Category: instrumental

Moonflow instrumental

Posted to a new Substack section, imaginatively called Wheal Alice Music.

My instrumental Moonflow was written and recorded in Ludlow, using Garageband on a MacBook. Originally it was a short, improvised introduction to a recording of Bert Jansch’s Needle of Death. Later, I thought the instrumental introduction was interesting enough to stand as a tune in its own right. (And I’m not at all biased.) That recording hasn’t been released commercially, by the way.

The acoustic guitar that comprises the first section is actually the entire improvised introduction to Bert’s song. The second and third sections are the same section, but electronically tweaked and with overdubbed instruments.

This is the version that was released as a single. It also got a mention in my book So Sound You Sleep. If it matters, acoustic guitar was a Gibson J160E, the slide guitar was a Gretsch Bobtail round-neck resonator guitar, and the electric guitar was a Variax Standard impersonating a Coral Sitar and then (if I remember correctly – it was quite a few years ago and I didn’t make a note at the time!) a Rickenbacker 370. And if it doesn’t matter, feel free to disregard the previous sentence.

Recording:

Acoustic, resonator and electric guitars by David Harley.

Motherless Child (demo)

Slide guitar version of the well-known spiritual (Sometimes I feel like a) Motherless Child. [Roud 10072] Probably from the Civil War era or earlier. Arranged and adapted…

I don’t sing it, but a common first verse is:

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child x2
A long, long way from my home

Not to be confused with Motherless Children or the blues Motherless Child or several more recent songs.

Or:

Yet another album: Brookland Voices

I know it’s hardly five minutes since the last album, but I’ve actually been working on this one since last year.

Brookland Voices album cover

Brookland Voices started as another vaguely folky album, but somehow Messrs Yeats (subsequently moved to the ‘Swan Songs’ album) and Housman elbowed their way in. Then I found myself with all these improvised or semi-improvised guitar pieces, some of them played on electric rather than acoustic guitar, and they do seem to dominate the album. In fact, while I would never claim to be any sort of jazz guitarist, this is probably as near to a jazz album as I’ll ever get. To be fair, ‘South Wind’ and ‘The Water is Wide’ are instrumental versions of traditional songs/tunes.

‘Severn Years In The Sand’ is a version of a song that seems to have arisen during World War II among units that saw service in the Middle East. ‘The Knocker Up’ and ‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain are actual folk songs. ‘When I Was In Love With You’, ‘Far In A Western Brookland’, ‘When I Was One-And-Twenty’ and ‘Blue Remembered Hills’ are settings of verse by Housman. The song ‘A Rainy Day Blues’ and the other instrumentals are my own, including ‘Chivalry’, which is an instrumental based on my own ‘Song of Chivalry’.

Brookland Voices

Working on my setting for Housman’s poem ‘Far In A Western Brookland’ I came up with an instrumental passage I really liked. I’m not sure it will fit in with the finished setting, but it certainly stands well on its own.

Acoustic guitar in DADGAD.

Backup:

Courtship Dance

A little guitar duet I improvised a while ago. It actually evolved from a multitracked version of Salley Gardens. I couldn’t get the tone I wanted from the main melody, but really liked some of the fills and frills, so here they are stitched into a short guitar piece. Maybe I’ll go back to it sometime and add some more layers as I did with Moonflow.

Backup:

Introduction to Nashville Tuning for the Guitar – links.

 

This is a short book on a rather niche alternative technique for stringing and tuning a guitar that may at least interest some of the people who’ve asked me questions about Nashville stringing/tuning when I’ve used it in performance.

It’s available on Lulu.com as an eBook.

It’s available for Kindle here (with embedded audio) and here (no embedded audio).

It’s available as a print book on Amazon here. Hopefully, other sources of paperback are on the way.

Books2Read.com links here.

David Harley