Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Tolley's Jig No. 1

Tolley's Jig No. 1 (mp3) (pdf)

Lots of tunes played, practiced and written in the last few weeks but little time for this blog. I recorded this little jig a couple of weeks ago. I haven't decided on what chords might work best so I'm leaving that up to you for now.

Wednesday, September 02, 2015

Loaves and Fishes-Too Many Goats-Fourth and Walnut live

Contratopia from Behind The Mic™ on Vimeo.

Loaves and Fishes/Too Many Goats/Fourth and Walnut (pdf)
 
A couple of weeks ago our Contratopia band performed a full length concert on a perfect summer evening in downtown Decorah. You can read a little more about that over at the Contratopia 2.0 blog.

This video, courtesy of Al and Behind the Mic Productions (with special support from Patrice), is the first to surface from that show. I checked and was surprised to see that none of the three tunes featured here have been included in this blog before now.

Contratopia has been playing these tunes of mine since the early days of the band and we have often used this set for the first dance of the evening. This is also the starting set of tunes on our Smitten CD. Al's video captures us trying to bring the set down from its usual 10-13 minute length to something closer to what we did on the CD.

In case you are wondering, my buddy Pat O'Loughlin isn't trying to come up with a fancy introduction to Loaves and Fishes, he just starts playing a different tune altogether. Same key, same tempo, easy to do. We've all done this in the band and you can see that no one misses a beat. That's because we are a dance band and missing the beat is the only real mistake we can make.

The sheet music supplied (sorry no tab this time) is straight from our Contratopia Tunebook, pages 6 & 7. Still available from the link above, only $6 for a PDF copy.
 
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.