Why do the ones I’ve read (including a mind numbing debate on modal theory) come across as quite negative towards guitars in trad music?
Does anyone have any good resource links for trad guitar playing? I’m looking for chord sheets and the like, specifically for Scottish trad songs.
I’ve been listening to a lot more trad stuff recently and want to learn a few songs on guitar as it’s my main instrument. I could just walk into the local music shops and buy a book but cash is a bit low just now.
I’ve noticed the same thing, Chris. I gave up trying to start any discussion on guitar accompaniment because it was always turning into ill-informed bitching about the instrument in general. Waste of my time.
As for online resources, you’ve seen MichaelEskin’s stuff, right?
Cheers, I’d seen the stuff on Tradlessons. I might give it a go over the weekend.
I’m really looking for just chord sheets to scottish trad songs in standard tuning, but it’s no big hassle to change to dadgad I suppose for a bit of fun.
The lack of replies has annoyed me really. I’ve played guitar for 12 years but that’s almost entirely been playing metal, rock and blues. I was hoping people here might have been able to help a bit with pointing me in the right direction for more trad stuff.
Guess I’ll just wait until payday to go buy a book.
Don’t be too put off by the lack of speedy replies. I’ve waited days and days for a replies in some spots here. The whistle and flute areas are the bussiest. Perhaps a post in the Traditional Music or virtual pub sections would help. And too, as you’ve noticed, guitar threads can become rowes and rants, so many hesitate to join in.
I’m afraid I don’t have any help to offer in finding web-based information on the subject, nor am I accomplished enough on guitar to help directly. Sorry.
I’m not quite sure why the guitar is treated so seemingly badly here. I hope that it’s mostly good-natured ribbing, but I wonder. I think a lot of the players here have had unsavoury experiences with guitarists. Being such a popular instrument, it’s fairy common that a guiitarist will wonder into a session not understanding the situation. Sessions are often mistaken for open mics or other free-for-all gatherings. And a great many of these players aren’t doing what you’re attempting, that is, to learn to do it the right way. I applaude you for doing the homework! Thus, many feel they need only wonder in, sit down, and begin ‘jamming’, having no sense of the music, the traditions, or the etiquette. Sadly, those fellows give guitarists a bad name.
Don’t feel too bad though, bodhran players often are treated worse! My negative experiences are with those players. While I know several accomplished, talented bodhran players, it seems sometimes that every guy with a spare $30 and a ticket to the Ren Faire thinks he can play the bodhran. Percussion instruments tend to attract those who want to participate without having to do all the work. After all, you just have to hit it, right? They often don’t inderstand the role of the instrument in trad music, or are not satisfied with filling that role. A couple of players I’ve run into treat the bodhran as if it were a rock and roll drum kit and wish to be center stage with it. It takes just the right person to play bodhran or guitar in ITM. One must know their job well and understand what it is to work within an ensemble.
I hope I haven’t been too candid about it. I wish you all the best of luck and encourage what you’re trying to accomplish!
Oh, and too, please don’t think I’m picking on just guiitars and bodhrans. These problems are people problems, not instrument problems!
Just this past Sunday we were playing our regular show at one of our new venues. We aren’t a session band and play mostly folk songs with a couple of jigs and reels thrown in for a good mix.
A family showed up before we began and had their two young daughters in tow. They were beginning dancers and had brought their costumes and everything. Now, it is always charming to have little girls dance a step or two, but the parents felt entirely justified in just showing up unbidden and expecting us to play half our show as their daughters’ dance band.
They had not contacted us ahead of time, nor had they ever heard us perfom, so they knew nothing of our act or what was being expected of us as employees of the venue. Fortunately, we were able to play five or six dance tunes for them and it all worked out well enough. But I have a sinking feeling that we’ll have to have a chat with the parents about it evenually, as they’ll probably keep showing up.
The lack of replies is largely due to the lack of online resources.
We can’t give you links if there’s nothing to link to. Sorry.
What has been suggested frequently is to take songs you want to
accompany and look them up on JC’s Tunefinder. Then look in
the Hdrs column for quotation marks. That signifies that the
abc link will have guitar chords.
If you want to play the melody, just get the music and start
playing. There are many resources for flat- and fingerpicking. http://www.musicmoose.org has many lessons. (Most are
bluegrass or American old-time, but the techniques translate.)
If you do end up getting a book, I would suggest Chris Smith’s Celtic Back-Up. It tries to teach you to form your own
progressions based on the melody.
Sorry I understand you can’t tell me about resources that aren’t there. But there were other parts to my post which I hoped would merit discussion. And no-one likes being ignored which is another reason I was annoyed. A reply saying there isn’t much available would have been something.
Anyway I should also say that sheet music is nigh on useless to me as I can’t read it in relation to the guitar and I have no intention of learning now. Guitar tab might be useful though.
That Tunefinder link looks superb, thanks for that.
The book doesn’t quite look like what I’m after though, I can already play guitar to a good standard so don’t need a tutorial book. Just a lyrics and chords reference really is all I want, I should be able to pick up style and appropriate technique from listening. Something like those busker’s reference books you get full of pop songs but for Scottish trad tunes is what I had in mind.
Oops, I should have realized you said “Scottish trad songs”
I was thinking tunes. Though, there is a program to convert
ABC notation to guitar tabs, if you ever see a tune on thesession.org or JC’s Tunefinder you want to fingerpick.
