A little bit of this thread .. Are there any Bodhran-players out there? And do you have any suggestions to notate *nice* bodhran-playing? If you do not only play (in a simple way) to reels,jigs,.. but also to any folk,jazz,swing and what ever you want or if you think of people like J.J.Kelly you know what I mean. ============ Yep, he plays some really nice stuff. I attempt to play generally using different tones like that. ============
When practicing I always have the problem to remember or to write down (hopefully) nice ideas. And two days later I start again from scratch, trying different sticks/fingers, patterns, rolls, colors of sound (sorry, is this english?), playing short or long sounding, ... I can note some important rhythmic points. That can be done pretty compact. But remarks about all the other things tend to become novels. So I just have to learn the bdr-accompaniment for each single piece and I play it from memory. Hints on this whould be wellcome. =========== Sorry I can't help with notating bodhran parts. I have been playing for almost 2 years now, and played in a band for most of that time. I usually end up playing a tune over and over and settling on a part to play that seems to gel over time (in rehearsal). After a while, I remember the important parts to play, the rhythmic and tonal variations for the tune, but I likely never play it exactly the same way any two times, but seeing it's folk music, I don't worry about it much. In jams, I listen to the melodic rhythm and melody line tonal rise and fall, and do something to go with it, but again, I don't worry too much about remembering those things I play then because, if it's worth remembering, it'll be memorable to me. ;-) Seems it would be a difficult thing to notate a bodhran part, especially seeing you are talking JJK style playing with all the different tones, and a continuous "scale" of tones, at that (like those darned fretless instruments ;-) ). One suggestion would be to assign the tones, in general to the staff, high is high, low is low, but not necessarily certain pitches, and maybe use "chord symbols" to notate either open or closed sounds. You could even use slurs to indicate sliding from one tone to another, and, of course, the standard accents to indicate accents. That would give you enough information to jog your memory about the part. Hope that helps. Rick To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
