Pete Seeger

[Briallan]

I agree with your idea of making things easier ... I just have found that some people don't seem to respond to PMs and some do, either because of how they set up their communication options, or because of occasional weirdness of GL pm'ing.

[Siltharan]

At the very least, the e-mailed PM notification will show up. :) Or at least it seemed to, even if the message didn't show up in GL's PM utility itself. Ehh, oh well...

Also, sidenote: I've been going through most of what has been used in concerts (and other stuff) that I've arranged and made volume tweaks on just about everything. :) Dropbox has synced each file, so everything is now current there. I'll get a new link up in the Songlist thread, since I changed my Dropbox structure a bit and I'm not sure if the current link redirects properly.

[Hobbelion]

This Sunday is Super Bowl Sunday. I will most likely watch it so I wouldn't count on me. So you shouldn't count on me.

[Briallan]

OMG I have to watch the superbowl the seahawks are playing. Somehow I didn't make the connection between the concert time we were thinking about and the superbowl. Superbowl kickoff is 625pm EST which means that it will prolly run past 9PM EST. So many people will be watching it as well that this seems like a bad time to me.

I think we need a different time for the concert....

[Ice Weasel]

Yeah, that is a problem.  We need a different date... or time. (Like a LOT earlier might work... afternoon-ish).

Nothing pops into my head right off... but then, I have the least scheduling problems of anyone. 

[Ice Weasel]

There's now a "Seeger" folder in my dropbox, with:

• BlueSkies8 (8 parts, Blue Skies, Pete played this a lot)
• GoodNightIrene6 (6 part Good Night, Irene, Weaver signature song)
• GoodNightIrene7 (7 part Good Night, Irene, Weaver Signature Song)
• GoodDrunkIrene9 (9 part "drunken" version, Good Night, Irene)
• KissesSweeter5 (5 parts, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, written by Seeger)
• LionSleepsTonight7 (7 parts, Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimboweh), The Weavers hit)
• MisnightSpcl6 (6 part Midnight Special, Seeger played often)
• SimpleGifts2 (2 part (duet) of Simple Gifts, traditional, Seeger played often)
• WorriedMan3  (3 part, all-wind, novelty version of Worried Man Blues, Seeger wrote the original)
• WorriedManBlues6 (6 part, more traditional arrangement of Worried Man Blues)

Some I like better than others, but I offer them all to the group.

I think the whole shebang ought to end with "Good Night, Irene" of one arrangement or other.  We could find and do Jacob's Ladder, or something more "spiritual", but he actually co-wrote "Irene". I only include the "drunken" version as a novelty, not for the tribute.  Might be fun for an Oktoberfest concert ender or something, in the future.  You can hear the beer. 

I like the 3 part Worried Man Blues, but it is probably too "out there" for the tribute.  Makes a good "set break" number, though.

 

On the whole concert... who is organizing?  Bri is doing schedule, but I don't want her to feel burdened with school and all this. Silth, you taking the reins?  I can research some simple announcements, like I did for Everly, or someone else can handle those... I don't want to overstep, or assume. 

Whatever we decide, time's tickin'.

[Briallan]

Well, we have another thread to determine time/date and who will play, so organizing I think at this point is deciding on the final set of songs, tweaking them and assigning parts. I only have one contribution: Guantanamera6 v2.abc in my dropbox "test" folder. Its a somewhat upbeat latin version that differs from the folk song version Ive heard before, but it got my toes tapping, so I thought we should have at least a couple "dance" songs in the set -- I am sort of afraid of this getting too serious otherwise.

We have enough songs now, it's just a matter of choosing and tweaking as needed -- I think we can do this offline and don't need a meetup. I will listen to everyone's songs tonite; hopefully we can critique each other's offerings and then decide -- we still have a couple days at least before any concert.

[Siltharan]

LOL. Whoops. I totally forgot about the Super Bowl. My bad!

[Briallan]

I listened to all the songs in ABC player and I have some feedback:

Good night Irene - all the versions sound good, but we might be able to do a comedy bit with the drunken version -- like, after the second to last song, we act like it's the end of the concert, and all grab some drinks -- then someone says 'hey we have one more song to do' and some of us are like 'ehhh? I just had a couple beers!' then we do drunk version of 'good night irene' as our finale. Unlike winterstock we aren't really on a timetable, so we can yok it up a bit. (Is yok a word? I think I heard that on Car Talk but I'm not sure...)

