Back from Fiddle Tunes! Hello!

Hi all! Back from my week-long sojourn to Fiddle Tunes, and goodness gracious that was fun. Challenging, and daunting sometimes, and intense–but all in very good ways, and it was beyond delightful to be able to learn directly from some of the best musicians in the entire Quebecois trad genre. Mad props to Lisa Ornstein, André Marchand, and Normand Miron for all being wonderful teachers, especially during the Quebecois band lab sessions!
Also mad props for my pal Dejah Leger who was not only an excellent aid for M. Marchand and M. Miron, but who ALSO gave some wonderful little tutorials on DADGAD tuning. I had to skip a couple of ’em because BRAIN FULL ALL HEDSPLODE FROM TOONZ, but what tutorials of Dejah’s I was able to attend were delightful.
The Centrum staff took very good care of us, so mad props to all of them as well!
I will be posting more in depth about the experience as the week progresses, but wanted to get this post out today. Particularly since I wanted to show off the video of the Quebecois band lab group I participated in! That was a big chunk of the week–a bunch of the attendees organizing under various faculty to learn tunes in the traditions we were all interested in, and then to perform what we learned on stage on Saturday the 5th! Linda Mattson took the video and kindly gave permission for it to be shared!
The video on this post is our band lab group performing “Galope de Ste-Blondine” and “Reel du bonhomme”. I’m pretty sure we were one of the biggest and liveliest of all the band lab groups, if not THE biggest and liveliest. I know we had a horn section. AND a stepdancer. I think it’s safe to say we rocked the goddamn house. :D
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx51mARi9_U&w=560&h=315]
More on this in forthcoming posts, as well as our other band lab video! Was very sorry to leave, it was so awesome. But I’m glad to be back!