Your Wiki link is off for some reason, PB+J. But if you click on "Did you mean: So What (Miles Davis composition)?" - it's near the top, next to a lightbulb icon - you get the page intended. I copied that URL for here, but got the same bad link. Weird.

_________________
"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

My apologies—I don’t know what went wrong there

I think the way Martin Hayes and The Gloaming play a tune like The old Bush is interesting. It gets to a quality of strangeness that I think is in the tune even when it’s played in the usual pub session way or by Micho Russell, say. I can see how they would get irritating but something about the various drones and plucks in their version of the old bush or the rolling wave refusing to either leave home or go home?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7zbeRR4j5AM

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi0GwF-QNmo

Thank y'all for the suggestions and comments. A question along the same line of thinking. I used to play whistle occasionally with singers who would often capo their guitars in a certain way that it would make my fingering difficult on a D whistle. Assuming you have multiple keyed whistles, is there a quick way to determine which whistle would work best with a certain tune? Is there something I could ask the guitarist (assuming they know something about the key of the tune, etc) which would make me instantly pick up the right whistle?

I've corrected the original link. It works now, in PB+J's original post above.

What it is, for some reason, Wikipedia links lose the final closing bracket. You need to add it back in, and make sure that you add it within the url tags, not outside. Wikipedia does this routinely - goodness only knows why - so it's worth remembering this little wrinkle.

_________________
"Only connect!"

https://youtu.be/ezbWVysJAOY
https://tapm.bandcamp.com/

My go-to would be to simply ask for the key. If you can't find out that way, then next I would try to find it using a D whistle. Listen for the tonic - the fundamental note the song centers on and which in most cases determines the key of the tune - and try to locate it on your whistle. If it's sharp or flat of what's on your whistle, you can take it from there, too. In any case, your findings should give you the key and, to a reasonable extent, which whistles you should use. However, just because a song is in X, it won't automatically mean that an X whistle will serve you best if you're trying to match the song note for note, though it's a reliable place to start if all you're doing is harmonizing along.

With some keys you might have to sit it out, depending on how comprehensive your whistle collection is. But it's also an opportunity to work on and master your half-holing.


Thanks, Ben!


Now I'm really confused. Our modes are intimately linked to the diatonic scale, because they arise out of it. Did you instead mean "chromatic"?

_________________
"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

I meant the way in which chords tend to change with the scale degree, so in the key of C, Cmaj7, Dm7, Em7, Fmaj7, G7, Am7 Bm7b5. If you play those as arpeggios they make sense right away. In a thousand jazz standards you'll find a I VI II V movement (Cmaj7, Am7, Dm7, G7: it's "Heart and Soul on the kids piano lesson) and thousands of II V I moves, (so in C, Dm7, G7, Cmaj7). Those chord patterns follow the rules of diatonic harmony--the I is major, the II is minor, the V is dominant. Of course there can be man variants, but that harmonic logic is really deeply instilled, and in the Charlie Parker tune I referenced above I hear it really strongly, while in the Miles Davis tune I don't. And I don't hear it in "the Shaskeen" either, for example. Does that make any sense?

As someone once told, me, there's a reason they call it music theory and not music fact!

Without a comprehensive grounding in theory, I'm afraid it doesn't. I can't think of a good, defensible reason to use 7ths, if ever, in backing Trad, so whatever relevance they might have in theoretical progressions is utterly irrelevant to my purposes. Consequently, as someone interested only in Trad playing, I have no practical reason to be conversant in them. "Bm7b5" means absolutely zero to me. I had to go to YouTube to hear it, and I can assure you that I would never have use for it. That's tiki lounge stuff.

That said, I had a brief occasion to work with an Irish guitarist who, while steeped in the tradition, was all about the jazzier sorts of backup. He was able to make it work because he knew full well what he was doing, but even though he was brilliant and my superior in every way, and it was a good experience for me in pushing my boundaries, it's not my cup of tea at all. But I've been called a stick-in-the-mud before, and I'm fine with that. I'd rather evoke the ceol draíochta aspect of the tradition, as I conceive it.

_________________
"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

Can I just say that "that's tiki lounge stuff" is one of the best phrases I've seen on here in many a year?

_________________
"Only connect!"

https://youtu.be/ezbWVysJAOY
https://tapm.bandcamp.com/

_________________
"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

It's a straightforward, bog-standard chord met and used in far more than just jazz. So, while your cute phrase has obviously amused Ben, it's way wide of the mark and I suspect Ben knows this fine well!

_________________
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

Why I teach... and where
Master of nine?

My point, Peter, is that despite its broad application in contemporary music (for which "tiki lounge" was to serve as a loose allusion), its utility in Trad is, to my thinking, nil. No need to get offended.

_________________
"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

Yes m7b5 chords are not confined to jazz--they're part of the vocab of diatonic harmony: they're all over the place. it's the chord you'll want to sing on the seventh degree of the scale. Don't blame jazz for the m7b5. Blame jazz for the Maj7#11, the "lydian chord."

Also 'm not advocating for the use of sevenths in Trad.

Also why do you disrespect polynesian culture that way?

A lot of folk music has an interesting indifference to chord structure. Lots of blues guys would go to the four chord whenever the felt like it, rather than at measure five, and it's often kind of relaxed about the momentum of origin and return.

I love this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd0GnCtjgKE. I use it in class a lot because it's so indeterminate. The students don't know what to cal it; they don't know if he's black or white, they don't know what to think about the "quills," the panpipe. It's ot really going anywhere for most of the song even though its a song abut traveling. and then it gets to Chicago and ends.

I hear a lot of accompaniment to Irish music that just seems wrong to me, like the guitar player is trying to do I IV V or make it into a 1960s style folk song.

I was trying to discuss this with a friend who isn't any kind of musician, and I sent him this version of "the Rolling Wave," where I thought the guitar player was just coming at it from the wrong direction, trying to impose a harmonic structure that ended up making the tune less interesting and more trite. I have nothing against these guys and am sorry to hold them up as a bad example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWOs_tl3Tgg

One of the things jazz musicians started doing in the 60s was "Quartal harmony" where instead of making chords by stacking thirds they started stacking fourths. A famous example is the piano on Coltrane's version of "my favorite things," especially the piano solo, starting at about 2:17

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWG2dsXV5HI

there are whole classes done on that solo, and how relaxed it is and how it's not really interested in either leaving or returning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kl9NBwii5w)

I think this is what DADGAD tuning is all about, subbing drones and root/five/octave for major and minor chords and to my ear, lending more of a "suspended" feeling and escaping the major minor alternation. This is suppose is what i mean about irish music being "modal." And I think thsi is why people hear someone like Dennis Cahill as being "jazzy."

Dont' worry, no need to be afraid of the spector of the seventh

You fooled me. I thought you were serious for a moment.

_________________
"Only connect!"

https://youtu.be/ezbWVysJAOY
https://tapm.bandcamp.com/

I'm not offended... just saying your label is mistaken. You make it sound arty, exotic and/or pretentious when it's not much past 'the cat sat on the mat' in terms of language equivalence. And it's not just contemporary music but historical stuff too, including the whole body of mainstream baroque/classical/romantic repertoire.

Your earlier point about open chords for trad was well made and very much in line with what I was trying to say about sliding sus/added note forms producing elements of drone or pedal point (I just forgot to include literally 'open'). But there's nothing rarefied about m7b5 (aka half-diminished) even if you can't see yourself ever using it.

_________________
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

Why I teach... and where
Master of nine?