Could you give me examples of Scottish trad songs you would
want to play? Sometimes you just have to google for what you
want, unfortunately, because guitar chord archives have been
the target of recent RIAA lawsuits. But, I find some things still.
Googling for:
Well, you can rest in this fact: No matter how much people will rant and rave about guitarists and no matter how the resources will dwindle, you will always have it better than the uke-player who wants to play trad. We just get ignored.
Sadly, the ukulele’s lot in life is even less than that of the poor bodhran! It’s one of my favorite instruments, and I love it dearly. But there’s only one thing harder than playing uke in trad: It’s being a guy named Tim playing uke.
I just tried it out, and I have to warn you of a few things. To get
guitar instead of dulcimer tabs, you have to pass the -g option on
the command line. Also, it seems to interpret the range of most
music as way too high … so for Brenda Stubbert’s, for example,
I had to bring things down one octave with the -d1 option to make
a useable tab (you can do -d2 to get things on the lower half of
the strings, which might be fun to play with). Also, when it sees
a B note, it prints it as a 0 on the B string, and below that as a 4
on the G string, but doesn’t tell you that it’s an optional fingering
instead of a double-stop or something… weird.
This forum is pretty slow for strings in general. If you wanna talk strings I’d recommend mandolincafe.com It’s still not really catered to guitar since there’s no specific place to talk guitar stuff so you might find some of the same ignorant comments about how guitar isn’t a good instrument for traditional music, and yes I said ignorant because anyone who thinks guitar isn’t a good instrument for traditional music is quite frankly retarded.
One thing that guitar brings to the table very consistently is amazingly full sounding chords for rhythm playing. Chords that just can’t be sounded on a mandolin/octave mandolin/bouzouki. You can get ‘some’ of that fullness out of a mandocello but even then it lacks that note heavy ring of a six string guitar using all 6 of those strings in one nice, full chord.
that said… Guitar is played by A LOT of traditional bands, you see it constantly in some of the best places and every session I’ve been to had at least 1 guitarist beating away on the thing and it was a better session for it.
As for learning how to play guitar for traditional music, learn traditional music first. I’ve found, at least with Irish Trad that 90% of the tunes fall within 3-4 “keys”, learn the applicable keys for the type of music you’ll be playing and you’ll find the standard chord progression for a lot of songs repeats itself, the melody changes the song but the rhythm and chord progression is generally not that complicated. Then once you’ve got that under your belt start learning creative ways to build chords. In Irish Trad, drop D and dadgad is too powerful to pass up since IT is heavy in D and G and those two tunings lend themselves to some powerful chording in those keys.
Don’t get discouraged by a slower forum or snarky comments from people who think if you’re not playin a “traditional” instrument like mandolin or zouk then you’re not playing traditional music right. One thing that holds true in ALL traditional music is it adapts and grows with time, you’re insulting the entire genre when you try to pigeon hole it into its ‘hayday’ time period and not let it grow.
Well, retarded might be a little harsh, but I get your point. I’ve often wondered about those who insist on only ‘traditional’ instruments yet will clamour after whistles made of Delrin, a material invented by DuPont in 1952! Even ‘traditional’ whistles like Generations and Oaks depend on thermalplastic injection molding, another 20th century invention. Many of the same ‘traditionalists’ will turn their nose up at wooden whistles, a technology that was actually used by our ancestors. Even ‘tin’ whistles themselves didn’t catch on until the Industrial Revolution made tinplate cheap and available (although that’s part of the Hey Day you mentioned), and music certainly goes back farther than that.
Even the mandolin, which gets discussed here very frequently, is not an old instrument in the Irish tradition. It only came into popularity about forty or fifty years ago. Not much ‘tradition’ there, but it’s popular and frequently accepted.
Maybe harpists have some right to look down their noses, maybe pipers too. I only know that I don’t! Nothing I do would be considered traditional by anyone. But I respect the traditionalists and evolutionists equally well.
I don’t think the anamosity stems so much from the guitar itself (or any other instrument) as it does from the behavior of the players. I’ve never seen a session that didn’t include a guitar; sometimes more than one. But I’ve seen a lot of rude players of all instruments who want to impose their ideas on others though. It’s all about mutual respect and consideration. If your a ‘traditionalist’ or a ‘preservationist’ who has worked hard to achieve some specific thing, then that’s respectable in its own right. If you’re a musician like me who wants to experiment with new ideas, there’s room for that as well. It’s a big world. We just have to be considerate and respectful of one another.
ok music reading is surprisingly easy… its just slow at first.. but you surprise yourself. first the notes: there are five lines with spaces in between them
as my clssical teacher told me:
Every Good Boy Does Fine - are the lines starting from the bottom
FACE - the spaces
so starting from the bottom whole line it goes E,F,G,A,B,C,D,E,F with F being the line on top…
at the beginning of any staff you see # and b’s that just means any time you see that note you either sharp or flat it
this seems really hard at first ( I hated my classical teacher for it) but once you figure out what scale your in it becomes more like following numbers within a scale
oh and if your using this to interpret whistle music… just use the notes to get a feel for the tune and what scale its in… once you got the basic rythm and melody turn up the distortion and jam it out… not for sessions at all but its fun as crap by yourself
theres a better more detailed discussion on http://www.cyberfret.com/reading/index.php
Nerdy ukulele jokes ensue, eh?
