> Hear, hear. (A good instructor could coach you through the comp > > and help adjust your attitude towards it, to something a little > healthier. But, as I said, comps are not for everyone. We just > shouldn't assume that what is bad for you is bad for me.)
Heh..Heh.. What I would want to play, or rather the way I would want to play it, is not something that would be exactly appropriate for a fiddle competition. :-) Have you ever heard track 1, "Beaton's favorite" off of Ashley MacIsaac's album "Hi How Are You Today?". I personally think he's totally brilliant, because he's taken traditional Scottish music and made it totally accessible to regular people of my generation. I've actually heard that track played in nightclubs here in Los Angeles. That's something which very few other people have been able to do. One of my buddies who runs a recording studio in Venice (who knows nothing about Scottish music) when he first met me said "So you play Scottish music? Like Ashley MacIsaac and Wolfstone? Wow, those guys really rock.. That's really cool!" Another traditional artist who has brought traditional music into this century is Mary Jane Lamond, singing entirely in Gaelic.. I'm a huge fan of hers as well. That's the direction I'm starting to go with this music. At heart I'm a traditional player, but it's time for me to push the envelope. I want my peers to feel just how gutsy this music can be. It's not just old dudes sitting around playing ancient tunes in the gleab. My next move is to buy an electric fiddle, either a Zeta or a Yamaha, and start pluging it into all my guitar effects, just to see how much I can tweak the tones out of 4 little strings. Guitarists have been experimenting with this stuff since the 1940's, I think it will be interesting to see just how much I can get my fiddle to not sound like a fiddle. Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
