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Jigs for Pigs

Jigs for Pigs
Last weekend was the Deep River Ancient Muster, for those not in the know. At the muster, I handed out a little book of jigs to fifty random people…free. Free baffles people. They don’t know what to do and I always get great reactions.

The last time I handed out a free book at a muster I met a guy named Chris Myers, who decide that he should hand out free music as well. The funny part was that I didn’t actually meet him until he passed around tunes on a card a year later. Apparently I had given him one of my books and he was inspired to continue the giving. That’s the kind of payback you can’t put a price on.

Here are the liner notes as well as a list of links to the tunes that were included.

The inconvenient truth of global warming got you down? Jigs.
Do our Middle Eastern escapades have you pining for peace? Jigs.
Wondering if you’re in shape enough to ride the sixteen miles to work on your bicycle once the price of gas exceeds the spot price of gold? Jigs.
Tired of reels? Jigs.

If you answered yes to any of the above questions … Jigs for Pigs is for you! I used to write reels. This year, all Jigs.

Admit it, we’ve all been a bit piggish lately. It’s time to trim the fat.
To help ease the pain … Jigs for Pigs

Indigo – article, music
Stone’s Mongrel – article, music
On the Mend – article, music
Blaze in the Barn – article, music
The Nobel Train – article, music
Franklin’s Harem – article, music

new music

Franklin’s Harem

Franklin in France
 
Benjamin Franklin, aside from being a founding father of our country, the ‘discoverer of electricity’, a diplomat, an inventor and the guy that first formed public libraries and fire departments, was also quite the ladies man. In the recent HBO series, entitled John Adams, Franklin is portrayed in a less-than-iconic and promiscuous light while performing his diplomatic duties in France. I suppose when you’re a guy that can tame lightning and create counties your gonna have the women fawning over you.

In reference to Franklin’s escapades in France I entitled my most recent tune Franklin’s Harem.

In this recording the tune actually comes behind another tune that I recently posted called The Nobel Train. It has three parts. The first two are in 9/8 and the last part is in 12/8. So, I guess it is a slip jig sort of. You can find the sheet music here.
 
The Nobel Train / Franklin’s Harem by baconworks

history

The Nobel Train

A classic corporate metaphor for teamwork is the crew team. In college I rowed in the two seat of an eight man scull and I can attest to that fact that if you are not pulling the oars in perfect unity, the boat moves like a duck.
 
teamwork
 
The visual simplicity of the crew is one reason it lends itself nicely to the teamwork metaphor. However, the stakes are low if the team fails and in the best case scenario, the winning crew goes home with a medal and a warm happy feeling. Nice, but not the most griping example of teamwork.

Recently I was reading David McCullough’s 1776 and I was reminded of an example of teamwork that I would prefer to see on those motivational posters.
 
The Nobel Train of Artillery
 

As winter approached, in 1775, George Washington and his untrained, ill equipped rabble in arms were trying to figure out how to dislodge the kings mighty army from Boston. By all accounts, including that of General Washington, the situation was untenable and the obstacles look insurmountable.

It was during this dire period, with Washington’s army perilously close to destruction and the hopes of liberty for the new Americans in jeopardy, that a young man named Henry Knox approached General Washington with a bold idea.

Henry wanted to take three hundred men and march them to upstate New York where they were to appropriate sixty tons of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga. He and his men would then drag the cannons back to Cambridge, MA during the dead of winter using wooden sleds and oxen in what Henry described as a ‘noble train of artillery’.

Henry left for Fort Ti in early December and for the next two months lugged artillery over Lake Champlain, through mud and snow and ultimately arrived in Cambridge on January 24th, 1776. Washington then set all fifty-nine of Knox’s cannons on Dorchester Heights during the course of one night and pointed them down upon the British army. When the British awoke to see the deadly line of artillery pointing at them they thought better of retaliating and within a few days were boarding their ships in Boston harbor and preparing to evacuate. A major victory for the American’s and not a shot had been fired.

