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Calliope House / Stone’s Mongrel

Home recording has never been easier. Recently I have been experimenting with some equipment and have found the audio quality to be quite stunning. The experiments have looked something like this:

recording

I record in my basement in between the furnace going on and off, which is a real pain since it has been so cold lately. Nothing like a perfectly good track ruined by the boiler firing up.

The track at the bottom of this post is made up of two tunes. The first is called Calliope House and is a tune that was written by Dave Richardson of ‘The Boys of the Lough’.

The second tune is one I wrote in January of 2007. I have been attending a session at a pub called John Stone’s Public House. After hearing lots of A minor jigs this tune fell out of my head on the way home from the session. I am quite sure it has to be a mix of all the tunes I had been listening to. The thing I like about the tune is that the A strain has ten measures … two more than is typical.

Stone’s Mongrel

For those interested in the recording details, I used the following equipment:
AKG C1000S microphone ~$200
into a
Pesonus TUBEPre preamp ~$100
into an
Echo Indigo IO ~$150
into the pcmcia slot on my laptop, which is not at all optimized for recording. It has a Pentium M processor, 1500 MHz and 1 GB of RAM.

I used free software called Kristal Audio Engine for mixing tracks, adding reverb, EQ and such. I also added additional effects such as compression from Kjaerhus Audio. They provide a set of free VST plugins.

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Ancient Mariners to Perform in Switzerland in 2007

The Ancient Mariners are heading back to Switzerland to perform a concert with our brothers, the Swiss Mariners in the village of Augst on August 14th, 2007. Augst, Switzerland’s oldest city, was built by the Romans in 44 BC and was home to roughly 20,000 people. We had the pleasure of performing in the amphitheater in Augst, back in 1990. Since then it has gone through a lengthy excavation and renovation. We are really excited to be heading back to this great location.
Augst

In preparation for our concert, we have been working on some of our old classics as well as thinking about new music. I have been trying to convince the Mariners to play the well known slip jig ‘Kid on the Mountain’ on fifes and drums. Dan, one of our drummers asked me to send him a recording of the melody so that drumming could be written. I was going to send him a simple penny whistle track but I got a bit carried away.

general

What’s in Your Name?

Ever do a Google search on your name just to see what would turn up? Well, in the process of checking if baconworks.com would appear I did just that. For some unknown and, quite possibly, mystical reason the Greg Bacons of the world like to be musicians. It’s like I’m a member of some über-exclusive club. There is a saxophonist Greg Bacon from Indiana, which might explain why I was once requested to play at a party in Gary. Also, there is a self described Bass virtuoso Greg Bacon who plays in a variety of punk bands. Check him out on gregbacon.com. Looks like a nice enough fellow. It also looks as if this Greg Bacon has created a Wikipedia entry for himself. I found the following bit amusing:

Greg is a performer and his ability to “perform” has developed over the years. His mastery is listed below:

  • The Foward [sic] Lean
  • The Foward [sic] and Backward Lean
  • The Jump
  • The Jump and Kick
  • The Jump and Kick and Axe Swing

Fortunately, those are all things I can do on a fife so I was not really compelled to make any content changes. I did, however, update the spelling mistakes. I don’t want this guy giving me a bad name.

What alternate personas do you have out there?

tunes-i-like

Tunes I Like…

One of the things that I thought would be nice to do with this blog space is to do some real simple recordings of tunes I like. These are tunes that I did not write but play frequently enough and enjoy them to the point where I would like to share them. I am not giving any guarantees about my interpretation of these tunes as I tend to drift away from the way I originally learned them as the years go by. They are simply tunes the way I play them. When possible I will try to include a link to the sheet music or a reference to where I learned the tune.

The first tune I have selected just rocks. It is called Colliers’ Reel. It seems that this is a fairly well known tune but, man, it can cook. The version I play is a bit different than the version found at thesession.org but it is the same in spirit. I learned my version from a book called Smoke in your Eyes, which you can get from my friends over at cooperman.com:
Smoke

I like to play this tune into another popular tune called The Earl’s Chair, which I will leave up to you to find.

Here is the mp3:

new music

Indigo

It is funny how a word can have very little meaning in your life one day and the next it turns up around every corner. In the fall of 2006 I went out sailing in the waters around New London, CT with some old friends on a boat called The Indigo. Since then I have been trying to lyrically incorporate the word ‘Indigo’, along with my experience, into a song. Unfortunately my songwriting skills are horrible and I have, to date, failed miserably. More recently I have been testing some recording equipment and coincidentally one of the components is called Indigo. Oddly enough both Indigo the vessel and Indigo the hardware have provided me with a sense of revitalizing freedom. After thinking a bit about the tune I blogged about last night in Hot off the Brain I realized that it is Indigo. So I put together a quick mp3 of the tune on whistle with some guitar backing. It’s a rough mix but you’ll get the point. At some point I am hoping to thread it together with some other tunes and record them all.

Also, here is a legible copy of the sheet music for the tune.
Indigo

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Hot off the Brain

I just got back from my weekly John Stone’s session and I gotta tell ya that playing with good musicians is always an inspiration for writing tunes. I had to pull over twice on the way home to jot down the following tune. I will try to get a simple mp3 and something legible posted as soon as I can. In the interim, I need to come up with a title.

untitled1

new music

The Making of a Tune

I have been playing a lot of traditional Irish music at John Stone’s Public House in Ashland, MA lately. One evening, while driving home from the session a few weeks back, I pulled over and jotted down the following tune that was rattling around in my head. I keep a penny whistle lying around my vehicle for these very moments.

The Perfect Pint

A couple days later I continued to work on the tune only to find that I was confused by what I had written. I quickly realized I had written it as if there were a pickup when, indeed, there was none. I then struggled a bit trying to tack on a B part and after an evening of failed attempts I did the only logical thing. I gave up. I have always found that if I force myself to look at a problem from a new perspective, I am often led to a solution that I did not anticipate. One mechanism that I often use when writing music and am in need of a new perspective is to simply change instruments. So, the next day I picked up a bouzouki and … shazam! … the B part presented itself.

When I played it for Mustachio later that week he asked about the name of the tune. ‘Oohh, I haven’t gotten that far’ I said. However, that very same evening the two of us were admiring the love and attention that is put into pouring a pint of Guinness at John Stone’s. So, from that chat I decided the tune should be called The Perfect Pint. Here is the final printed version that I typed into Finale:

The Perfect Pint

Incidentally, here is how you ruin a Guinness .
Here is a basic mp3 of the tune

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New & Improved

The old baconworks wasn’t working. So, it has been replaced with this new WordPress powered site with all the modern amenities.

I plan on using the site to serve two primary purposes:

  1. Publish music I write and to talk a bit about the tunes, their origin and evolution. As always music notation and midi files, as well as mp3’s, will be posted.
  2. Highlight tunes that I have learned and that I want to share.

Also, in the near future I am hoping to incorporate accompanying music written by others, features on individuals that have, in some way, contributed to traditional music and discussions around great recordings.

As I have been playing, writing and recording quite a bit lately I expect to have plenty of things to share. So, please stay tuned!