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Tune Of The Month, April 2014: Zelda


Jim Besser

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Here's my next

 

Zelda

 

(thanks to Thomas and Jody for inspiring me to playing the start in a more bouncy way!)

 

(Edit: noticed that I sort of did that echo effect with part B which had been on my mind from the very beginning; might develop it to some further extent I'd say)

Edited by blue eyed sailor
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Here's mine.

 

http://youtu.be/XHe1z98sBC8

 

Jody, a question.

 

In the second measure, A part: the fingering on the F-E-D run is tricky on a GD/Jeffries.

 

I can't really see in your video: do you use the same finger to go from the F to the E on the middle row, just sort of sliding down, or do you drop down to the E on the bottom row using a different finger? I always assume that hitting consecutive notes with the same finger is bad form, but often find that difficult to put into practice.

 

Playing Zelda in Am on the G/D works great for me except for that awkward run.

 

Hi Jim, Yes, it's a bit tricky but not as tricky as what Thomas is doing! WOW

 

I'll try to answer your question. I play F-E-D as draw-draw-push. Rows: far-middle-middle. Fingers: ring-pinkie-ring. My G/D is a Jefferies 38.

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Thomas, from 1:15 to 1:30 you seem to deliberately make use of that rhythmic shift in the B-part (by playing straightly along the bars) which Jody had been afraid of... :D

 

Edit: A closer look reveals that the A-part is quite of the same kind: There appears to be an emphasis on the second half of the second bar which results in the impression of a 9/8 bar. Your version (other than mine), Thomas, keeps it rather strange but doesn't seem to completely avoid the effect.

 

Thus I'd say it's in the tune: an appealing irregularity finally adding up to 16 complete bars - which might have qualified it as a candidate for the "theme" thread as well...

Edited by blue eyed sailor
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It's not... but every time I get there, I'm fooled into thinking that it is.

 

I must be playing too many of those crooked West Virginia A modal tunes where they actually do such things... but without the dancers who might fall over in France. My beret is off to the clever Mr. Philippe Plard for devising such an economical harmonic/rhythmic deception!

 

Anyone else hear this cool bait and switch with the relationship between the chords and the melody forcing a crooked feel to an otherwise straight tune?

 

I'm in awe!

Yes! Yesterday I had to play it with a metronome because it was messing with my head.

 

The tune also has some interesting chording possibilities. Definitely a fun one.

 

 

 

I hear it very differently, and I think I have an explanation for the phenomenon that Jody and Jim are alluding to: Perhaps the notation is wrong.

 

As I hear the tune in the flashmob video, it doesn't start at the beginning of the measure, as the notation suggests, but halfway through, moving each bar line in the notation three beats (a half measure) one way or the other.

 

This would explain why Jody hears the chord changes in the middles of the measures (I hear them at the beginning of measures that start in a different place) and Jim needs a metronome to find the beat.

 

If you look carefully at the people dancing in the video, it seems that they hear it the same way I do (I guess they haven't seen the music).

 

I don't know if the music supplied above is copied from notation by the composer, Philippe Plard, or taken down as dictation from an audio source. But FWIW, this is what I hear on the video (which differs in a number of other respects from the music we were given):

 

X:1
T:Zelda
M:6/8
K:Am
|:e2A|e2A fed|e3 edc|B2B Bcd|cBA e2A|
      e2A fed|e3 edc|B2B BcB|A3:|
|:ABc|E2E ABc|F3 ABc|B2B dcB|cBA ABc|
      E2E ABc|F3 ABc|B2B dcB|A3:|

 

My recording, therefore, starts with three potatoes, not four, as Jim's does or two, as Jody's does.

 

Edited to add: Jody, in editing post #6 of this thread early this morning, you seem to have lost the link to your video.

 

 

Edited by David Barnert
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Hi David,



First off, thanks for the missing link alert. Here it is:


My Zelda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHe1z98sBC8



As for your ABC version of the tune, well I agree and I don't agree. Actually, I think it's just a cultural thing, that is, we all can't help but impose our cultural template on the music we hear.



For instance, I play traditional and new music for gamelan (Indonesian pitched percussion orchestra). My western ears want to hear the down-beat at the beginning of the music. In writing that down I would put the down-beat at the top left of the page with the big gong there. That is not how Indonesian musicians think of it, speak of it or write it down. They put that stressed beat at the end of a phrase. They might have a group of four beats with the stress on the last beat, but in listening to it, I would swear that the gong is on the down-beat of the next measure. On the page, that gong is the last note, not the first.