History is a great place, of course, to find good tune titles. This tune’s title is a nod to the teamwork and perseverance of Knox and his men during the most trying of times. I was really intending on recording a quick demo of the newly written tune…and then I got carried away with the instrumentation. It was one of those rare evenings where the recording session went smoothly (i.e. my furnace didn’t click on during the perfect takes!). As a demo, unfortunately, the recording is rather short. Consequently, I expect to rework it into a longer set at some point.

 
The Nobel Train / Franklin’s Harem by baconworks

new music

John Stone’s Session on YouTube

Just got wind of this YouTube video from our concert at Framingham State College back in March.
 

 
Although the recording is quite saturated with reverb, it gives a sense of the fun we had. The group of musicians playing can be found at John Stone’s Public House in Ashland, MA on Tuesday evenings. While this chapel gig was fun, I don’t think it really compares to coolness that happens on Tuesday evenings at John Stone’s. Besides, they weren’t serving pints in the church.

new music

Planxty Grace Davis

Here is another track that I recorded a bunch of years back at Melville Park Studio. The tune is in honor of Grace Davis who was the wife of my great Uncle Stinson Davis, the schooner ship captain. You can find the music notation here. Also, I’ve added the tune to the virtual album Castaway.
 
Grace Davis
 
I always loved this picture. It makes me wonder how many evenings she waited on the shore for her husband to return…or would he ever? It is hard to imagine the complete lack of communication that often accompanied life during the age of sail.

new music

More Collaborative Recording

Bouzouki
 
My buddy, and fellow Plucian, George, A.K.A Mustachio, wrote a beautiful bouzouki tune a few months back called The Christmas Wish. About a week ago Mustachio sent me an mp3 that he recorded in his home, complete with trucks passing by outside and someone cleaning dishes in the kitchen. You gotta love home recordings.

I took his demo of the tune and added a bit of guitar and tried to remove the clinking glasses. I shouldn’t rib him too much because as I was recording the guitar track my interrupting furnace kicked on during the last few notes, forcing me to overdub a couple of chords. Ironically, it only ever ignites during the takes I want to keep. GRRRrrrrr. Anyhow, Mustachio will probably have my head when he finds out I posted this rough cut here. But, in spite of the passing garbage trucks, the dinner crowd in the kitchen and my background boiler, I enjoy the recording.

Nice work Mustachio.

new music

Moving Cloud / Devany’s Goat / Julia Delaney

Today I received an email from someone I have not heard from in ~20 years … apparently Facebook really does have a way of connecting you to your past. Anyhow, this old friend ultimately stumbled upon baconworks and asked me about more music that her children might be able to step dance along with. So, I began poking around my site, realizing how difficult it actually is to find all the mp3’s I’ve posted (I’ll have to fix that), and discovered that I have yet to post a few of the tracks from my old Amadán album. I guess I’m just getting lazy.
 
Amadán
 
This set of tunes was the first that we recorded as a group. As I recall, we were real excited to get into the studio and lay down some tracks. We were well prepared, had it all planned out…except for the part where Kevin, our guitar player, broke a string while tunning up. In his guitar case he found no spares. I offered my guitar, not the prized Lowden, but instead the infamous Rhapsoby . No, that is not a misspelling. Rhapsoby, not Rhapsody. The guitar is so obscure that even a Google search turns up almost nothing. And when I say ‘obscure’ I don’t mean the good kind, like a 1909-S VDB penny.

Needless to say, Kevin wanted no part of the Rhapsoby. So, there we were, wasting precious time and money in the studio, with no guitar. We had no other choice but for Kevin to leave the studio to try and track down some strings. Scrap all the practices and all the preparing, we had to come up with a new plan, which, of course, we did only after Kevin left on his hunt for new strings. In his absence Roger the percussionist, Damon the fiddler and I on the Rhapsoby, pulled this old set out of the bottom of our repertoire. We recorded it once or twice together and had the track nearly finished, to Kevin’s dismay, by the time he returned an hour later with his new strings.

The set starts with a little Rhapsoby intro, followed with some tempo challenged foot stomping. Incidentally, the foot stomping seems as bad of an idea today as it did then, but neither I nor the engineer could convince Damon to can his cacophonous idea. In addition, my good friend Roger plays some real nice Bodhrán and Bones throughout the set. And, just so Kevin didn’t feel entirely left out, we let him overdub some tenor banjo.

