Month: September 2020

A tune to go with Rig a Jig Jig, this is The Dory Boat. It has a lot of the same melodic shapes and rhythms as Rig a Jig Jig, and lots of opportunity for trying out varying the tune in subtle ways. Here is a demo and a walk through of the tune:

Here are the dots, with a PDF to download below:

Here is a video on the melodic variations we tried out:

And finally a video on jig rhythms and how to play them. A bit fiddle-centric I’m afraid but I’m sure the strummers and wind people can interpret it all!

Here’s our opening tune of the term, Rig a Jig Jig it’s an cheerful English jig, with a lot of bounce! Here’s a demo of the tune:

Here are the dots, with a PDF available here:

This tune contains a lot of arpeggio shapes, so I set the challenge of adding some extra notes in between the small intervals that these shapes give us- you might have spotted some of these variations creeping into in my demo video! So for instance, you could add an A in between the first two notes of bar 2, giving you a quaver run of BAG. These subtle little variations are just one way in which folk musicians play around with tunes, and they can be dropped in here and there for variety and as a way of putting your own stamp of individuality on the tune. Try a few out – maybe one every couple of bars or so – and see what you like the sound of!