It can twist your head around.



Consider this book: http://www.mudthumper.com/fiddletunesbook.html


The Milliner - Koken Collection of American Fiddle Tunes. Follow the link and look at the examples. There are no bar lines because so many of the tunes are crooked. Milliner and Koken decided that putting bar lines in would be a purely editorial decision based on cultural norms not really shared by the source players that the tunes were collected from... so they left them out. This was to avoid having to do the kind of thing you did in reconfiguring the Zelda notation.



Example #2 is more to the point. Listen to Kost er C'hoat.


http://jodykruskal.com/tune_of_the_month/december_2006.html


Two French (Breton) dance tunes that I got from Alan Day and put up in 2006. They also have that interesting feature that makes us like Zelda so much. Strong harmonic changes half way through a measure that makes me unsure where the measures are.



To sum it up... you can write Zelda down any way you like, or not at all, but IMO, what makes it sound so cool is that it sounds so French.


Edited by Jody Kruskal
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The key to the timing on this tune which is used for the dance which we all know as the Circassion Circle Dance is that the first part of the dance is at brisk walking pace and then fast enough for a polka dance at the end. We used to play the Russian tune used by "Game Boy" and gradually speed it up to very fast. This is a very popular dance in France.Look closely at the Paris dance Flash Mob posted at the start of this Monthly tune for the correct moderate speed.

This is a lovely tune and some great examples have been posted.

 

Al

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The Cercle Circassian is becoming an increasingly popular first dance at French bals, often done as a mixer at about the tempo of the Paris flash mob. I've also been at some bals where it's danced as the first dance and again as the first dance of the second half.

 

All very confusing for those of us more used to the English ceilidh tradition where the Circassian Circle is the last dance of the evening (give or take an informal 'encore' polka) ...

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The Cercle Circassian is becoming an increasingly popular first dance at French bals, often done as a mixer at about the tempo of the Paris flash mob. I've also been at some bals where it's danced as the first dance and again as the first dance of the second half.

 

All very confusing for those of us more used to the English ceilidh tradition where the Circassian Circle is the last dance of the evening (give or take an informal 'encore' polka) ...

When we first started to play a English/French dances in Paris as Rosbif ,must be about twenty years ago, they loved this dance and in particular the change in speeds.

Al

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Here is my another WIP recording, this time with harmony - mostly drone/chord, with added rhytmic fifths, but my next step will be to add some more audible rhytm on the left hand as this is somehow dull and obscures the lively nature of this tune a bit.

https://soundcloud.com/martynowi-cz/zelda-wip-with-harmony

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Hi Łukasz,

 

I don't find your accompaniment dull - it's more in the melody as for me, which might start jumping down rather a 5th than just a 3rd.

 

OTOH I can easily understand that you haven't got where you want to get, a quite familiar feeling... :)

 

Best wishes - Wolf

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Okay, I've got to admit... I'm having some trouble with this tune.

 

Most of it is due to my extreme beginner status--I feel like I'm trying to play this tune before I've really learned how to play this sort of tune (if that makes any sense).

 

A lot of it is that the melody strongly features those notes that are duplicated on the G and C rows, and sometimes even the Accidental row (I'm on a 30-button Anglo, Wheatstone layout). Sometimes I feel like it's better to play them one way, and other times the other. Maybe I should just pick on way and practice that, whether it's the "best" way or not?

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Hi Jeff, when faced with these decisions, I pick the melody buttons/directions that go with the chords in the tune. Another way of saying the same thing is that the harmony on the left hand dictates how I need to play the melody on the right hand... and visa versa.

 

As a child, I heard my older brother play Anglo with melody and chords going at once. Later, as a young adult when I was an extreme beginner, I asked my brother for Anglo advice. He said that if I wanted to play tunes with chords, I had to learn them both together. He told me that it would never work to learn the melody only and then attach the chords to it. This is true for the reasons you just mentioned... too many options. There are lots of ways to play the melody alone, but there are only a few ways to play melody and harmony together. Harmony and melody are so intwined on the Anglo that both the left and right hand have to be learned together and they limit each other so that there are only a few puzzle solutions as you figure out a new tune... often there is really only one way to do it in terms of button and direction choice.

