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Post by ukpacker on Feb 12, 2022 22:22:16 GMT
I am wondering how folks go about accompanying folk songs on guitar while singing,mainly because I have been trying to come up with some chords to While Gamekeepers lie Sleeping but the melody never seems to hang around for long enough in one chord to make a chord progression viable so do most people just play the melody to such songs and sing in unison with the guitar? Then again some trad songs like Scarborough fair seem to fit in a chordal accompaniment just fine, what makes some songs easier than others to accompany with chords?
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Post by Matt Milton on Feb 12, 2022 22:54:56 GMT
I just had a listen to a few different versions on Spotify. Depends whose version of that song you're listening to I think. There seem to be a few quite tricksy (some might even say over fussy) versions of that song - eg June Tabor, Faustus. Sounds like some people perform that particular song with irregular line lengths; and a lot of people sing the first line or two in a bit of a rush. But the unaccompanied versions by Mike Waterson or Bob Roberts seem much more straightforward (and personally I prefer them). Listening to Bob Roberts' version I think you could accompany that mostly with different combinations of I, IV, V chords.
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Post by robmc on Feb 13, 2022 14:03:09 GMT
There's a chap at my folk club who sings 'While Gamekeepers Lie Sleeping' unaccompanied, lovely song, I'd be interested to hear what you come up with. I recently learnt 'Trees, they do grow high' and listened to versions by Martin Carthy, Joan Baez and Wild Silk. I only listened to them and didn't try to learn one like for like, they were all quite unique. I ended up arranging the song based on chords, Em, D and Am to suit how I sing it. Anyhow, I think you can be quite free in how you develop your own version, either with melody or chords to suit how you feel comfortable singing it.
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Post by PistolPete on Feb 14, 2022 9:16:37 GMT
At the risk of derailing the thread, I'd be interested to know how people go about working out chords behind tune sets on the fly? It's always a skill that impresses me in folk sessions when a fiddle/whistle/melodeon player can launch into something unfamiliar and the guitarists can spot the structure and jump in.
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Post by ocarolan on Feb 14, 2022 10:45:35 GMT
PistolPete - Not too much of a derailment really Pete as both situations raised in the thread requuire two basic essentials - i)familiarity with the style and type of song/tune. This only comes gradually, with much "proper" listening and playing too. ii) a good "ear" for what's going on musically - is it major/minor/neither but more sort of modalish? are there arpeggios that spell out a chord (many trad tunes are mostly just this)? what is the tune structure (AABB, AABBCC etc) and when does each part finsh/repeat or move on? In tune sessions, assuming you can hear what the basic key tonality is (D or maybe G are a good bet, or Em if it sounds minory!) a good listen first time through followed by a lot of droning on a D5 (neither major nor minor)or G5 second time through goes a long way to deciding what might be worth trying third time through - if there is a third time! The chords aren't complicated, but may well change often/in unfamiliar places unless you have really worked at i)above. You need to be able to hear the difference between 4/4 straight for reels and dotted for hornpipes and 6/8 for jigs at least, plus variants on those, the occasional 3/4 waltz and those indefinable slow airs (the tune equivalent of a song) that meander all over the place with seemingly no regular timing but are often really beautiful! Morris tunes can be weird, and melodeon players' ideas for chordal accomp tend to be rather different from a guitar/bouzouki players' natural thoughts. Answer - persuade all box players to limit themselves to the melody or, more likely, don't play (you that is)! tbh, guitars can be pretty superfluous in tune sessions, though one (and no more) can definitely add something if the player knows what they are doing. Pipe tunes (which are often played minus pipes in session) can be Bb or Eb often. Or, if there are pipes, somewhere in between keys! (Sorry, pipers! My mate used to spend more time fettling his reeds than playing, and when he did the intonation was, er, creative!) Recommend listening and watching Sharon Shannon vids- her (nylon strung) guitar player is stupendous and often keeps bass lines going as well. John Doyle is of course a master in this field too. And for something sparser try Dennis Cahill accompanying Martin Hayes. Songs aren't that much different really, though often vary more in key to suit the singer. Answer - capo, so you play in D, G, or C or whatever is easiest for you! The song mentioned at first is never going to fit to straight 4 in the bar familair "progression" - more likely chord stabs at crucial points based around the main chords of the key as Matt Milton said earlier. And droning on ambiguous chords does wonders to get you out of trouble, provided you're the only "harmony" instrument. Not really answered either question I suppose, but food for though I hope. keith
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Post by stringdriventhing on Feb 14, 2022 10:57:45 GMT
At the risk of derailing the thread, I'd be interested to know how people go about working out chords behind tune sets on the fly? It's always a skill that impresses me in folk sessions when a fiddle/whistle/melodeon player can launch into something unfamiliar and the guitarists can spot the structure and jump in. I think a lot of it is just going to lots of sessions and getting familiar with the keys and structures of the tunes and the types of rhythms that work with jigs, reels, etc. My daughter who plays fiddle was at home over lockdown and was getting frustrated by my incompetence at backing her Scottish/Irish tunes on guitar, so she got a friend of hers to give me some pointers. One of the things he mentioned was that if he doesn't know the tune he'll just play a drone/rhythm on the root chord until he's worked out where the tune goes. It's definitely a type of playing that's very different to what I generally do on the guitar and I'm pretty hopeless at it, but I love to hear someone who can do it really well.
