instrumental – Wheal Alice Music

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’.

Blues For Davy – new version

A vaguely jazzy piece I first put together in the 80s, but I’m still trying to get it right.

It looks as if this version is going to be on the next album.

Backup:

Impro 1/Rea Brookland

Improvisation round a theme that’s been bugging me for a while. A cleaner version will be available on the ‘Brookland Voices’ album.

Backup copy

Another Brookland

Another guitar piece: it gets its name because I was messing around with a previous piece called ‘Brookland Voices’. Martin D-41 in DADGAD.

Backup:

The Water Is Wide (revisited)

An instrumental version, based on the unlikely assumption that several layers of Harley guitar are a Good Thing.

[backup]

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

Mixed-Up Boogie [working title…]

Back in the Dark Ages, I used to spend a lot of time sitting in the Refectory Lounge at what was then called the University College of North Wales, Bangor. No doubt I should have been in the library, but was likelier to be mistreating a guitar, often in the company of other guitar addicts, including David Higgen, who was better known in those days as Mex. (It must have been a student thing that no one called David should be known by their real name, since I was mostly known at that time as Bert.)

I’ve lost touch with most of the people I knew then apart from Sally Goddard (with whom I used to sing, and who visits my part of Cornwall quite regularly). I’d lost touch with Mex, too, but when I mentioned his name in a blog article, he picked up on it and contacted me, which is nice. During one of our recent exchanges, I mentioned this thing that we used to do as a rather flippant guitar duet. He didn’t remember it, but started to nag me to include it here. I don’t remember exactly how it went (or even what we called it, if we called it anything at all, and I can’t remember Mex’s riff either), but it went something like this. I suppose I ought to have another go to correct a couple of bits of slightly suspect notes and timing (but as Broonzy said, there’s no such thing as a strict 12-bar; or something like that, though I suspect that he had in mind putting in an extra bar, rather than an extra beat). I guess I should put in a second guitar part in at some time, but in the meantime…

I’m not planning on putting it on an album, but never say never.

David Higgen has a lot of very interesting stuff on YouTube.

Sally Goddard has been singing for many years with the Canada-based folk band Atlantic Union, which has put out several classy CDs.

And here’s that boogie thing. Feel free to tell me to boogie off.