Sunday 11 September 2016

The dance band is back in action again in Glasgow next weekend at Maryhill Community Centre, for a ceilidh with Maryhill Integration Network. Aaron’s also working on plans for more gigs, and (we hope) a regular 18^th century ceilidh night. He’s also found out that around 1805 John Gow’s dance band in London included harp, French horn and tambourine, but one of the reports also says that all the players other than Gow were terrible. I think we might have to try this at some point: the instrumental combination, not being terrible.

You might have noticed that some of our albums have begun to disappear from digital outlets. This is a temporary measure as the licences to record companies expire – we’ll be re-releasing them ourselves soon, and making more available on Spotify too. In the case of The Red Red Rose, I’ve been re-editing it over the last week and a bit, to get it sounding as good as possible for mastering. Editing is a bit like practising: the music very gradually gets better in tiny increments, and it’s very hard work. But it’s been fun to hear again just how much messing around and laughing was going on whenever we weren’t playing what was sometimes (but only sometimes) very genteel music. Some of the music is reassuringly wild and out of control too.

I had a blog post drafted about a month ago about how easily musicians can forget how their instruments and voices work unamplified, but I never got around to finishing it, and then I gradually lost interest in my opinion anyway. I certainly wouldn’t go as far as Mr Cutler (this from one of his Able-Label stickies that he used to give out to people). Maybe another time …