Category: Music

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Valentine’s Day, with music

userinfosolarbird came to the realization this weekend that she really needed a decent bodhran to finish up her CD, given that her little Kimi, which is essentially a toy, just wasn’t cutting it. So since we’re recovering well financially, we scampered down to Dusty Strings yesterday to get her a real drum!

They didn’t have the drum she really wanted–mostly because those, Dusty String’s highest end bodhrans–are made by an artisan in Ireland who makes new drums quite slowly and there was no real estimate on when he might get more to them. But happily they had a couple of drums that were kind of the next tier down, and Dara ultimately chose one of those. The new drum’s got a nice deep resonant voice to it and should sound awesome recorded. Its only drawback is that Dara can’t do that nifty rip noise around the rim, but it ain’t like she’s tossing Kimi, so she can still break out the little drum for that.

Meanwhile, because this is pretty much mandated any time I set foot in that place, I checked out their wall of acoustic guitars. They had a few Seagulls as well as two smaller guitars that said Art & Lutherie on the heads–and the Dusty Strings staff said that those were actually made by the same parent company, which was kind of neat. The A&L guitars I liked were these guys, and the one I particularly liked was about the size of Rags but with a bit more punch. Ultimately though Dara and I agreed that that instrument didn’t really have the capability to roar, so I started playing with the Seagulls, and the third one I tried had a really lovely voice to it, a good deep low end and some clear, precise upper notes as well.

I have to admit that a good Seagull is very likely a contender for the Cargo for the guitar I’ll ultimately buy. I have more than a little fear that the Cargo is possibly way more guitar than I actually need, since I have no aspirations to be a real performer; I just want a nice guitar I can play at jams and take to local conventions for filking purposes, and occasional busking as well. The Seagull very well may be about right.

On the other hand, Dara pointed out quite correctly that it’s very possible that I could grow enough as a guitarist to match the Cargo. The Seagull would certainly give me good room to grow–but I shouldn’t necessarily dismiss the possibility of growing to match the Cargo, either. What I would really like to do is go to the Bellevue store that carries the Cargos, see if they have Seagulls as well, and then just compare both instruments side by side and see which one calls to me louder.

Of course, this depends upon me selling enough copies of Faerie Blood to actually afford the Cargo. *^_^*;;

In the meantime, in the interests of giving me more room to grow as a guitarist, I snagged a copy of the same fakebook I’d bought for mandolin, only this is the guitar version. So I’ll see if I can start picking out some of these melodies on Rags, which will give me some fingerwork practice. Looking forward to that!

Last but not least, I snagged a couple of CDs from the store since they do have a small selection–and I was stunned, stunned I tell you, to see that they actually had a couple of La Bottine Souriante CDs! So I promptly grabbed one of those, as well as one by an Irish lady named Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh who appears on a previous CD I bought. Also, the name Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh is just awesome.

All in all a lovely way to spend Valentine’s Day afternoon, and Dara and I were the last ones out of the store since we were there right up until they closed. Always a pleasure to visit there! Because as far as I’m concerned, music is love.