I mean, I get that this is a tribute, but I don't think that means we have be totally serious all the time -- I mean it shouldn't be like a funeral or no one will have fun

midnight special -- this is one song where the lead seems too soft in some place. When the horn and clarinet are playing in harmony, it sound ok, but when the horn cuts out and the clari takes it alone it seems to soft. We could fix it in one of two ways: just boost the clarinet (might be the easiest fix), or hand-edit the abc to boost the clarinet when it is playing alone -- hand editing would be easy in this case since it would just be where the horn goes out.

Where Have all the Flowers Gone - I am wondering if we have should bags doing the voice here. One piece of feedback we got from winterstock was that we maybe overuse bagpipes. This is a slow song, and with sort of bittersweet theme. Maybe some other instrument might be better?

Worried man -- I kind of like the more upbeat 6-part version as opposed to the slower 3-part version - more dance-able!

 

[Ice Weasel]

I'll give hand-editing Midnight Special a try. 

On "Goodnight, Irene": Yeah, we could play on that a bit... and the "drunken" version does strike me as funny. Pete wasn't always Mr. Serious, either, so that might be cool.   I'd still save it for the last song of the gig, though.  My only concern is that we don't go from funny or silly to mocking or irreverent. I agree that it isn't a funeral... the idea is to celebrate the man and his music, not to mourn. I think if we pre-script it, it could be funny. Ad Lib opens the possibility of too much too soon kind of thing.

I'd also agree on Worried Man. The 3-part version is a heck of a lot of fun, but the faster 6 part is probably better for this time out.

On Flowers... I had a similar thought. Maybe go a "gentler" more "round" sound with flute?

I've backed way off using bags, except for where I want a very reedy accent.   Maybe too much, an over-correction, but if the someone makes comment during a concert... well, that's hard to ignore. I think bags have a place, but I am a lot more critical of where I plop em. (Still hard to avoid them for certain rock organ sounds, for example...)

The others are great, Silth. That VPitcher helps a lot. I use it on about everything, now, before posting.

One Ton Tomato... er... Guantanamera sounds great. 

[Ice Weasel]

Part of the problem in doing a Pete Seeger tribute is that he was first and foremost a folk singer. The music is important, no doubt, but it took second place to the lyric; the song as a function of protest and politics. 

I would have loved to find and do "Garbage!" for example. I had a friend who sang this in his folk sets in the early 80's, and while Pete didn't put it on an album until the 90's, he sang it in concert a lot. Give a listen and you can tell why I love it so much and why it would be next to impossible to do in LOTRO. (imagine the entire crowd chanting back: "garbage! Garbage!! GARBAGE!!"

GARBAGE!

[Siltharan]

Flute changed from bags in wherehavealltheflowersgoneFLUTE.abc

[Ice Weasel]

Midnight Special has been edited, too.  Up in my Dropbox, overwrote the old one.

[Briallan]

Ice Weasel wrote:

On "Goodnight, Irene": Yeah, we could play on that a bit... and the "drunken" version does strike me as funny. Pete wasn't always Mr. Serious, either, so that might be cool.   I'd still save it for the last song of the gig, though.  My only concern is that we don't go from funny or silly to mocking or irreverent. I agree that it isn't a funeral... the idea is to celebrate the man and his music, not to mourn. I think if we pre-script it, it could be funny. Ad Lib opens the possibility of too much too soon kind of thing.

Sure, pre-scripting is fine so that it doesn't cross that line, which I agree is a good one -- prolly prescripting will be funnier than just adblib. Adlib is I think good when someone does something unexpected, but you think of something funny to say. Here we know what's going to happen so we should just plan it.

[Ice Weasel]

Pete is on record as saying he wasn't "much of a drinker". He didn't abstain, but he didn't have the drinking reputation of some of the other icons of that era. But I don't see a problem with raising a "toast" to  his memory a few times between songs... and get to a slightly blurry condition right as we hit "Goodnight, Irene".  

I had a point... I think I dropped it someplace. 

I'll look at the comments and work in some toasting and such, and we can work on some dialog for before the song.