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Author Topic: Way to Wylam/The Factory Smoke/The Lass from Harrogate at Upton Folk Festival  (Read 3024 times)

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robotmay

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Popped over to Upton Upon Severn for the festival this weekend, and decided to enter the acoustic folk competition that took place on Saturday evening. Not sure of the results yet but it was fun and good practice at playing to an audience (it filled out a bit while I was playing which I think is a good sign ;D).

I played a set of three tunes I've learnt fairly recently. There's a few fluffs and I had to modify The Factory Smoke to work on a 2-row due to missing notes, but overall it was worth doing. The last tune is one I nabbed from squeezy's new tunebook, which I can definitely recommend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEl6dGwYIeg

Good to see a few people from here in the sessions too (:)
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richard.fleming

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Last time people poured in when I was playing it had just started raining ...
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Old Paolo Sopranis in C#/D and D/D#

nigelr

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Nicely done.  I love "The Way To Wylam" since Julian Sutton's workshop at Witney.  It's been vexing me ever since - I think grafting an extra finger on each hand should allow me to nail it (:)
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DB Oakwood Super 2 (D/G), Mory (D/G/Acc), Erika (Bb/Eb) and an HA114 in C

robotmay

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Nicely done.  I love "The Way To Wylam" since Julian Sutton's workshop at Witney.  It's been vexing me ever since - I think grafting an extra finger on each hand should allow me to nail it (:)

There's certainly a knack to that tune! I think I play a couple of notes on a different row to Julian, which makes it a little easier for me in the jumps up/down the scale and how I hold the box ;D
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Schnorbitz

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Lovely playing. Good set of tunes as well :-)
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robotmay

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Lovely playing. Good set of tunes as well :-)

Thanks Schnorbitz :)
They're some of my favourite tunes I've learnt in the past year. The James Hill book I bought has been a goldmine for great hornpipes, so it was fun to finally figure out a set that involves one ;D
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Ellisteph

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Popped over to Upton Upon Severn for the festival this weekend, and decided to enter the acoustic folk competition that took place on Saturday evening. Not sure of the results yet but it was fun and good practice at playing to an audience (it filled out a bit while I was playing which I think is a good sign ;D).

I played a set of three tunes I've learnt fairly recently. There's a few fluffs and I had to modify The Factory Smoke to work on a 2-row due to missing notes, but overall it was worth doing. The last tune is one I nabbed from squeezy's new tunebook, which I can definitely recommend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEl6dGwYIeg
Great set & very well played. You'll have to let us know when you find out how you did in the competition; if you don't win the others must have been really good!

Good to see a few people from here in the sessions too (:)
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robotmay

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I came second, as it turns out ;D
My vote would have gone to the guy who won; he was a really nice singer and sang a lovely couple of songs. He'll make a much better gig than me for next year's festival, though I might get a chance to do a small spot (:)
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Ellisteph

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I came second, as it turns out ;D
My vote would have gone to the guy who won; he was a really nice singer and sang a lovely couple of songs. He'll make a much better gig than me for next year's festival, though I might get a chance to do a small spot (:)
Well done. you have every right to be proud of yourself.
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Salterelle Connemara III, Loffet Pro C/F

robotmay

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Thanks! It was good practice for playing in front of a non-dance audience, I get far more nervous performing like that than I do for morris etc :o
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bellowpin

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Thanks! It was good practice for playing in front of a non-dance audience, I get far more nervous performing like that than I do for morris etc :o
  well done , confident performance I thought .     "stage fright" can grip us all, and adds to the pressure.  how do others settle them selves??   
      lovely tunes well played .  can you say which box from your stable you were using?               thanks brian.
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whole life in the shropshire hills. on the slow track and enjoying it.

robotmay

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can you say which box from your stable you were using?

I can indeed; it's a Castagnari Lilium, which is the box I use the most these days. I used to play it rather softly but it turns out it has quite a punch if you give it some welly ;D
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Grape Ape

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Really enjoyed the playing and the tunes- great execution!
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robotmay

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I've finally gotten around to doing a proper audio recording of this set of tunes. Took me bloody ages to get clean takes, particularly of squeezy's Lass from Harrogate (and I'm still fudging a note or two in there). Audio's probably a bit variable in places as I had to use my gooseneck mics and they wiggled about a bit. I might look at getting some condenser mics on stands for recording (or "borrowing" some from a recording setup at work ::)).

