Tune of the Month – October 2017

I just recently attended the Spanish Peaks Piping Retreat held in conjunction with the Spanish Peaks Celtic Music Festival in La Veta/Walsenburg, Colorado. The concert highlight of the festival was Old Blind Dogs featuring Ali Hutton on the pipes. Kevin Burke (fiddle, solo) was also a delight to listen to.

One nice thing about the smallpiping retreat (there’s an uilleann pipe retreat also) is that La Veta is basically a higher elevation version of Lubbock, so all my pipes work exactly the same more or less, no worries about differences in humidity.

The piping retreat was taught by two instructors 1. Tim Cummings and 2. Ben Miller. Ben had his playing partner with him, Anita MacDonald on fiddle, so it was a treat to learn a couple of tunes from their band’s repertoire after getting to hear them play together at the kick off party. Tim Cummings taught mostly Appalachian tunes like the Tombigbee Waltz and Old Joe Clark, which was really cool. He has published many such tunes and sells them through his website. I also got a border tune and Breton tune from him which are unique in their own right. It’s always good to challenge yourself with new idioms! Many thanks go to the smallpipe retreat organizer, Jim Conley!

Linking the concert and workshop together: on Old Blind Dogs’ newly released album, and at their concert, they play a couple of Appalachian tunes, Bunker Hill and Sandy Boys. This set was electrifying in concert and coincidentally relevant to the workshop with Tim over Appalachian music. While Tim didn’t cover the tune Sandy Boys, I cannot let it pass without it being a tune of the month. This tune is so good, and so versatile, I’m just waiting for an innovative pipe band to end their medley with it.

There are so many awesome versions of this tune. Variations galore! I’ve gone through and found a few of them and mashed them together. However, there are no gracenotes in the sheet music I’m providing. This is for two reasons. 1. This is folk music, play it how YOU like and different every time. I don’t just mean changing the gracenotes, change the big notes too! 2. If you want to mark up your own version with gracenotes and/or change the big notes, I’ll give you the “code” in ABC format so you can change it yourself. My hope is you’ll keep it in ABC notation because it’s so easy, free, has accommodations for bagpipe notation, and EVERY OTHER FOLK TRADITION ALREADY USES IT making it easy to transpose tunes from other traditions into the highland bagpipe key. Here’s your introduction to a wider world of music if you haven’t already used ABC notation. Many bagpipe specific music programs are capable of importing ABC notation if you insist on sticking with software you might have already paid for.

In ABC notation, the bagpipe scale is ‘G A B c d e f g a’, bar lines are the pipe | on the backslash key (repeats with a colon :), and anything in curly brackets {} are gracenotes, e.g. high g gracenote = {g} and taorluath = {GdGe}. Set the key in the header of the file to K:Hp and it automatically adjusts formatting for bagpipes! My preferred program for rendering ABC notation files, EasyABC, is no longer being developed by the original programmer but it is still available for download from his website. It went open source but I can’t get any of the newer releases for mac on SourceForge to execute, so I stick to the last version released by Nils.

Sandy Boys – pdf file (the last iteration is repeated only because I didn’t bother to further modify the version that had the note B in it)

Sandy Boys – download the ABC file

Me playing through all the versions in the pdf file:

If you want to hear someone really bang this tune out on clawhammer banjo, go here:

Clawhammer Banjo