perpetual ice age. So I'll call it Solardown, or Sunfall or some such other cheesy title and write some low quality fantsy lyrics to accompany it.

Harper's Frolic

In from work I only have a limited time so it's a good thing the tune of the days is easy!

English Pub Session Tunes (Dave Mallinson) - Harper's Frolic p19

I've played this on melodeon. I own one of these which I was sold by a shady man in a shop. What I really wanted was one of these so I'm slightly miffed. This doesn't excuse the fact that this is easily my worst instrument (actually on second thoughts I've just taken up the piano a few months ago so that is much worse).
You can find the dots for this fairly standard English tune in D here. The A part is slightly reminiscent to me of Iron Legs, which is a tune I absolutely love.
No recording today as I'm off to rehearsal. I thought I'd reveal all my musical projects one at a time to keep up the suspense a bit. Tonight (and every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday until May) is Mugss night. They have a show on at the end of April called Iolanthe for which I am musical director. This involves flapping my arms about teaching the chorus the music, extracting a heavenly performance from our young and talented principals, and flapping my arms about some more in front of the orchestra during show week. Come and see the show it'll be great!

To business

Right, now I've introduced myself, how about some content? Let us begin.

Recently I've begun a daily challenge.

• Take one sheet of music off the bottom of the large pile I own.
• Turn to a random page
• Choose a piece (if possible one I haven't played before)
• Grab an instrument
• Begin playing

I've been doing this for a couple of weeks now, and actually the point of starting this blog was to make a note of what I've been playing, and possibly comment on it.
This is what I've done so far:

• 23/02/2008 Broadside Ballads (Lucy Skeeping): The Country Lass p18 (classical guitar, voice)
• 24/02/2008 The Piper's Dream (Pat McNulty): The Magheracloone Girl p17 (banjo, mandolin)
• 25/02/2008 The Rennaisance Guitar (Frederik Noad): The Parlement p31 (classical guitar)
• 26/02/2008 The Guitar Music of Spain Volume One (Bartolome Calatayud): Can't remember which tune. They all sound Spanish (classical guitar)
• 27/02/2008 Musik Für Mandoline (Beethoven): Sonatine C-dur p5 (on Banjo and classical guitar)
• 28/02/2008 Complete Works of Scott Joplin (Mel Bay): The Great Crush Collision March p149 (classical guitar)
• 29/02/2008 Encyclopaedia Blowzabellica (Blowzabella): Pach-Pi II p35 (melodeon, bouzouki)
• 01/03/2008 Hell Awaits (Slayer): Praise of Death p31 (electric guitar (didn't really suit classical))
• 02/03/2008 Klezmer Collection for C Instruments (Mel Bay): Orientalische Melody p33 (classical guitar)
• 03/03/2008 Lute Songs of John Dowland (David Nadal): Come, Heavy Sleep p46 (classical guitar, voice)
• 04/03/2008 One Hundred English Folk Songs (Cecil Sharpe): Lady Maisry p26 (3 voice arrangement started)

From now on I'll be adding entries on a daily basis.
Today I picked up the following:

• O'Neill's Music of Ireland (Capt. Francis O'Neill/ James O'Neill): The Drogheda Lasses p243 (banjo, mandolin)

This tune is very similar to a favourite of mine The Maids of Castlebar. I've been mainly playing on my electric mandolin "Draconis the mandolock" - an explanation will follow in a future blog, but here she is:
















I'm not Irish, and I'm sure my playing would make any true Celt wince, but I don't particularly care because I'm doing it entirely selfishly and just really enjoying the way the melody flows out of my own fair hands. Well it doesn't exactly flow yet as the B part is tricky, but you know what I mean. These D reels could become stolid and samey, so for future reference I really should look into new ways of approaching the music - swinging the rhythm slightly perhaps, working on unusual trills and flourishes. Well I have slightly swung my playing on this one, and also played it through a Vox AC30 amp with plenty of nice inappropriate distortion. I'm not 100% convinced it works, but if you never experimented you'd never know.
And after about 10 minutes playing the tune I've recorded it on a banjo. With any luck this'll embed properly...

Ah darn it. It embeds in Internet Explorer, but not in my browser of choice, Firefox.
Ah well here's a link to it instead. Very badly played I'm afraid and all manner of errors, but you get the basic idea of the melody.

*edit* At last I have the plug in working in Firefox! Follow this link to determine the arcane secrets behind it.

*edit again* in a fit of keeness with this new blogging idea, I have actually put a little more effort into recording the tune. The performance is still shockingly bad, but I have slowed it all down, swung it a bit more, done a guitar backing and introduced the deeply innappropriate distored electric mandolin towards the end, just to shake things up a bit:

Getting Started

I make music. Lots of music. The styles are extremely diverse, and the rate at which I plough through different ideas currently is immense. So I thought I'd share it with the world. I don't care if there isn't an audience, because it is useful for me to track what I'm doing more formally.

In this Blog I'll be going through all the music I make or encounter, and hopefully comment in some insightful way. I may even try and link some tunes if this allows it.

Oh by the way, my name is Justin, I come from Manchester in the UK, I work full time as a programmer in a pharmaceutical company. All my music making is crammed into the evenings, giving me not enough time to sleep.