Meeting Notes: Sun. 03 March 2013

This past-Sunday’s General Meeting was fun and enlightening in equal measure! Here are some notes:

1. Club Business

General Meeting attendance is up sharply over this time last year. And we’ve room for plenty more!

Tom K. has confirmed that GNIPC members receive a 5% discount when registering for the Center for Irish Music’s Minnesota Irish Music Weekend (MIM), June 13-16. This is the same discount CIM members receive! See http://www.centerforirishmusic.org/mim-2013/ for details.

To be eligible for this discount, you need to be current on dues. Although the Month of Dues Righteousness (aka February) has passed, it’s not too late to square up at https://gnipc.org/membership/.

2. Tunes

• The Rolling Wave / Garret Barry’s Jig
• Drops of Brandy / Leitrim Quickstep / Kid on the Mountain
• Eagle’s Whistle / O’Sullivan’s March
• Dronies

 

3. Tom Klein’s Demo: Playing in A and what that does for your piping

Tom performed the following sets in A, explaining technical challenges therein:

• The Spotted Dog / The Flying Wheelchair
• Saddle the Pony (hop jig version)
• The Dusty Miller / Top it Off

 

For this demo, besides using his regulator-clip trick to make an ersatz tenor A drone, Tom also had baritone & bass drones in B, the latter with an extension, fitted into his concert-set’s mainstock and tuned down to A.

As a bonus Tom also played “Barret Garry’s Jig” which is a clever D major re-working of Garret Barry’s Jig (the latter usually being in G Mixolydian) (If this makes no sense to you whatsoever, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Properties_of_musical_modes).

Tom spent the remainder of the meeting’s second hour teaching his A version of “The Dusty Miller,” which is especially valuable for improving your octave-break transitions and overall high E kung fu.

Over the next week or so, I’ll upload to our website a tune-transcription PDF or two, and possibly MP3s, from Tom’s demo.