FINGERPICKING FIDDLE TUNES, Arranged for Fingerstyle Guitar. Ken Perlman. Centerstream Publications CD TABLATURE

FINGERPICKING FIDDLE TUNES, Arranged for Fingerstyle Guitar. K. Perlman. CD TABLATURE

Series: Guitar
Publisher: Centerstream Publications
Medium: Softcover with CD
Artist: Ken Perlman

With this book/CD pack, Ken Perlman presents a systematic approach to playing classic fiddle tunes fingerstyle on the guitar. Learn hoedowns, reels, set tunes, marches, hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys and airs from a pioneer of the style! 112 pages

Fingerpicking Fiddle Tunes was first published over two decades ago. Now that Centerstream is making it available again, this is a good opportunity to look at the book anew, and to reflect upon its role in contemporary instrumental folk music instruction. When the book first came out, playing traditional Celtic and Southern dance music (often called fiddle tunes) on fingerstyle guitar was quite rare. I had to work out the style and techniques presented in these pages on my own. Fingerpicking Fiddle Tunes was the first modem book to present a systematic approach to the playing of fiddle tunes on fingerstyle guitar. Of course, it was customary as far back as the Renaissance for fretted-instrument players to compose settings for folk dance tunes, and the approach they used was not dissimilar to the one used here. This practice had been out of fashion for centuries, however, and I was in fact unaware of this historical precedent until long after I had come up with my own approach. This was also the first modem folk music book to use a coherent and workable system of guitar tablature that included rhythm notation. Prior to the publication of Fingerpicking Fiddle Tunes, the writing of folk-guitar "tab" was fairly haphazard. In those bad old days, most guitar tab lacked rhythm notation (indications for half, quarter or eighth notes etc). Most tab-writers were also unclear about the location of upbeats and downbeats, inconsistent about the number of beats per measure, and inaccurate in terms of such rhythmic subtleties as ornamentation and syncopation. What's more, there was a general tendency towards carelessness: if a guitarist wasn't already familiar with a tune, he or she usually had little chance of learning it properly from the notation alone. By including rhythm notation, being careful about measures, upbeats, and downbeats, and by making a special effort to represent arrangements precisely, this book succeeded – probably for the first time - in accurately representing folk-guitar settings. It also set a standard that other compi lers of instruction books were quick to emulate. The new publisher and I decided to expand this new edition by roughly 25% and include eleven new arrangements - all of which are selections I have recorded over the years on the following LPs and CDs: Clawhammer Banjo and Fingerstyle Guitar Solos (Folk ways), Devil in the Kitchen (Marimac), Island Boy (Wizmak) and Northern Banjo (Copper Creek). Note that for these new tunes, there have been a few modifications in the tab and standard notational system employed: these are explained in an introduction to this new section. Of late, there has been an upsurge of interest in playing fingerstyle fiddle tunes on guitar. Many recent arrangements have employed open tunings - most notably "Dad-gad" tuning (DADGAD). My own settings are in standard or "drop-D" (DADGBE) tunings, but I'm sure that once you've tried a few pieces, you'll agree that these tunings are equal, or even superior to open tunings as vehicles for the genre. The arrangements in this book offer you an excellent opportunity to transfer the spirit and vitality of traditional Irish, Scottish, and Southern dance music to your instrument. I hope you enjoy playing them as much as I enjoyed creating my approach to the style! Ken Perlman, Massachusetts

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Tablature

About the Music

Learning the Necessary Skills

Old Joe Clarke

Angeline the Baker

Boatman

Georgia Railroad

Cluck Old Hen

Jimmy Allen

Little Beggar Man, The

Hoedowns

Over the Waterfall

Arkansas Traveller

June Apple

Sugar in the Gourd

Whiskey Before Breakfast

Reels & Set Tunes

The Spanish Lady

The Rose Tree

Swallowtail Reel

Drowsy Maggie

Marches

Return from Fingal, The

Nancy

Halting March, The

Battle of Aughrim, The

Napoleon Crossing the Rhine

Hornpipes

Boys of Blue Hill, The

Rights of Man, The

Fisher's Hornpipe

Flowers of Edinburgh, The

Jigs

Road to Lisdoonvarna, The

O'Keefe's Slide

Elsie Marley

Haste to the Wedding

Some 3/4 Time Tunes

Sheebeg Agus Sheemore

Sonny's Mazurka

Supplement to the Centerstream Edition.

Strathspeys & Airs

New Tunes for this Edition:

The Humours of Ballyloughlin

Madame Bonaparte 

Coilesfield House 

John Campbell's Strathspey 

Loch Earn 

Professor Blackie 

Glenfiddich Strathspey 

Homeward Bound 

Sweetness of Mary, The 

Mason's Apron 

Niel Gow's Lament for His Second Wife 

Bibliography & Discography

The accompanying CD digitally reproduces one of the flexible plastic LPs that originally accompanied this volume (the original master recording was misplaced years ago by a previous publisher). Although I could have recorded a new version of this material, I felt that the spirit and enthusiasm exhibited in the playing - done when thesearrangementswere all freshly composed- far outweightedtheobvious shortcomingsin audio fidelity. This CD illustrates only the thirty-one tunes that madeup the original edition. Each of the eleven new arrangementsin this edition appears on one of my recordings - ortilern Banjo, Is/and Bay, Devi/ in the Kitcilen or Balljo & Guitar Solos.