I did try to check that this hasn’t been up before, but if it has please kick me to the appropriate thread forthwith.
On several recordings I have - I have in mind an old De Danaan album, “Barking Mad” by 4 Men and a Dog, and that Peoples/Molloy/Brady album recently discussed - the music is more or less consistently played a semitone higher than the (dare I say) “usual” keys.
Does this ever occur in sessions anywhere? Is it a regional thing for example? I wouldn’t want to show up somewhere hoping to play, only to find out that my session warhorse harmonicas were all useless (yes, left meself open there - save it!)
If it does occur, is there a reason? Surely it isn’t just to keep the riff-raff out… #
Well, yeah, sometimes in sessions it’s done to exclude people, but enough people have Eb flutes and whistles nowadays that the strategy doesn’t work so well. Fiddles of course are easy to tune up to Eb.
The real reason for doing it in the first place, though, is that the fiddle sounds brighter when you tune it up there, and some people really love that sound. And the Eb flute is easier to fill than a D one, so you get more power and brightness. The music feels like it has more energy when you tune it up a notch. In contrast, you’ll also run across sessions in C or even B or Bb, which tend toward a slower pace and a mellower feeling.
In the sessions I go to the lead geezers are button box players who come over from Ireland, have been tutored by people from Ireland, and people who regulary go and session in Ireland with top names.
They tend to tune their boxes dry, which means a half tone sharp. Why they do this is still under debate and you will find the same happening in the GHB competition circles. Boxes are untuneable so everyone has to tune to them. I tune my guitar sharp to back these guys up. I also can’t use my tuneable Susato at these session because it won’t tune sharp enough.
If you’re going to play with heavy hitters you will have to get some sharp mouth harps. Or get a concertina which is where most harmonica players end up going. And then it’s just a short hop to a wheezer.
Dry, swing or wet tuning depends on the tuning of the reeds that sound a given note, but does not indicate pitch per se. I’d rather that a box player weigh in here, but this is how it’s been told to me: each note has more than one reed to it; the closer they are tuned to each other, the “drier” the tuning, and vice versa for “wet”. The wetter the tuning, the more it sounds like multiple instruments. For instance, Marty McHugh’s been playing a pretty wet box, lately (that red one), but I don’t recall if it’s pitched sharp. I am given to understand that boxes of Italian make can be expected to be pitched more sharply than others in general.
The confounding thing about playing with wet-tuned boxes is that my own pitch on flute is harder to anchor down sometimes.
BTW, a number of recordings that I listen to have at least some tracks -sometimes nearly all- pitched to Eb. Good ear training, as I don’t have an Eb flute yet, and playing along is a godawful experience!
Well I’ll stick to harmonicas for the time being! It isn’t the “wet/dry” tuning issue I’m thinking of, but an absolute semitone rise in pitch. What I know as D tunes played in D#/Eb, and G tunes played in G#/Ab, and so on. I wonder if anyone in Ireland can comment on its occurrence there.
Cheers
Steve
You are correct: “dry” means that the instrument doesn’t have a warbly tremolo-like sound. Wet or dry is, AFAIK, unrelated to whether the whole box is tuned sharper or flatter.
Now, are we talking about an accordion that has been tuned sharper, or in tune but up an entire half-step or whole-step? I know some concertina players like to break out the D/A concertina and play their D major tunes in E major (and I guess you can get the same effect by playing a C#/D accordion as if it were a B/C accordion.)
I think the whole e flat tuning was a bit of an eighties thing, I haven’t come across it in a long time though it still happens. There is more a tendency to tune down at the moment. To play with flat pipers I suppose It hasn’t to do with boxplayers per se, I play with some decent accordeon players and they are generally in concertpitch although I note here that Conor Keane once brought in an eflat box, Jackie Daly has a C box whcih he uses in one particular session [with Henry Benagh playing the viola] and Josephine Marsh last week played a batch of tunes in F on the B/C box, which worked wonderfully well.