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Valentine's Day, with music

came to the realization this weekend that she really needed a decent bodhran to finish up her CD, given that her little Kimi, which is essentially a toy, just wasn’t cutting it. So since we’re recovering well financially, we scampered down to Dusty Strings yesterday to get her a real drum!
They didn’t have the drum she really wanted–mostly because those, Dusty String’s highest end bodhrans–are made by an artisan in Ireland who makes new drums quite slowly and there was no real estimate on when he might get more to them. But happily they had a couple of drums that were kind of the next tier down, and Dara ultimately chose one of those. The new drum’s got a nice deep resonant voice to it and should sound awesome recorded. Its only drawback is that Dara can’t do that nifty rip noise around the rim, but it ain’t like she’s tossing Kimi, so she can still break out the little drum for that.
Meanwhile, because this is pretty much mandated any time I set foot in that place, I checked out their wall of acoustic guitars. They had a few Seagulls as well as two smaller guitars that said Art & Lutherie on the heads–and the Dusty Strings staff said that those were actually made by the same parent company, which was kind of neat. The A&L guitars I liked were these guys, and the one I particularly liked was about the size of Rags but with a bit more punch. Ultimately though Dara and I agreed that that instrument didn’t really have the capability to roar, so I started playing with the Seagulls, and the third one I tried had a really lovely voice to it, a good deep low end and some clear, precise upper notes as well.
I have to admit that a good Seagull is very likely a contender for the Cargo for the guitar I’ll ultimately buy. I have more than a little fear that the Cargo is possibly way more guitar than I actually need, since I have no aspirations to be a real performer; I just want a nice guitar I can play at jams and take to local conventions for filking purposes, and occasional busking as well. The Seagull very well may be about right.
On the other hand, Dara pointed out quite correctly that it’s very possible that I could grow enough as a guitarist to match the Cargo. The Seagull would certainly give me good room to grow–but I shouldn’t necessarily dismiss the possibility of growing to match the Cargo, either. What I would really like to do is go to the Bellevue store that carries the Cargos, see if they have Seagulls as well, and then just compare both instruments side by side and see which one calls to me louder.
Of course, this depends upon me selling enough copies of Faerie Blood to actually afford the Cargo. *^_^*;;
In the meantime, in the interests of giving me more room to grow as a guitarist, I snagged a copy of the same fakebook I’d bought for mandolin, only this is the guitar version. So I’ll see if I can start picking out some of these melodies on Rags, which will give me some fingerwork practice. Looking forward to that!
Last but not least, I snagged a couple of CDs from the store since they do have a small selection–and I was stunned, stunned I tell you, to see that they actually had a couple of La Bottine Souriante CDs! So I promptly grabbed one of those, as well as one by an Irish lady named Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh who appears on a previous CD I bought. Also, the name Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh is just awesome.
All in all a lovely way to spend Valentine’s Day afternoon, and Dara and I were the last ones out of the store since we were there right up until they closed. Always a pleasure to visit there! Because as far as I’m concerned, music is love.

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Conflikt was fun

Several of you who read my journal in whatever iteration already know this since you were actually there, but hey, Conflikt! That was fun.

This was the first year that userinfosolarbird and I got to attend the whole convention, which was nice. We still pulled a commuter con, which was not quite so ideal; next year, I think we’ll be getting a hotel room, just because driving all the way back to Kenmore at 2am or later is crazytalk. Especially when things like the Jury panels happen around 10:30 in the morning!

Dara did of course do more active music playing than I did since she has a CD in progress; me, I mostly hung out and beat on one of the novels in progress. And a nice lady I hadn’t met before even told me she quite liked Faerie Blood, to which I double-taked hugely, and was all ‘wait, a complete stranger actually read my novel? Whoa!’ (Nice Lady Who Read My Novel, if you’re reading this, I have forgotten your name and LJ, but if you drop a comment I shall make sure to note it again properly for the future!)

I did periodically also whip out Rags and do impromptu jamming near the registration table, which was also good fun. Special shout-outs on that are due to userinfodoragoon and Jeri Lynn who was managing the registration table, and whose LJ, if she has one, I do not know! We managed to play a not too bad little pass through “Si Bheag Si Mhor”, a song to which I am partial of course from its connection to Mr. Crowe and the Grunts. (Mmm, “Judas Cart”, I should listen to that again.)

Also participated in the Band Scramble, which let me meet a few nice folks and play music with them; we did “Elf Glade”, which is a standard at the Murkjams, and it was an interesting musical exercise to try to follow somebody else’s version of the guitar line. Also fun to try to invent piccolo twiddles on the fly since I never play flute on this thing at home.

The main attraction of the whole shebang was userinfofilkertom, though! Since my original exposure to filk was in the Midwest and my and Dara’s housemate at the time, userinfoamethyst_dancer, was an old college buddy of Tom’s, I’m real familiar with Tom and fond of his music quite a bit. He’s a superb musician, and I was very pleased to see that he hasn’t missed a step in live performance since I saw him last. His voice and guitar playing are both very strong, still! It was with great glee that I plunked down money for three, count ’em, three of his albums at the con–and furthermore picked up two more off of iTunes when I got home. Tom’s just that awesome.

Secondary highlight: seeing Alexander James Adams perform. I really want Alec to start writing more new stuff, just because as a long-standing Heather Alexander fan I have the original versions of a lot of his songs stuck in my brain and they don’t really want to be budged out by newer versions. He’s got a quite nice new vampire song though as well as a new one called “The Dance of Hoof and Horn”, and of course his fiddle playing is still sublime. Extra bonus points for Dara and I getting to sit near him in the big Sunday afternoon Jam, too. And I got to remind him of the incident in 1997 when he looked me in the eye at a room party and said “Play something!” and I squeaked and almost melted into the floor. Now? Now I can actually whip out a guitar and do something with it. He told me he was pleased to have inspired via terror. ;)

(Another shoutout to userinfodoragoon as well for whipping out that fiddle of hers and duo’ing with Alec on “Si Bheag Si Mhor”. Lovely and very well done!)

