I wrote my first tune last night!

It just sorta came out. I was learning some Shetland reels, Sleep Soond ida Moornin and Willafjord, so I think those had some influence on me, mood-wise. I was then playing around with one of my old competition sets, the one I competed with in Richmond in October. When I got to The Braes of Mar, for some reason I started to play the initial measure as a reel, and it went on its own for another measure. "Hey, that's a cool riff", I said aloud. "Too bad I've already forgotten it". But for some reason, I managed to pull it off again. So I said to myself "I better write this down!", and went to my laptop and launched Barfly and started to transcribe it. The rest just kinda came out from there, and only a couple of times did I deliberately consider the chord progression: a I IV V I tune, with a V7 in there in a couple of places. When I noodle around, it tends to be in D-major. I guess that's the key I'm most familiar with at this point. By the time the A-part was half-done, I already knew what to call the tune; it was fun and perky and spirited, and reminded me of my friend Carolyn.

Here it is, "Carolyn Lentz's Reel", twice through, played by the sheet music software Barfly:



I like it; it's fun and lively. Though it ended up as a double reel, it almost became either a fast hornpipe (a la The Flowers of Edinburgh), or a Shetland reel, with each staff ending with 3 quarter notes, fdd. Upon further listening, the A-part also reminds me a bit of Put me in a Box, and the B-part a reel version of the B-part in The Statten Island Hornpipe.

One guy over at fark.com reponded to my link to it. "Neat tune," he said. "It speaks of dirt-floor cottages and touches the Irish redneck within." I consider that a great compliment.


In other news, my Irish mandolin teacher has suggested that I've learned almost all the techniques there are that are specific to mandolin. That doesn't mean I'm that good; I need to practice a lot more to become flawlessly fluid in my execution of the techniques I know, it's just that there are not a lot of things one can do with mandolin; the instrument isn't that versatile in the Irish style. The other material I want to learn for mandolin, improvisation and the playing of counter-melodies, are skills not specific to that instrument. So we're going to probably go a few more lessons, and then switch to Irish bouzouki, played as a rythym instrument. I expect it to be fun!

As I mentioned above, in my Scottish fiddle lessons we've started to look at Shetland reels in my tour of repertoire tunes of the Potomac Valley Scottish Fiddle Club book 1, and we talked about the proper context for and degree of swing, up-beat accenting, and 3-in-a-bow for reels. Fun stuff.