Thanks all, but I’m still not clear as to whether I have the answer. Here’s a quote from my website that’s been sitting up there for almost a year. It is based only on what I have come across myself, and may be inadequate. The reason I posted my question was to try to clarify this. Here’s the quote:
<<Sometimes, on recordings, Irish musicians play a semitone higher than the “usual” pitch of the tunes. I admit I have no idea of how widespread this practice is in Ireland. If you are planning the grand tour of Ireland, and wish to be prepared for all eventualities, you could consider adding A flat, E flat and B flat harps [harmonicas] to your collection. Don’t quote me on this!
Also, most well-known groups take occasional liberties with keys in their recordings. In sessions on the other hand the keys are pretty well fixed by tradition for every tune. Just occasionally the keys of G and A are interchangeable. There is very little scope for compromise if you’re going to play with other musicians. >>
Now am I way off the mark in putting it like this? I’d be very happy to be put right on any of the specific points in the quote.
I am a box player and can confirm that you’re both correct. Those of us who play concertina would not favour a very dry tuning for accordeon since we might just as well be using concertina instead. Swing tuning, which is sort of in between wet and dry, works very well for Irish music IMO.
If you were really tuning one reed a semitone sharp, you would need to tune the other a semitone flat to compensate. It would sound so wet it would be awful. The wetter the tuning, the more exaggerated the chorus effect.
Perhaps I’ve sown confusion here, but it really isn’t the wet/dry tuning issue that I wanted to raise. That’s a different area altogether to the one I was hoping to get some feedback on, interesting though it may be. I was hoping to discuss whether or not the playing of the music a semitone higher than “usual” actually occurs anywhere (I’d be especially interested in the UK and Ireland). For example, is there anywhere that I would hear, say, Maid Behind the Bar played in E flat as opposed to D?
I was surprised when a friend gave me a tape he made of a good-sized Eb session last summer in Milltown during Willie Clancy Week, led by Marcas O’Murchu.
A few years ago at Cruise’s pub in Ennis, there was a great little session in Bb with John Rynne, who’d just received his Bb flute from Geoff Wooff, and Kevin Crawford, who didn’t own a Bb at that point (this was before he got his Grinter). The rest of us watched in amazement as Kevin picked up his Eb flute and played along with Rynne in Bb for an hour or so, transposing all the tunes on the fly and playing them perfectly.
Steve, I’m afraid we haven’t been addressing your query with as much focus as you may have hoped for! FWIW, I’ve always been under the impression that tuning to anything other than concert pitch is more a matter of prior consensus than regionality, but I might be mistaken.
I think this means the he would play the G tunes in D (i.e., in the flute’s natural scale) and the D tunes in A (which works out to be Bb). Doable, but hard to do on the fly. I bet he prepared for it.
Not necessarily, Kitty Hayes and myself played on his dad’s 80th birthdayparty last year, we played in C, Mick Conneelly transposed all tunes we came up with instantly on the fiddle and Kevin most. Not a bother.
Yes, he plays an 8-keyed flute, and no, he didn’t practice beforehand for the session with John Rynne. In fact I remember him saying something like, “well, I wonder if this will work,” and Rynne was just as impressed as everyone else. I remember he looked at Kevin with mock disgust and said, “you bastard.”
Some tunes are easy to transpose on the fly but others are real brain-twisters because you have to jump octaves. Try playing the Green Mountain in D or George White’s Favourite in D on a flute, whistle, or pipes. I like playing them that way, but I had to sit down and work it out. Kevin pulled off his transpositions almost flawlessly, and my opinion of him as a musician took a huge leap that day (it was pretty high to begin with, of course!).
Have a listen to Kevin playing the Bag of Spuds with Martin Hayes on viola on In Good Company. He’s not playing it in the usual A-minor fingering on his Bb flute – that’s another nice job of transposing.
It hasn’t to do with boxplayers per se, I play with some decent accordeon players and they are generally in concertpitch although I note here that Conor Keane once brought in an eflat box, Jackie Daly has a C box whcih he uses in one particular session [with Henry Benagh playing the viola] and Josephine Marsh last week played a batch of tunes in F on the B/C box, which worked wonderfully well.