Alec has a work print of his next new album, so although it’s mostly reworked versions of Heather-era songs, I put down for that too since hey, again, awesomeness. And it may amuse userinfodamara as well that I bought a Heather Dale album–one of the CD vendors in the tiny dealer’s room had a whole bunch of her albums, so I got The Hidden Path and in fact listened to it tonight on the way home from work.

All in all a pleasant and relaxing way to spend the weekend. I may have been “hanging out on the periphery” girl for the most part, but it was a lovely periphery to be at. And “surrounded by musicians” is strangely conducive to getting actual writing done, not to mention guitar playing. <3 Looking forward to next year! And maybe next year, I'll actually have a proper chord line to "How Many Hugos?", one of the few filk songs I've actually written. Not to mention, maybe I'll finish that Doctor Who filk still haunting my brain, and also have that shiny green guitar!

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Jam Report #95-96–10/18/09, 11/1/09: Double Afterthought Edition

I know I haven’t been properly keeping up with the last couple of Jam Reports, and this is me trying to get caught up on that! Since it’s been a while since the last couple of Jams, all I have to offer is brief notes on the actual songs we played, so I’ll go ahead and make notes of those here. We’re currently talking about when the next Jam will be, some time in December, and hopefully when that happens I’ll return to serious Jam reporting.

Songs for the 10/18/09 Jam: “Getting Away With It”, “Captain Kidd”, “Chickies in the House”, “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate”, “Elf Glade”, “Dancing With Mrs. White”, “Billy Peddle”, “Mari-Mac”, “Stars”

Songs for the 11/1/09 Jam: “Come to the Labyrinth”, “Pirate Bill”, “Elf Glade”, “Chickies in the House/Duncan’s Dance”, “Goin’ Up”, “The Last Saskatchewan Pirate”, “John Waits Polka”, “The Road to Lisdoonvarna”, “Brian Boru”, “Butterfly Jig”, “Nonesuch”

Some generally fun things to note here:

“Getting Away With It” is a newer one of userinfosolarbird‘s, and is a song about super-villainy! Which is of course appropriate, given that Dara is a super-villain.

“Come to the Labyrinth” was brought into rotation by request; it’s one of userinfos00j‘s, and turned out to be fairly easy once Dara found the chords for it online. The guitar line is dead simple–all the interest here is in the complex layering of the vocals. When the group’s at suitable strength, thankfully, we have more than adequate vocal power to pull this off. We’ll be coming back to this one, I suspect.

Y’all may notice quite a bit of instrumentals in the last couple of rotations. This has particularly appealed to userinfodoragoon, who asked me for pointers to the various bits of GBS instrumental goodness, and I am of course all over that. But we also broke out my mandolin fakebook to give Dara and Molly both a quick and dirty introduction to how to play “Nonesuch”. I really do need to remember to whip that fakebook out more often; it’s a handy resource. It’s also chock full of all kinds of instrumentals that would be fun to explore in Jam.

On a similar note we also tried to make a serious run at playing through not only “Chickies in the House”, but also its companion pieces, “Napoleon’s Rant” and “Duncan’s Dance”. My eventual goal here is of course to be able to play the whole trio through without stopping, but I think it’ll be a while before we catch up with Tricky Pixie in our ability to do that!

I can also note of course that the last Jam’s pie, in favor of the holiday season approaching, was pumpkin. And as I recall, it was pretty darned tasty.

Watch this space for further Jam goodness, and very possibly, a special Solstice edition of a Jam report! Also? Now that I can play it, I am totally going to be bringing in “Concerning Charlie Horse”!

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Monday morning, damp and awful

I’m pretty sure that if I arrive at work only marginally less damp than I would have done without an umbrella, I might need to think about getting a new umbrella. My pants are wet from the knees down. Yay!

But at least I have on good warm socks and a cup of tea is steeping at my elbow.