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Post by stringdriventhing on Feb 14, 2022 11:28:48 GMT
I think Keith's posts and mine must've crossed in cyberspace there. What he says is spot on and put much more eloquently than mine. I think the having a good ear aspect is probably the most crucial. When I used to go to jam sessions I'd be looking at other guitar players' hands a lot of the time to see where unfamiliar songs were going. With trad music you don't have that crutch. Here's one of my attempts at backing some tunes - there's no way I could do that off the cuff like some people can. I had to sit down and figure out what I was going to do. fb.watch/b9Z9uhZrpz/
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Post by ocarolan on Feb 14, 2022 12:32:16 GMT
..... Here's one of my attempts at backing some tunes - there's no way I could do that off the cuff like some people can. I had to sit down and figure out what I was going to do. fb.watch/b9Z9uhZrpz/...lovely stuff with some great chording! I couldn't make that up on the spot either! keith
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Post by stringdriventhing on Feb 14, 2022 13:07:14 GMT
..... Here's one of my attempts at backing some tunes - there's no way I could do that off the cuff like some people can. I had to sit down and figure out what I was going to do. fb.watch/b9Z9uhZrpz/...lovely stuff with some great chording! I couldn't make that up on the spot either! keith Thanks Keith! I think it's a lot easier to come up with something by way of guitar accompaniment for Scottish/Irish fiddle tunes than it is for English folk songs of the type mentioned at the top of the thread.
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Post by robmc on Feb 14, 2022 19:59:42 GMT
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Post by Matt Milton on Feb 16, 2022 11:13:45 GMT
Personally I find it a lot easier to come up with a guitar accompaniment than to join in with the actual melody line if you've never heard the tune before - especially at the breakneck pace of most Irish sessions.
When I do accompaniment I tend to stick to fifths and fourths on the guitar rather than full on chords. If you're staying alert you can hedge a bet on whether to go down from the I to the VII, or up to the IV or V for the B part. If you've got it wrong then you can change pretty quickly and you'll have it right next time around.
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Post by Matt Milton on Feb 17, 2022 10:40:56 GMT
Based on how Bob Roberts sings it - which is pretty close to how Mike Waterson sings it too - I'd accompany While Gamekeepers like this:
D G A I had a long-legged lurcher dog, and I
D A D kept her in my keeping.
D A D A She'd run out hare, on a moonlit night, while
A7 D gamekeepers were sleeping, while
D A D gamekeepers were sleeping.
etc
I just had a go at it myself, having listened to the Bob Roberts version a few times now. It suits my voice to sing it in D (I think that's the key Bob Roberts sings it in). I play fingerstyle rather than strumming chords and I found that tuning to drop D started to give me the beginnings of a fingerstyle arrangement. Suspect it would work well in DADGAD.
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Post by ukpacker on Feb 19, 2022 0:03:07 GMT
Well I still can't get my head round accompanying this song with chords so I have just reverted to my default technique of just singing to the melody. I wonder how the likes of Martin Carthy or Nic Jones would accompany themselves to such a tune? Think I read somewhere that Nic Jones sometimes played the melody at a lower interval to harmonize with the sung melody, that sounds a bit clever for me but I guess to try it out first step would be to write out the melody and copy it a 5th bellow and see how that sounds when sung to?
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Post by ukpacker on Feb 19, 2022 8:13:07 GMT
Er why did the Soundcloud link not work?
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Post by ocarolan on Feb 19, 2022 10:29:20 GMT
ukpackerWorks for me - sounds good! Keith
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