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the blue-eyed rascal


shelly0312

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ooo, oooo. I just discovered this week's favorite: the Blue-Eyed Rascal. I'm just getting all those strung together triplets to flow. I'm learning to love triplets. Bless you Paul Harding! Michelle

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What a coincidence... I discovered the same tune a few weeks ago and it's far out my favorite since. I found it in one of the Paul Hardy's tunebooks. But I asked around and it is in fact a set dance and NOT a hornpipe, so it would have to be played even slower as a hornpipe: one dances very complicated stuff to it... I also found the chords in the PH tunebook a bit too much. More simple chords: My link

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What a coincidence... I discovered the same tune a few weeks ago and it's far out my favorite since. I found it in one of the Paul Hardy's tunebooks. But I asked around and it is in fact a set dance and NOT a hornpipe, so it would have to be played even slower as a hornpipe: one dances very complicated stuff to it... I also found the chords in the PH tunebook a bit too much. More simple chords: My link

 

I'm always willing to receive suggestions for better chords! I'm not a chord instrument player myself (other than tinkering with a guitar nearly 40 years ago), but the practice session I help run (http://greenshootsmusic.org.uk) always has a few guitar players who want some guidance. So if no chords were provided at the source of the melody, I computer generate some using ABCmus and then massage them to sort of work! I'll try your chords and adopt them for the next edition if they work for me. Improvements to chords for any other tunes also welcome.

 

Regarding the tune being a hornpipe - I learned the tune from a session where it was certainly played with the quaver pairs being long-short - "dum da-dum da" I could have written that explicitly as G>F G>A, but it was simpler to keep it as GF GA and set the rhythm to Hornpipe, which abc2midi interprets as to set a dotted rhythm. The term Hornpipe has had many meanings over the years (beyond being a tune played on a pipe made of horn), but I gather that it is commonly used now to indicate a dotted pair tune.

 

Again, my rhythm annotations are a bit arbitrary - waltz (3/4), jig (6/8) and slipjig (9/8) are usually pretty obvious (but 3/4 could be a minuet or mazurka) , but 4/4 tunes can be reels, polkas, etc that are not easy for me to tell apart. Marches should be in 2/2 but often appear in 4/4. I've added my best guess to all the tunes for consistency, but always happy to get corrections.

 

I agree that Blue Eyed Rascal is a good tune though.

 

Final point (for Michelle) - I'm Paul Hardy not Paul Harding!

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Hello Paul. I like your tunebooks very much! As for the Blue eyed one, I play together with a very experienced accordeon player, and he came up with the chords. And indeed, it has to be played uneven, as most hornpipes. Careful with the rhytms though: 3/4 could be a lot of things: a slow air, a mazurka, a waltz or even a bourrée. 6/8 could be a jig, but also a march (e.g. 93 not out, Liberty Bell). Polkas are written in 2/4 most of the time, as they should be: they have a distinct 2-beat feel. 2/4 could also be something entirely different, as a bourrée in 2 times etc. Most hornpipes are written in 4/4. But so are reels, schottisches, etc. And to make things even more complicated, tunes could start as a march in 6/8 and end up being played by most as a jig. Slow airs in 3/4 could end up as a waltz. And some polkas were originally played uneven, but because this does not show in the sheet music, this is sometimes forgotten by players who learn from sheet music instead of by ear.

 

The Blue eyed should however remain a set dance I think, because the number of bars does not fit a hornpipe.

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