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Music

Supremely awesome people, reprise

That surprise that Dejah promised me if I showed up for this week’s session turned out to be THIS! If pictures are worth a thousand words, this one is worth at least an entire novella.

This is What an Awesome Band Looks Like

This was in fact the very poster I had given to Dejah myself, one of the extras sent to me by Susan! You guys, Dejah gave up her poster just so she could get it signed for me. How awesome is this? “Pour ANNA!” (heart) And aside from me blurring out Réjean Brunet’s signature a bit because it was actually legible (and I therefore was NOT going to put that publicly online), what you see here is exactly what I got.

I got a little happyteary at that. I may have played only like FIVE NOTES at that session, because I’m still pretty much in Absorb the Musical Ambience mode, but I’m here to tell you, Internets: BEST. SESSION. EVER. I gave Dejah a big thank-you hug. And after the session was over, I promptly came home and wrote all four of these boys a thank-you message on Facebook. In French.

I Keep This Up, I Might Actually Become Bilingual

We still don’t know why the car conked out on us–and solarbird and spazzkat went down and fetched it from Kelso yesterday, since the mechanics there weren’t able to diagnose a proper fixable problem for us. I’m still surly at that car for making me miss the concert.

But getting this poster went a long, long, LONG way to making it all okay.

November 17, 2012 by Angela Korra'ti

Quebecois Music

Most awesome fiddle player of the week

Y’all remember I was gushing over “Lanlaire” by Le Vent du Nord, right, and in particular over this video of it?

That vid was super-handy in letting me figure out a few things about the song. As I’d posted before, I was able to follow the melody on my piccolo and from there figured out what key it was in. Seeing Simon Beaudry’s guitar in the vid let me figure out what set of chords he was using–i.e., that he’s got to be using D minor chords if he’s capoed on 5. (Me, I punted to E minor chords capoed on 3, which are a lot easier for me; D minor is still giving me issues if I try to play chords at any given speed.)

What I could not figure out from the video, however, is what fiddle player Olivier Demers is playing on the bridge and on the outro; he’s playing too fast for me to follow. I tried letting TunePal on my iPad listen to the recording, and it had no idea what the tune was–which is not terribly surprising, since TunePal, helpful though it is, is fairly scattershot about how well it picks up on stuff.

Turns out though that there’s a reason it had no idea what that tune was.

See, I sorta kinda emailed M. Demers and asked him about the tune. *^_^*;; The LVN boys have email links on their bio pages on their site, so I looked at Olivier’s page on Saturday, went .oO (what the hell) to myself, and clickied! Told the gentleman I was a newbie session player and a new LVN fan, and asked if he could identify the tune for me so I could maybe look it up online and learn it. (Because it’s either that or I try to transcribe it, and then learn it that way, which’ll take me a lot longer. Because I can’t play by ear well enough to try to pick out a tune without the intermediate step of transcribing it out first.)

He emailed me back! And said he actually wrote the tune himself for the song! And said he’d send me the sheet music later since he didn’t have it on that computer!

I’ve heard from a couple different directions now (hiya, scrunchions!) that the LVN boys are sweethearts, and this is clear proof. Olivier Demers for me is now this week’s most awesome fiddle player! I’m going to be fangirlishly squeeing about this all week, so y’all be warned. And then I’m going to see if I actually can transcribe the tune, because it’ll be an amusing exercise, if sheet music actually shows up in my inbox, to compare against it and see if I can get it right!

*squee!*

September 26, 2011 by Angela Korra'ti