Slight differences

[Tim Twiss]

I recently pulled out 2 tunes for comparison. The song is "Peel's Jig" as found in the Buckley 1860 Book, as well as the Emmett Mauscript. I have not found the source material for it yet. If somebody finds it...let me know. It is interesting to see to subtle changes made, while keeping the tune intact.

[Carl Anderton]

Well, do we know when Emmett jotted this tune down? I suspect he did so prior to the publishing of the Buckley book, but that's pure speculation. What a cool tune. Emmett was obviously a major proponent of the syncopated style.

[Tim Twiss]

It is listed as not being his (Emmett's) song. Many of the tunes are (in that book) are dated from the 1840's. I also like the syncopated phrasing of the Emmett version.
It would be good to find the source tune.

[Greg Adams]

Tim and I figured it'd be fun to see how we interpret these tunes based on our appreciation of the period instruction books. In addition to the youtube videos, I've included an image of my fingerings of each of these tunes. At this point in my development, I can attribute a lot of my technique as being distilled from Briggs 1855 and Rice 1858. As I approach sources with significant amounts of structural ambiguity, like in Buckley 1860, I generally use and adapt the techniques found in more definitive sources. As you will be able to see, some of the features that I use in these two tunes in particular include the following:

1) Alternating between my lead finger and thumb. This generally occurs
--between adjacent notes (2 or more strings away)
--as extended attacks separated by slurs (hammer-ons and pull-offs) (something commonly found in Rice); what's neat about this is that it allows you to also do note groupings of 3+3+2 as I attempted to do on mm2 of the Buckley version of the tune.

2) Ascending right hand nail glides (or, "slides" as described as 1 of the 3 slur types outlined by Briggs on page 12 and 13 of the 1855 book)

3) Thumb leads starting on the fifth string

4) Individual consecutive attacks with my lead finger

Something that I don't like as well about what I've done here is doing two slurs back-to-back (a pull-off and hammer-on with mms 6 and 8 of Buckley's version and mms 6,8, and 10 of Emmett's version)

I'd love to see/hear other people's interpretation of these pieces.

[Tim Twiss]

We both put these up without talking about how we would play it. A somewhat similar musical interpretation with different approach. I used the Converse 1886 view. I employed almost all hammer strokes except where a combination made sense. To me, this simplifies all non-fingered linear type music, as in fiddle tunes. All the obvious thumb strokes, hammers, and pulls seemed to be about the same.