Songs without words

Snowball (Harley)

A more-or-less improvised slide piece. The guitar is a Gretsch Bobtail roundneck resonator guitar.

Faintly Fahey/Fainter Fahey (Harley)

This guitar piece started as a sort of fake Irish air in DADGAD but somehow became a slide guitar piece in Csus2 tuning (if I remember rightly), by way of one or two other tunings I can’t remember right now. And I can’t quite decide which way I prefer it. But there’s no reason I can’t keep them both in the repertoire (though I’ll need to practice them a bit before I do them in front of a real audience again).

Here’s the slide version, which acquired the title ‘Faintly Fahey’. Not that I’m as well acquainted with John Fahey’s work as I ought to be, but when I played the first demo version back, it reminded me vaguely of ‘The Death Of The Clayton Peacock’, even though the tune and tempo are completely different.

[Backup version on dharley.com]

Here’s the original version. It didn’t have a title originally, but it’s now called ‘Fainter Fahey’ because it’s pretty much the same tune, but not very Fahey-like.

[Backup version on dharley.com]

Carpentry

Copyright David Harley, 1976. All rights reserved.

This is an instrumental version of my setting from a poem from ‘A Shropshire Lad’. The song was originally intended to be sung unaccompanied, but it somehow developed a guitar accompaniment with a slight Middle Eastern feel, and the first section is very much based on that.

The faster second section was meant to have a more medieval feel, and includes  overdubbed dulcimer and bouzouki. Cittern would have been more appropriate, perhaps, but I didn’t have one to hand. Strangely, it seems to have finished up sounding a bit like the Philip Glass Ensemble (but with much less time between changes), but I like it.

Here’s a link to an earlier MP3 on Soundcloud.

Same version uploaded to one of my other blogs:

This version is just a single guitar and is pitched way down from the other (uses a C-modal tuning). A work in progress.

Moonflow (Harley)

David Harley: acoustic, resonator and electric guitars