Category: Minor key tunes

The Red House Reel

A classic dance tune The Red House Reel – I know this from a Jimmy Shand album (as per the video below), but it’s earliest collection appears to be in the 9th edition of the Playford Collection 1695. It was used in a range of theatrical productions in the 1700s, with more info available here on the invaluable tunearch.org website. It has various titles in English, Scots and Welsh and there are both major and minor versions, showing it to be a very popular tune that was absorbed into various different traditions.

The tune is often played in G minor, with F#s rather than F naturals, but E minor is also common, either with D#s or D naturals.

We are using the tune to accompany a 40-bar dance and so are playing AABBC – this is also a useful tune for the Eightsome Reel, the beginning and end sections of which are 40 bars long. The tune may be also be played as a 48 bar tune, as AABBCC.

The Red House ReelDownload

Accompaniment patterns for Mynnyd Yr Heliwr

We tried three different accompaniment patterns for our tune, with an alternative set of chords from week one – each player picked a note from each chord, linking them together to create their own personalised part.

Looking at the PDF below, A is the short stabs, B has the overlapping patterns used earlier in the term and C is the feature rhythm for the A section only. All are illustrated with the A section and the notes used are also illustrative, please use your own chosen notes:

mynnyd accompDownload

Tune with new chord sequence:

Mynnyd Yr Heliwr 2Download

Extra task: try playing the tune in a different key, specifically A minor. Why?

1. Many tunes have more than one ‘standard’ key that they tend to be played in, and so being able to switch into a different key is a very useful skill to have in any setting. Examples of this are Cock of the North (G/A/D), Jump at the Sun (Gm/Em) and Mrs McCloud’s (G/A mixolydian).

2. Thinking in terms of intervals rather than in terms of fingerings/notes will make you more flexible as a musician. It’s good for your brain! I don’t expect many of you to be able to get it perfect first time, that’s not how learning music works, but practising this skill will also help to get the tune firmly into your memory banks.

Mr Moore’s Hornpipe

Here’s our tune from Monday 29th, Mr Moore’s Hornpipe. It’s widely used as a Border Morris tune, first (it seems) by the team Boggart’s Breakfast – the tune appears to come from the Thomas Watts manuscript of the late 18th century, from the Peak Forest in Derbyshire (researched by Brian Peters of Glossop). The tune as I know it is a little different from the manuscript,  I think this is most likely the ‘session effect’ where tunes get tweaked and rounded out over time.

Here’s the tune in action, in the dance Lorenz’s Shiny New Butterfly by Sheffield border Morris team Boggart’s Breakfast:

The Rights of Man

The tune from June 9th, as requested by Mary D, The Rights of Man. This is a hornpipe that was first published in the 1870s, it’s played widely across Ireland, Scotland and England. I’ve included two chord progressions (as PDFs), we will examine the effects of these next week, amongst other things.

Here’s a video (with focus on violin left hand) with some of the variations we tried, there are also some interesting sound recordings on the TuneArch.org page.

The Rights of Man 1Download
The Rights of Man 2Download

Throw the Beetle at Her

A slip jig (9/8) played in Scotland and Ireland. The beetle in question is “the name in parts of northern Ireland and Scotland for a heavy wooden implement shaped like a pestle or club that was used to mash potatoes (sometimes called a ‘potato-beetle’), and colloquially used as a verb meaning ‘to give a beating to’, as in “I’ll beetle him!” (Source; The Trad Tune Archive).

Throw the Beetle at HerDownload

Accompaniment patterns for tunes in 3 time

In order to create an accompanying pattern for our recent tunes in 3, we took inspiration from the melodic pattern in bar one of La Tete Ailleurs. This is essentially an E minor triad (three note chord) so we played it and then transposed the pattern for each chord in the piece, starting on an A for the A minor chord, a D for the D major chord etc.

We then took things up a notch, changing the inversions of the triads to keep the patterns a similar register. What’s an inversion? It’s the order in which you play the notes, for instance an A minor triad is ACE in root position, CEA in first inversion and EAC in second inversion. Below is a version that uses root and second inversion chords to create a part that flows.

We switched to long notes in the B section to vary the texture, choosing the root note of each chord.

La Tete Ailleurs with acc patternDownload