Jack Campin wrote:
>
> > Odd thing is that similar brief bursts of 'drone' occur in smallpipe
> > playing
>
> What do you mean? The actual drones don't do "brief bursts"; are you
> talking about using a chanter note as a secondary pedal by filling in
> the subsidiary beats with it?
Probably. It usually sounds very droney or bass. Sort of punctuative
farting. When I think about it is can also happen with what sound like
random, loud 'noises off' which are clearly deliberate and not bass.
It's an effect or technique I really like but have never tried to copy
on a guitar :-)
>
> [ringing strings on fiddles]
> > Now I may be told that exactly the same things happen in Irish or
> > English, Welsh or Appalachian music (or if Jack's reading, Turkish....)
> > so this may not be Scottish style.
>
> Doesn't have to be exclusively Scottish to be Scottish...
>
> You certainly do get the same thing in Appalachian fiddling (listen to
> Bruce Molsky), and in Scandinavian styles. You don't in Turkish playing
> on either kind of "keman" (a word used for both Western fiddles and for
> an instrument from Central Asia resembling the Chinese er-hu), as they
> are played in as vocal a manner as possible. You get a LOT of it in Black
> Sea fiddling (using the "kemence", shaped like the old European "kit") but
> as that's tuned in fourths, played with lots of double-stops and three-
> strings-at-once bowing, it sounds really different; the least vocal music
> imaginable, with the highest metronome speeds ever found in the field
> anywhere, accelerating up to 900bpm in one of Picken's transcriptions.
Help! Throw all those books from 300 years ago with 72-80 bpm as the
natural state of human musical speed out of the window. What do they
drink to go with this?
>
> English in former times I'm not sure about. The English were the first
> people in the British Isles to use the fiddle for folk music, and if we
> are to believe the illustrations in Playford's books from the 1650s, the
> kind of fiddle they used was the kit. Did English kits of this period
> have flattish or highly arched bridges? There must be surviving examples.
> Not sure there any 17th century kits surviving that were definitely used
> in Scotland, though the instrument must have got here.
>
I always wonder whether instruments have changed, or artists just
couldn't draw them. I think the MOMI website (Museum of Musical
Instruments) has some examples of the ambiguity of f-hole shapes, body
lengths etc in old woodcuts.
David
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