 

That said... Zelda would not be an easy "first tune" to play on the harmonic Anglo. Better to start with something that has only two or perhaps three chords, something in a major key, like C if you are playing a C/G Anglo.

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Hi Jeff, when faced with these decisions, I pick the melody buttons/directions that go with the chords in the tune. Another way of saying the same thing is that the harmony on the left hand dictates how I need to play the melody on the right hand... and visa versa.

 

As a child, I heard my older brother play Anglo with melody and chords going at once. Later, as a young adult when I was an extreme beginner, I asked my brother for Anglo advice. He said that if I wanted to play tunes with chords, I had to learn them both together. He told me that it would never work to learn the melody only and then attach the chords to it. This is true for the reasons you just mentioned... too many options. There are lots of ways to play the melody alone, but there are only a few ways to play melody and harmony together. Harmony and melody are so intwined on the Anglo that both the left and right hand have to be learned together and they limit each other so that there are only a few puzzle solutions as you figure out a new tune... often there is really only one way to do it in terms of button and direction choice.

 

That said... Zelda would not be an easy "first tune" to play on the harmonic Anglo. Better to start with something that has only two or perhaps three chords, something in a major key, like C if you are playing a C/G Anglo.

I agree with Jody,Jeff I am having difficulty with this tune and I have been playing for over forty years.I can play it ,but I am not happy with it yet.

Al

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Thanks Jody & Alan!

 

Jody, to be honest I wasn't even thinking about playing it in a "harmonic style". I was going for more of a Irish vibe, with just the melody line, figuring I could always multitrack in an accompanying instrument if I felt it needed it. And that's the nice thing about being a beginner--you're tickled pink to just wangle a melody out of the thing. :-)

 

But your advice still does help. I was playing around with adding the odd harmony here and there this morning, and it did help narrow down things, even if I don't ultimately use the harmonies. And it helped me sort of "let go" of the need to finger the song in the best-most-optimal-super-efficient-no-chopping-allowed way and instead just play the dang thing.

 

All that, combined with a good night's sleep, and it's starting to not sound half-bad!

 

- Jeff

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FWIW, here's my current fingering for the tune.

 

I made up the tab method, but it's pretty straightforward and I wouldn't be surprised if others have come up with the same idea:

 

  • Each line is a row on the concertina.
  • Buttons in each row are numbered 1-5, low-to-high.
  • Pushes and pulls are indicated with down bow (table-looking-thing) and up bow (bird beak) marks, respectively.

 

So you can see some awkwardness in the B section. Not sure if that's the best way to go about it. But it keeps that repeated abc figure consistent on the buttons at least.

Zelda Tab.pdf

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Hi Jeff, I looked at your Tab file. That's an interesting way to play it but not the way I would. Without sitting down for an hour to make you an arrangement let me just suggest that you get Gary Coovers book which has a quite different and more compete tab scheme. However, just to get you thinking, I would play the A section melody like this:

 

R2, L4a, R2, L4a

R3, R2, R2, R2

 

R2, R2, R1, R1, R1

R1, R1, R2, R1, L4a

 

The push and draw part starts: P P P P, D P D P. You can figure out the rest. Here is the button # plan so you can see what buttons I'm referring to:

 

post-557-0-12453100-1397850474_thumb.gif
Edited by Jody Kruskal
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C-G Anglo concertina seems to be quite far from C-G diatonic accordion. Tunes which are easy on one can be much more tricky on the other and vice versa. For instance, zelda seems to be not a tune for concertina beginner but it is for diatonic accordion players. I think this tune has been composed by Philippe Plard not on the "paper" but directly on the diatonic accordion. The notes are "under" the fingers and the tune zelda is often used in diatonic accordion workshop.

 

About strong/weak or first/second beat, I don't understand how does it really work... At the start I thougt it was an error of composition (my apologize to Philippe!...). So I know when I start the tune but I don't understand what it happens after... But in any case, dancers don't care about it!.. We can see it on the flashmob video in Paris..

Here is my C-G diatonic accordion attempt. It was a good opportunity to take it out of its case...... Even If it has 18 keys at the left, I just use the 8 basics keys you have on each two rows and eight bass accordion.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU7TviDsLtY

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