Lark in the Morning

One of my favorite tunes, played on my favorite ‘tina.

The way music is meant to be played

Yours truly with a few friends playing at Larz Anderson Park. A leisurely Sunday afternoon, plenty of food, kids running around, and tunes.

watch my concertina being made

A while ago, I’ve ordered a “Zephyr” concertina from Bob Tedrow. Like everyone else doing quality work, he has a waiting list of several months. Last week however, Bob started to work on my ‘tina, and is putting up pictures of the work in progress:

Trad Lesson Website

Another website with flute / whistle lessons. But this one has material for concertina as well. Yay!

http://tradlessons.com

Transparent Screen

I know this has been done elsewhere, but I wanted to give it a shot. My wife’s countertop Mac is particularly inviting because of all the junk behind it. Or so I think.

Christy Barry’s #1 / The Kesh

Two jigs on concertina. Watch for the big yawn. I’m still working on getting the timing right, sorry if it is a bit ‘choppy’ at times.

Gan Ainm Session Cartoons

They’re a few years old and discontinued, but I really enjoyed the Gan Ainm cartoons. Here’s one of my favorites:

You can check out the whole goodness over here.

Captive Audience

If the frequency of my posts here suggests busyness in real life, that’s exactly what it is. Since Nov 12th, we have been blessed with the presence of our 4th child, Thea Clare. If you want to see a nod to my musical passions in the middle name, you may. More importantly though, I have one more victim to play to sleep, and thus one more reason for “whistling in the dark”.

Playing a duet with meself

Having recently taken to learning the concertina, I thought it would be cool to hear it played side by side with the flute. So I recorded meself twice playing the same tunes, then layered the two audio tracks on top of each other. The result is here:

A duet with meself

As you can probably tell, this turned out to be much harder than it initially seemed, but it is a great exercise to play accurately on the beat. Apart from being a hedonistic indulgence, recording oneself is useful because it is revealing in a way that merely listening to oneself isn’t: So this is why everybody leaves when I start to practice …

ICONS wrap-up

I know it’s been a while. Part of the reason is that given some free minutes, I’d rather play than blog. Or see other people play. In exchange for a little donation to Boston’s NPR Art and Culture Station, I ended up with a set of all-weekend passes to this year’s ICONS festival. Besides an overdose of good music (I must have heard The Bucks of Oranmore in about 5 different renditions), we made an exciting new discovery:

Gadelle, a band of four P.E.I. lassies rocking their socks off with Acadian tunes. Before going to bed that night, my son said: “I’m never going to forget Louise” (the fiddler-stepdancer and band anchor). I hope we will hear more from them in the near future. Maybe they’ll even add a flute or whistle …