Incidentally, I enjoyed Devany’s Goat so much that years later I did my own recording of the tune, this time setting aside the Rhapsoby and opting for the Lowden.

So, I don’t know if this is step-dancable but, here is Moving Cloud, Devany’s Goat and Julia Delaney.

Moving Cloud / Devany’s Goat / Julia Delaney by baconworks

new music

Loudness Wars

While my contest has been plugging away, I’ve been doing a bit of writing and recording myself. A couple months back I posted a new tune called On the Mend. More recently, I wrote another tune to go with it called Blaze in the Barn. Before Christmas I spent some time recording the set and ultimately learning quite a lot about mixing and how sound works in a mix, or in many cases, doesn’t work.
 
Loudness Wars
 
In my experimentation with this new set of tunes, I discovered an interesting phenomenon. What I found was that anytime I added compression to an instrument, it immediately sounded better. It actually took some time before I started questioning why this might be true. Without going into lots of technical details, the net effect of compression is that it essentially allows you to make quieter sounds of a track louder but without making the louder tones louder. This gives the listener the sense that the track is more solid and it is perceived as becoming louder. And, apparently, louder is better. Also, as I soon found out, I was not really the first person to stumble on this phenomenon.

Back in the days of juke boxes, you see, record executives discovered that the records that were most frequently played were the ones that were recorded the loudest. Humans, for some reason, perceive the louder records as being better and, in turn, are more likely to stick another dime in the juke box, baby. Thus, record companies started to look for ways to make their recordings louder than the competitions recordings. What resulted was a loudness war that is still raging today and is killing the quality of recorded music.

Well, if we perceive louder recordings to be better, then why is it killing the quality of recorded music you ask? The answer has to do with dynamic range. By compressing music, which allows studio engineers to make recordings louder, they are also squashing the dynamic range of the recording. Dynamic range, in sound, is the distance between the softest tones and the loudest tones and it is used in music to impart emotion. So reducing dynamic range essentially reduces the emotion.

One everyday example of dynamic range that we have come to depend on is that of the human voice. When we speak our voices naturally fluctuate in volume as a means of emphasizing our emotions. If we were to take out all the dynamic range in our voice we would sound very monotonous. Now, imagine taking that monotonous voice and making it loud all the time. The effect would be that all our conversations would consist entirely of yelling. While yelling certainly gets peoples attention, it also gets tiring very fast. And this leads me back to my recording discovery.

What I found was that when I added compression and, in turn, loudened my recording I thought, ‘Hot spit! That sounds great!!!’ But the more I listened to it, the more it started grating on my nerves, sort of like yelling. I had inadvertently stumbled into the loudness war, which is being fought between record companies that want their music to catch your attention as you flip by on your new satellite radio and the sound engineers of the world that realize that the greatest recordings are not devoid of dynamic range but instead, embrace it.

Take a look at the following example:
 
Compression
 
What you are looking at is a mastered stereo recording of an ABBA song from 1981 and then remastered in 2005. The first set of sound waves show a track with plenty of dynamic range while the second set of waves show much more sound and, consequently, represent a louder track, but one with much less dynamic range.

With all this in mind, I removed much of the compression I was using on my new set and found that I enjoy the track much more now. Anyhow, here is a mix of what I’ve been working on. I don’t know if it is a final mix because there are other issues I’m trying to address, but those issues are probably the subject of another post.

new music

Contest: Let the Voting Begin

Below are the twenty submissions that were entered into the Baconworks Tune-smithing Contest!

It is time to vote on a winner and I need your participation!
 
Vote Today!
 
Here is how the voting works:

  1. First, anyone can vote.
  2. You are allowed one vote.
  3. Voting takes place via email starting today, Monday, January 7th, and runs through Friday, January 11th.
  4. All votes must be received by 5pm (EST) on Friday, January 11th.
  5. All votes must be sent to contest@baconworks.com.

Next to the name of each tune below is a link to the audio that was submitted by the author. In addition, there is a link to the notation for the music submitted.

I urge you to take a few minutes, listen to the submissions and cast your vote today!