Tuesday, November 11, 2008 @9:40:54 AM
I haven't had much time lately for building - hardly any, in fact. But I've had the odd minute here and there for practicing and trying to increase my repertoire. One of the songs I've been working on is "Keemo Kimo." First I figured out a basic melody in Open G tuning and played that enough times through that I could be up to speed. Then I tried to figure out some ornamentation. In this song, the verses consist of four lines, each followed by the same refrain ("Sing song kittie catchy ki-me-oh"). The melody is the same for each of the four lines, and a different melodic line is the same for each of the four repetions of the refrain. Listening to my favorite recording of it (actually it might just be the only one I've heard), by the Canebrake Minstrels, I noticed that the lines were very simply strummed but that the refrain was quite fancy with triplets thrown in. Trying to figure out the triplets in Open G wasn't working for me, so I opened the MP3 file in a shareware program I've got called "Goldwave" which is a sound editor. I selected out the first line/refrain part - just about three or four seconds - which is played exclusively on banjo. Goldwave has a speed control on playback so I set it to 50% and listened and miracle of miracles, I was actually able to 1) figure out how to play the triplet (there was actually only one) and 2) figure out that they were in low-bass tuning rather than Open G. So, I'm making progress. I'll have to get a real slow-downer program and keep trying (Goldwave doesn't preserve the pitch, although come to think of it it also has a pitch control so maybe I can try that).
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