Meanwhile I blew the weekend playing way more of our game Unwell Mel than I probably should have done, but hey, we make good games, what can I say? ;) And userinfosolarbird has been digitizing a lot of my old filk tapes, finally–which means I can at last get this stuff onto my iPhone. We’re focusing on stuff that has not to my knowledge been released on CD, like the Technical Difficulties tapes, the Where No Man… Trek tape, the general-folk Brandywine tape that’s got some good Julia Ecklar and Leslie Fish on it, and best of all, the original Elfquest tape, the one that isn’t remastered to within an inch of its life.

And this does of course mean I’ll have “Banned from Argo” on the iPhone too. <3 This'll be nice to listen to. I've missed a lot of this; when it comes to filk, I'm really more a fan of the older stuff than I am current, although I do of course like me some userinfovixyish and userinfotfabris and userinfos00j and userinfoseanan_mcguire. The Technical Difficulties and Julia Ecklar were really the people who got me interested in filk in the first place!

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It’s taken me forty years…

… but I have now purchased the very first Beatles album I’ve ever bought in my life. I got the new remastered 2-disc edition of Past Masters, which looks like it’s the new version of two previously released CDs that came out in 1990.

Decided to pick this one because it’s got the German versions of “She Loves You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on it, as well as the English versions of those songs, and I want to see how well I can understand the lyrics! I can already tell that “I Want To Hold Your Hand” doesn’t literally translate; the German title is “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand”, which is “Come, Give Me Your Hand”.

I totally blame this on Beatles Rock Band, which I finally got to seriously play last night when userinfojennygriffee came over to join us for a session of gaming. This is the first time I’ve ever seriously actually done Rock Band or anything like it, and that’s pretty much because this is the first time there’s been a version with a bunch of music I actually like. I’m still very new to the game, though; I spent the whole time with the guitar controller playing either Guitar or Bass on Easy. I’m going to have to try the singing, though. I kept bursting into harmony lines anyway while I was playing, and Paul thought I should have one of the mike controllers. ;)

It’s pretty nifty though that this has kindled my first serious burst of interest in the Beatles. I’ve now listened to most of userinfospazzkat‘s albums and have a new appreciation for the quality of the music; I’ve got Magical Mystery Tour and the White Album left to listen to. But now I’ve got the new Past Masters volume as well!

Posted on

It's taken me forty years…

… but I have now purchased the very first Beatles album I’ve ever bought in my life. I got the new remastered 2-disc edition of Past Masters, which looks like it’s the new version of two previously released CDs that came out in 1990.
Decided to pick this one because it’s got the German versions of “She Loves You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on it, as well as the English versions of those songs, and I want to see how well I can understand the lyrics! I can already tell that “I Want To Hold Your Hand” doesn’t literally translate; the German title is “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand”, which is “Come, Give Me Your Hand”.
I totally blame this on Beatles Rock Band, which I finally got to seriously play last night when came over to join us for a session of gaming. This is the first time I’ve ever seriously actually done Rock Band or anything like it, and that’s pretty much because this is the first time there’s been a version with a bunch of music I actually like. I’m still very new to the game, though; I spent the whole time with the guitar controller playing either Guitar or Bass on Easy. I’m going to have to try the singing, though. I kept bursting into harmony lines anyway while I was playing, and Paul thought I should have one of the mike controllers. ;)
It’s pretty nifty though that this has kindled my first serious burst of interest in the Beatles. I’ve now listened to most of ‘s albums and have a new appreciation for the quality of the music; I’ve got Magical Mystery Tour and the White Album left to listen to. But now I’ve got the new Past Masters volume as well!

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A few things of no particular consequence

userinfomamishka came over this afternoon, and we had a delightful time getting her laptop updated to Snow Leopard (plus the .1 update) while watching the first two hours of the BBC version of State of Play. I really liked that, and it’s quite nice how the US version did a decent job of preserving the bones of the plot while condensing it down to two hours. John Simm is easily a match for my beloved Mr. Crowe, I’ll totally grant–plus, the BBC version has David Morrisey, who I’d first seen being awesome in the last Doctor Who Christmas special, “The Next Doctor”. It’s quite cool to see him in something else.

Meanwhile, I have made my first ebook purchase inspired by my recently joining the Outer Alliance: a short work called Rot by Michele Lee. It’s a zombie work, and it adds an extra level of tension by making the zombies still sentient while their bodies are rotting around them. You can check out the Outer Alliance’s spotlight post on Michele here, and her own page about the work here.

