The Blackthorn Stick (jig)

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  1. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    Here's a nice wee jig for ye all - just giving the 805 a workout today. Wee bit bright sounding as the strings on it are brand spanking new. Here are the ABC's from thesession.org:

    X: 1
    T: Blackthorn Stick, The
    M: 6/8
    L: 1/8
    R: jig
    K: Gmaj
    |:d|gfg ege|dBG AGE|DGG FGA|BGB A2 d|
    gfg age|dBG AGE|DGG FGA|BGG G2:|
    |:d|edd gdd|edd gdd|e2 e gfg|edB A2 d|
    gfg age|dBG AGE|DGG FGA|BGG G2:|

  2. Michael Pastucha
    Michael Pastucha
    Mighty fine... mighty fine! The 805D sounds great too. (I know that just about any mandolin would sound great in your hands.)
  3. Marcelyn
    Marcelyn
    I love that song. So glad you have a mandolin to play on again.
  4. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    I feel lucky to still have a mandolin given my situation - playing music makes everything alright!
  5. Michael Pastucha
    Michael Pastucha
    Jill, know what you are going through as I was in the same situation as you when first joining the mandolin cafe back in August of last year. Music does indeed make everything better.
  6. GKWilson
    GKWilson
    If the music helps you feel better Jill, keep playing and posting.
    Cuz, your playing sure makes us happy. Best of luck with the rest.
    Gary
  7. Loretta Callahan
    Loretta Callahan
    Well, it certainly makes me feel better. Been so sick all weekend, couldn't touch my mandolin ... so listening and watching you play seems to have cured what ailed me.
  8. John Kelly
    John Kelly
    Another fine bit of playing, Jill - in fact a cracker! Hope you can see yourself through present troubles and I know your music will be a big help to you. If it can give us so much enjoyment, then you can maybe take some comfort from that. Hang in there, girl!
  9. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    Thanks so much for all your good wishes everyone, it means a lot!
  10. Rob Fowler
    Rob Fowler
    Jill I'm so glad that you were able to get yourself a new mando! I was starting to go through "McAuley triplet withdrawals" so thanks for fixing that! Welcome to the f-hole world!
  11. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    I gotta say I am really loving the f-holes! Last summer I played an AWESOME Collings MT2 at a guitar show and shortly after that a really great Weber Big Sky, both really opened my eyes to the world of f-holes!
  12. Jim Baker
    Jim Baker
    Awesome as usual Jill. You are the standard I measure against.
  13. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    Cheers Jim!
  14. Bertram Henze
    Bertram Henze
    I can't find any significant difference vs. the other mandolins you had, so that springy happiness coming out of them must be all yours, Jill. Proves so much, all at once. Must never lose that. Trust your heart gal!
  15. Tosh Marshall
    Tosh Marshall
    Ditto to what has already been said Jill, the world would be a poorer place without your triplets!
  16. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    Janey mack, this place rocks! Thanks so much everyone!
  17. Barbara Shultz
    Barbara Shultz
    I was going to post what Bertram did.... your magic is in your fingertips, not in the instruments you play!
  18. John Kelly
    John Kelly
    Once again I feel inspired by listening to your playing, Jill, so here is my offering of the Blackthorn Stick combined with Gary Owen, recorded on my JK Mandolin with no other instruments added, so the tune has to stand there on its own! Using the Soundcloud site again as I had no time to get the video up and running before my fingers went into knots.

    http://soundcloud.com/user9128887/bl...tick-gary-owen
  19. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    great stuff John, and your JK mandolin sounds lovely!
  20. Eddie Sheehy
    You make that oul' Eastman sparkle, girl.
  21. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    Cheers Eddie, I'm putting the playing miles on it!
  22. Toycona
    Toycona
    The Eastman sounda great, and what a beautiful tune.
  23. jordandvm
    jordandvm
    Jill, that was superb! You make it look so easy! Thanks for providing the ABC...... I'm surprised that no one gave this one a try because it's a fun little jig! I've been on a kick to improve my Jig picking (DUD DUD) and decided to give it a go. I'm only going at about 100 bpm, and noticed you were going about 130. It'll take me years (I'll be in a nursing home by then) to reach that. So, anyway here we go......with my Breedlove FF Quartz mandolin.



    Jim
  24. jordandvm
    jordandvm
    OK, so I decided to give this a go on a tenor banjo as well. I don't own a TB, but have been enamored with it's sound in our Celtic sessions. So I've borrowed this one from a friend I play Celtic music with. I've had it for about a week and I'm hooked! It's so much fun to play. I just have to get used to the extra stretch to the high B.


    I'm sure I'll be buying a TB soon!



