Leahy

So if you didn't already know this Natalie MacMaster is married to Donnell Leahy. How fun are their family gatherings? Anyway, if you like Natalie's playing you'll like Leahy. They are playing at the Flynn on St. Patrick's Day and they totally rock. The band is made up of eight brothers and sisters and one outsider. All of which are very talented multi-instrumentalists. They sing, they dance and they can fiddle like there's no tomorrow. So, if you have nothing to do on St. Paddy's Day check out Leahy at the Flynn.

On Practicing

I'm reading Stephen King's book, On Writing, right now. I'm reading it in hopes that it will inspire me to write more. It has. But it also has inspired me to practice playing more as well. In the book King says to make a goal for yourself. He suggests writing locking yourself in your office and writing 1,000 words a day, six days a week. And do not open the door until you're finished.

I've been thinking about this when it comes to practicing my fiddle. Let's face it. No one wants to practice. We all just want to play like Natalie MacMaster (or write like Stephen King) or whoever your musical hero is. But nothing good comes easy. So I'm taking King's advice both with my writing and with my practicing.

I once had a teacher that said if you practice just 15 minutes a day you will see an improvement on your playing. I'm still to this day not sure if she was kidding or not. Anyone who plays the fiddle know it takes more than 15 minutes just to open your case, rosin your bow and tune your strings. I think what she was trying to do was make me commit to doing it. Once the case is open, the bow is rosined and the fiddle is tuned, it's impossible not to want to play it. And let's face it, who can play for just 15 minutes? For me, 15 minutes turns into 1/2 hour which then turns into an hour and so on depending on how much time I have during day.

My point is: Just as King and my teacher suggested, make a commitment and follow through.

Happy practicing!

Creating a band name

I'm not sure why but creating a band name couldn't be more difficult. Trying to come up with something that describes your music, your personality and is easy to remember can seem close to impossible.

A band called Trinity was the first real band I was ever in and the band already had it's name, so that was easy. I left Trinity to start my own band and the band went through a variety of different names. The first was called Salamanca. You see we were a Celtic groove band complete with fiddles, congas, guitar and banjo. There is a famous fiddle tune called The Salamanca so we thought it was perfect. However, the name sounded too much like Latin music so it seemed a bit misleading since we played traditional Irish music. And unless you are a regular session goer, you wouldn't know the history of the tune The Salamanca.

The next name for the same band was called Down to the Wire. I thought it was a great name because it seemed like we were always "down to the wire" when it came to practicing for gigs. But the band eventually broke up. (Keeping a band together is another blog entry for another day).

I'm in two bands now. One is a spin off of Down to the Wire in that it's my guitar player and me and we are playing some of the same tunes though we have strayed from Celtic groove music to more folky, Americana type music with some Irish fiddle tunes thrown in. I'm not sure just how you would classify our music, which is why it is so hard to come up with a band name. I welcome any suggestions.

The other band I'm in plays traditional Irish music. We call ourselves Muddy Boots. We began with the same problem in that we couldn't come up with a name. So Andrew, our guitar player, decided that we should cut up some paper and write down as many nouns and adjectives that we can think of. We threw the nouns in one hat, the adjectives in another and then spent the better part of an hour pulling them out of the hat and putting them together to come up with Muddy Boots. Though it doesn't say much about traditional Irish music, most Vermonters can at least relate to having muddy boots.

Learning tunes

My husband runs a website development company so he's a bit of a tech geek. But I can't blame him for making fun of me when I break out my tape recorder, (yes, you heard it right - tape recorder) to learn tunes. In this day and age with the advancements in technology you would think there is a better way to learn tunes.

There are different types of computer software, such as Transcribe and The Amazing Slow Downer, that take the tune and slow it down without changing the key so you can learn it right off your handy dandy laptop. However, if you're heading to a session and you want to learn the tunes that your peers play, you can't really break out your laptop to record. That's where my little tape recorder comes in.

I have a hard time learning tunes by ear when they are racing at lightning speed. I'm one of those fiddlers who has to learn every single little note before I consider the tune complete. So for me I have to tape the tune and then go home and listen and try to learn it by hitting play, stop, rewind, play, stop, rewind...

I guess my point is, with technology growing so rapidly, there are still some old fashion ways of doing things. How do you learn tunes?

The art to recording

For some reason, we can play like rock stars in our living rooms but put a microphone in front of us and some recording equipment in back and we fold. It can be a bit stressful knowing that if you make a mistake, one tiny mistake, it's being recorded. And for some reason, that's scary.

Here are a few tips to follow before you head into the studio:

1. Practice recording. My husband makes fun of me because my home recording devise is, yup, you guessed it, a tape recorder. But boy does it come in handy when learning tunes. I find it very helpful to record myself sometimes so I can hear what other people hear when listening to me. It's amazing what you'll learn about your playing. I find that my mistakes are in different spots than where I thought. So I record myself playing and practice the weak spots before heading into the recording studio. This does a couple of things: It makes me completely aware of what I need to work on and it gives me confidence when I finally get into the studio that I know what it is going to sound like.

2.Get lots of rest the night before. You can't really be on your game if you're tired. And it is tiring to record. I recently recorded 6 tune sets with my band, Muddy Boots which doesn't sound like a lot but some of our tune sets are 6 minutes long. So if you make a mistake at the end of the set, you have to re-record the entire set. (That is if you're all recording in the same room). It's seems simple enough but go into the studio fully refreshed because when you leave, you're going to be exhausted.

3. Have fun. We sometimes get so nervous about the process of recording we forget to have fun with it and it shows in the music. So take a deep breath, smile and rock it out!

Heading into the recording studio

As with most bands who come to the point of getting sick of playing kick-ass tunes in their living room, my band Muddy Boots, is heading into the recording studio this week. We're planning to lay down 5 tracks of rockin' Irish fiddle tune sets.

It's hard to believe but we have been playing together on a weekly basis for almost 7 months now. We've played two gigs, one for a benefit to raise money for Jerry Holland and one at the Richmond Farmer's Market. And it's now time we get our there and share what we have been working on so off to the recording studio we go.

I'll post the finished product when it's...well, finished. In the meantime, you can catch some of us playing at the Wednesday night Irish session at Radio Bean, in Burlington.

Tony DeMarco coming back to Vermont

This is a picture of Jerry Holland and Tony DeMarco playing tunes at the Red Shoe Pub in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

Tony DeMarco played in Vermont a fews year back for a memorial concert in honor of the late and great Johnny Cunningham. I had never heard of Tony DeMarco before that day. He's a big teddy bear of a guy and as he walked out on stage that night I couldn't imagine what kind of music was going to come out of his fiddle. Once he sat down and began to play, I quickly realized that I was not in the know. This man made my jaw drop with his fiddle playing. He was incredible.

DeMarco is a Brooklyn native with Irish and Italian in his blood. He plays County Sligo style Irish fiddle with lot of crisp ornamentation, fast rhythms and he improvises like nobody's business.

DeMarco is one of the musicians that will take the stage with Ashley MacIsaac and John Doyle next month at Chandler Music Hall to raise money for Jerry Holland's battle with cancer.