What New Song Are Your Currently Working On?"Amazing Grace".
In DADGAD.
Here's the story about teaching this old dog a new trick.
Hopefully it will be amusing and/or insightful.
A while back on the "Acoustic Tuesday" show on YouTube, Tony Polecastro featured an artist named Tony McManus, a renowned Celtic Guitar player. Much of his material is in DADGAD. I liked what I heard, and bought some Tony McManus music on cd.
On a subsequent Acoustic Tuesday program, Tony Polecastro featured a quick DADGAD session, encouraging everyone to try it. He said that because DADGAD wasn't tuned to a specific chord and had no third, you could use it to play both major and minor key songs. This was a selling point for me, and so I tuned a 6 string guitar to DADGAD. After learning a 2+ octave D major scale built around the open positions, and playing around with it a bit, I felt it was time to explore.
I play "Rising of the Moon" in G major, and Donovan's "Three Kingfishers" in E minor, both as 12 string instrumentals. They are built around using the DGB and the EGB open strings, respectively, as drones, plus other frettings of course. I tried both pieces in 'D' (major and minor, respectively) on the 6 string with the DADGAD tuning, and both worked very well for a first try.
Here's where it got a bit strange. On YouTube I found :
"Celtic Fingerstyle Guitar
An Introduction by Tony McManus",
and featuring a piece titled "Si Bheag, Si Mhor"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DLJYk7LI0sLooks simple and sounds great, right?
But it turns out that after playing the finished piece, he digresses into what he could have done for his arrangement and the choices he made. Actually very interesting, but somewhere along the line I realized I couldn't quite pick up the underlying melody, mostly because it's not a tune I'm familiar with. That is, which notes are part of the tune and which notes are part of the supporting arrangement.
So I started looking around for something more. Among other videos featuring McManus on YouTube, I found what I think works as a 'Rosetta Stone' for me :
"The Process of Arranging Celtic Melodies
by Tony McManus"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWfVznJpvIcIn this one he basically states that he starts with the melody, and finds a guitar tuning that works best for it. Then he works out what chords and notes support the melody, making his arrangement unique. Which is kind of what he did in the other video, but didn't start close enough to the beginning for this DADGAD novice. But the idea of 'melody first' was now imprinted on my brain. Then build your arrangement around it. I have always enjoyed doing my own arrangements, and knew that would be a fun part of the process.
I decided to work from the ground up, using songs with which I was familiar but didn't already play. That way I had no preconceptions about anything. I chose and worked out the melody to "Old Folks at Home" by Stephen Foster. (You may know it as "Suwannee River".) And then "Amazing Grace". I decided to use key of D for both as I was working out the melodies, mostly because that is the key which I would initially use with DADGAD. After learning the melodies and playing them many times each, I felt that "Amazing Grace" held the most promise. Even while learning the melody, I started using hammers, pulls, and slides to stretch the melody and really liked the result.
So right now I have a somewhat fluid first arrangement using drones and hinted chords to accompany my version of playing (with) the melody. Not a finished product yet, but the goal is to arrive at a piece interesting enough to play in mixed company. 'Mixed' in this case being loosely defined as a spectrum from non-musicians to guitarists.
Thanks for reading,
Don