In addition, I’ve picked up copies of Treason’s Harbour and The Far Side of the World, since I needed those to continue the Patrick O’Brian goodness. Y’all may remember I listened to an audio version of Treason’s Harbour already, but I didn’t have a physical copy yet. Very much looking forward to reading The Far Side of the World, too!

I have issues with the 3.1 iPhone OS update: namely, it’s totally broken Smart Playlists. All of my Smart Playlists on my device are displaying out of order, although they’re fine in iTunes on my computer. So to get around this, I’ve started listening to a lot of my stuff via album view or via the podcasts view. As a consequence, I’ve been stricken with an urge to just listen to my entire collection in alphabetical order, just because I haven’t listened to quite a bit of this stuff in quite a bit of time. Still working my way through the A’s. I think I’ll do a summary post when I’m done with each letter.

And, last but not least, speaking of music, the Murkworks now has Beatles Rock Band. We played it some Friday night and it was highly entertaining, and a Beatles Rock Band gathering at our house is highly likely next weekend. We need more mikes to properly do the harmonies. And I am totally requiring some Beatles in my iTunes collection now.

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Today in Vancouver

So yeah, Saturday in Vancouver has failed to suck. Made it safely up here to Chez userinfocow, with hardly any wait time at all at the border. And today, we went out on various and sundry shopping sorts of excursions.

userinfocow took userinfosolarbird and userinfospazzkat and me over to the nearby HMV–which proved to be a way more fruitful visit this time around than on the two previous visits, because this time I actually scored an album by La Bottine Souriante! Also picked up one by the Punters, who I’ve been meaning to listen to anyway by way of introducing myself to more Newfoundland music; plus, this album has the magic words “Produced by Alan Doyle” on the back, so I’m figuring that’s a strong recommendation right there. Lastly, got one by the Rankins, since I like their track on Fire in the Kitchen.

Relatedly, userinfocow also gave Dara and me a copy of userinfohsifyppah‘s very first filk CD, Steel Cage Match. Looking forward to listening to this, in no small part because “I Fell Asleep (Reading the Silmarillion)” made me LOL, and also, I want to hear “Livejournal Shanty” too.

And, userinfocow snagged me a couple of loaner copies of La Bottine Souriante albums from the Vancouver Public Library as well. These shall have to stand me until I can acquire actual copies of these albums–which I have now ordered from Amazon, since apparently Amazon’s actually stocked up on La Bottine Souriante a lot since the last time I looked. To wit, bitchin’. Or should that be bitchin-ez moi?

Anyway, aside from all this musical love, we stopped in at Little Sister’s, which is Vancouver’s oldest queer bookstore. Which was kind of neat. I walked out with a novel called Salt Fish Girl which sounded interesting to me and SFnal (it mentions shapechanging and biotechnology), even though it doesn’t call itself a science fiction novel. I told the dude at the counter that I was a bit surprised that they didn’t have Tanya Huff in their (teeny) fantasy section, given that she’s a queer Canadian author and that she has a whole trilogy of books starring a queer boy, set in Vancouver even! He thought that was cool, so who knows, maybe they’ll stock ’em. Also, they had a big black Labrador-lookin’ doggie who reminded me a lot of Sheriff, the doggie who lives along the goat trail.

OH OH OH, also, they had a magazine on the rack there with a cover blurb about an interview with the actress Alex Hedison. Wait a minute, I thought, Hedison? She did look suspiciously familiar, so I thumbed into the zine to check the interview–and yep, that there was the daughter of David Hedison, my very own Captain Crane from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. And she’s not only queer, she’s the former partner of Ellen DeGeneres! That’s some pretty high-profile queer there.

And after that, userinfocow went back to his place while Dara and Paul and I proceeded to hop on the bus and head down to the Asian-heavy community in Richmond, where they have a couple of largish Japanese/Chinese/Asian-friendly shopping mails. That was neat. Quite a bit of flashbacks to Japan there what with the layout of the stores and the sorts of stuff they sold. We snagged a couple of gifts for folks, had tasty lunch and later on tasty yogurt, and eventually staggered back to Chez userinfocow for zzz’s.

We’ll be heading to Steamworks for tasty food in a little bit, and to meet up with userinfogerimaple and possibly also userinfoelfmaid. Which should be a fine closer to a pretty fine day indeed.