Also my first time using Ardour for audio editing. I have almost no idea what I'm doing, but it's rather nice once you accidentally stumble on the right buttons to push ;D

https://soundcloud.com/robotmay/wylam-factory-lass

I'm now officially done with this set for a while, and I can finally stop playing them every single day!
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Ellisteph

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I've finally gotten around to doing a proper audio recording of this set of tunes. Took me bloody ages to get clean takes, particularly of squeezy's Lass from Harrogate (and I'm still fudging a note or two in there). Audio's probably a bit variable in places as I had to use my gooseneck mics and they wiggled about a bit. I might look at getting some condenser mics on stands for recording (or "borrowing" some from a recording setup at work ::)).

Also my first time using Ardour for audio editing. I have almost no idea what I'm doing, but it's rather nice once you accidentally stumble on the right buttons to push ;D

https://soundcloud.com/robotmay/wylam-factory-lass

I'm now officially done with this set for a while, and I can finally stop playing them every single day!
Sounds really good. Well worth all the effort.
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Salterelle Connemara III, Loffet Pro C/F

playandteach

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Really great. Playing, box, and sound quality. Can you share your recording set up in more detail?
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robotmay

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Really great. Playing, box, and sound quality. Can you share your recording set up in more detail?

It's an odd mixture of tech and...shoelaces at the moment ;D
The gooseneck mics are Thomann CC 100s. They've been pretty good so far, though I do wish they had detachable cables as I'm pretty certain I'll rip them out accidentally at some point.
I've got some ideas around making a portable mic attachment system similar to how squeezy does his (using magnets) but I haven't had time lately. So at the moment they're attached quite poorly:



Then, because I have it anyway and as the small gooseneck mics lose a bit of the character of the instrument, I have a third mic on a very professional stand ::)
Not very obvious from this angle but it's a Thomann large-diaphragm mic. I use it for voice chat stuff on my computer most of the time.



And finally, they're all plugged into a Focusrite 18i8, which was quite expensive. It's a great bit of kit though, and I wanted something I could use to power up to 4 mics for myself. My previous audio interface was very old and I got it for free, so I considered this a bit of an investment, especially as this is pretty portable and I could use it when doing small stage stuff. It also seems to work very well on both Windows and Linux, which is handy, as the desktop it's on runs Windows (for videogames) and my laptop runs Linux (for programming).

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Andy Next Tune

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Hi Rob,

Do you run Ardour on Linux or on Windows? Just doing some reading before downloading a trial and the info on configuring the 'now supported' Windows version is very sparse.

I'm playing around with a recently acquired (ebay) Zoom R16 Digital Recorder which will connect with a DAW as both an 8 channel audio interface and control surface. It works a dream with the free version of Tracktion I got with a Behringer mixer, but thought I'd look at something more 'mainstream'.

Cheers, Andy
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Andy, from the now ex-County Palatine of Cheshire

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robotmay

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I've managed to get it going on both without too much difficulty, though figuring out the audio interface configuration was probably the trickiest part. On Windows my interface is handled through ASIO, which I would assume the Zoom supports (that's a really snazzy looking interface btw). Not sure if it'll help but here's how mine is set up in Ardour:



From the look of it your R16 does the control surface stuff via midi, which Ardour does seem to have support for these days but I'm not sure if it'll work automatically. Apparently you can write your own midi map for it if it's not though.
I must admit that I'm not as sharp at debugging/configuring stuff on Windows as I am on Linux; even if the support for hardware is missing on Linux you can normally fudge it ;D

My laptop is my Linux machine and I could bring it with me to FoD and see if we could figure it out, but unfortunately audio interfacing is rather different between the two platforms.
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Andy Next Tune

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Thanks Rob, I think I'll park Ardour for a future rainy day project as it sounds like it may need a clear head, patience and crossed fingers. The Zoom has its own Win10 driver rather than using ASIO or ASIO4ALL, which may make things easier, or alternatively.........

It emulates Mackie Control for the control surface stuff, hopefully that ought to be supported and just work.

So don't bother bringing your laptop to FoD, let's focus on music instead :)
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Andy, from the now ex-County Palatine of Cheshire

Caring for a European community of melodeons from France, Italy, Germany, Wales and Suffolk!
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