site review

Site Review: irishflute.podbean.com

I just came across a great site called Irish Flute Tunes.
 
Irish Flute Site

For those that are looking to expand your tune repertoire this site is a great resource. The site author essentially records tunes he thinks are good flute tunes and posts them. Since the site is hosted by podbean.com all the music is podcasted. I did a quick count and it looks like thirty-one tunes have been posted so far for April. The most recent post includes a tune called My Love is in America, which is a tune that I like playing on the tenor banjo.

The author of the site also seems willing to record slower versions of tunes if requested. Great stuff.

general

Where is your dot?

Google, what a wonderful thing. They’ve created all sorts of cool tools including one called Google Analytics. If you are the admin of a website you can sign up for Google Analytics and they will provide you with interesting information about the traffic to your site. For example, below is a map of the world personalized for me by Google. All the orange dots on the map represent the locations from which people, including you, are visiting my site. Cool!
 
Google Map
 

Now, before you freak out, let me assuage your fears. Google is not giving me your social security number, bank statements or the keys to your car. But what they do give me is a sense of who is visiting and what you find interesting. This information helps me shape the content I provide. For example, here is a view of the top content on my site.
 

content
 

From this I can see that, other than the home page, people are visiting discography most, which is good for me to know since I have not really spent much time on that part of the site. Maybe I should. Other interesting bits of data…people spend only eighteen seconds on the music page but they never leave the site from that page, which implies that they are clicking on a link to music. I’m happy about that.

Some other things I’ve noticed…it took about a month before someone from Ireland finally noticed that I have a site about Irish music. I guess I have to work on my marketing strategy. Also, I had a dot suddenly appear in the Pacific Ocean one day. I though, ‘hey, turtles from the Galapagos are check’n me out!’. On further inspection it appears to be surfers from Hawaii. Surfers love slip jigs.

So, tell me about your dot! Do you play traditional music? Fife & Drum? Just passing by? Leave a comment and let me know!

Lastly, is anyone willing to fess up to which dot is sending me all the spam about Viagra?

tunes-i-like

Amadán – Scotsman / Paddy Clancy’s

After my last post it occurred to me that in addition to recording Paddy Clancy’s on my own, I recorded it with my old band Amadán back in 1999. The two versions are quite different. This one, being the second tune in the set, is quite lively with a bit of impromptu harmony the second time through by Damon our fiddle player. The set starts with a nice jig called The Scotsman Over the Border.

Here is Amadán, during our Vermont tour, mugging for a shot in the foundation of an old abandoned farmhouse somewhere near Grafton. That is me in the upper left.
 

Amadan Photo
 

The track below, as well as four others, came from a CD that we recorded as a demo album. The cover artwork, as I recall, was actually a close-up picture of a pig’s belly inverted and then colorized. I don’t believe I ever told the band where the image came from.
 

Amadan cover

 
We were not very well organized and would typically sort out what we were going to record the night before the session. Then, once in the studio, we would inevitably record something that we had not planned. It was lots of fun. Incidentally Amadán is the Gaelic word for ‘fool’, which, given the high cost of studio time and our general lack of preparation, was probably apropos.
 

new music

Sketch

Sketch
 
I once took a painting class where we were asked to do ten paintings in thirty minutes. The rules were simple.

  • No more than three minutes per painting.
  • The entire painting surface had to be covered at the end of three minutes.

What one quickly discovers is that there is no time for detail. Instead you focus on the bones that define the structure of an image. Bad bones, bad painting, and one that is not really worth details anyhow. What you also discover is that details is not where the energy lies. The good stuff is in the most fundamental elements of the image such as line, balance and color composition.

I painted a lot of ugly three minute sketches. Keep at it long enough, though, and suddenly a good painting pops out. You then realize that the ugly ones were just part of the process of getting to the good one. The ugly ones are where you explore all your good ideas. It is where you separate the wheat from the chaff, as they say.

The image above comes from one of those sketches that, at the time, I was not really all that happy with. Fifteen years later my wife found it, framed it and put it on the wall. I love it. It reminded me that sketches, serving most often as a means to an end, occasionally have the power to stand on their own.

A lot of what I have been musically producing lately is what I would consider audio sketches. I have not focused too much on details such as set arranging, voice leading or instrumental variation. Instead, I have been focusing on melody and tempo, the basics. Going forward I will group these sketches under the internet album title of ‘Sketch‘.

Yesterday, after changing the strings on my borrowed bouzouki, I became mesmerized by its exotic sound. I was noodling around and a melody in minor started to take shape. I envision that it has a second strain but I am not sure what that would sound like yet. Or, maybe it is an intro to a song or even a set of tunes. I don’t really know. For now I have given it a working title of ‘Crosswinds’. That could change too, though I do like it. What I do know is that it has a couple brush strokes that I wish it didn’t but enough good ones where I will continue to push the paint around. It is a sketch.