    Jim
  25. Barbara Shultz
    Barbara Shultz
    Good going, Jim! I love my tenor banjo, I encourage you to get one for yourself!
  26. dcdan
    dcdan
    Jill, what a great jig , sounds great and you make it look easy. Your new mando sounds great but its all you.
    When I was 17 worked in a place in NYC where you would go to buy a Stradivarius violin, or other violin ranging from $100,000 to over a million dollars ( my first instrument is violin). A Guy by the name of Danny Heifetz was trying one of these violins in the great hall of the shop. someone came in and said "wow that Guanarius" (17 th century violin maker) sounds amazing! Danny took the violin off his shoulder , put it to his ear and said " I don't hear anything!". I am sure you get the point.
  27. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    Nice one Jim, and like Barbara I say "Get a tenor banjo!" That stretch to the B gets me as well, but they're so much fun!

    Thanks for the kind words, dcdan!
  28. CelticDude
    CelticDude
    Very nice playing, Jill. And holy s**t on those triplets! Even on a jig, they are just perfectly timed and and executed. Inspirational.
  29. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    Cheers Dana, you're too kind sir!
  30. Dean Fields
    Dean Fields
    Jill, The triplets that frequent your playing sound so natural, how in the world do you accomplish it? Great stuff everytime out.
  31. Eddie Sheehy
    Here's my effort - short and not so sweet...

  32. jordandvm
    jordandvm
    Great jig playing Eddie! I suspect you and Jill both have a few more years playing under your belts......so I can only aspire to your skill levels. Thanks both for being inspirations for Celtic musicians here on Mandolin Cafe!

    Jim
  33. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    Nice one Eddie - that Collings has a lovely ring to it as well!

    Cheers for the kind words Dean and Jim - I've actually only been playing the mandolin since Jan '09, prior to that I played the tenor banjo for about 1.5 years, and prior to that I played guitar in punk bands! Learning triplets on the tenor banjo was a big help I think as I was able to transfer that learning to the mandolin when I picked it up. Also another thing that accelerated my learning curve was that I was still living rurally back home in Ireland when I picked up the tenor banjo, and practiced on average about 3-4 hours a day, in addition to having weekly lessons with one of the best tenor banjo players in Ireland, Angelina Carberry. Needless to say, now that I'm living in the States I'm lucky if I can put in 1-2 hours a day on the mandolin, but all that tenor banjo wood shedding put a good foundation in place!
  34. jordandvm
    jordandvm
    Jill, that's an interesting background. I would think most people would play mandolin first then go to the tenor banjo, but you did the opposite. But your history of punk guitar and then transitioning to the TB was a bigger switch. Was playing TB your first foray into ITM?

    Jim
  35. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    Back home the tenor banjo would be a more likely instrument to play in trad music, so not unusual at all that I started out on it, though, as mentioned in another thread here at the cafe, in the States it seems a wee bit commoner for the reverse to be true, meaning mandolin first, then moving on to the tenor banjo in search of more volume in a session setting. The tenor banjo wasn't my first foray into trad music - I was back home restoring an old run down farmhouse back in '02 and saw a great programme about regional fiddling styles. As a life long punk rocker it had never occurred to me that there was such a thing, and it was also the first time I'd really listened to trad music, and I loved it. So for the rest of that summer I tuned into any and all programmes on the telly about trad music and upon returning to my job in the States I promptly bought a cheap fiddle ($60 on craigslist, but it was actually a really nice old German one) and started taking lessons from my upstairs neighbor - who by happy coincidence was a trad playing fiddler who'd spent quite a bit of time in Ireland! I enjoyed it but never really came to grips with the bow, so the learning curve was slow. A few years later I found myself back in Ireland attending university and thought I'd get a tenor banjo as a way to learn new tunes quickly, thinking that then I could move them over to the fiddle and be able to focus more on the bowing. But I fell in love with the banjo and the rest as they say, is history! It certainly had a lot to do with the fact that you play it with a plectrum so having already come to grips with plectrum use on the guitar my learning curve on the banjo was quite fast and there was considerable instant gratification involved so the fiddle paled in comparison!
  36. Eddie Sheehy
    I've been an acoustic guitarist since I was 17. Way back then I also got my hands on an old bowlback mandolin and learned a few basic chords and scales but never played it much. Then I got a cheap tenor banjo and used the same chords and scales I had learned on the mandolin - ditto a Greek bowlback Bouzouki (Planxty had just come into being). I hadn't a clue about intonation or bridge-setting so these instruments were truly awful-sounding so I stuck with guitar (fixed bridge). In the mid Nineties a guy at work sold me a Flatiron pancake mandolin - 1SH for $100. His wife had bought it for him but he wasn't interested in it. I noodled on it off and on for several years until I found the Cafe in 2008. Then I decided to start practicing seriously and started learning Irish Trad tunes - jigs, reels, hornpipes etc. I joined a local jam last year and also started a serious MAS (including CBOMS). I have about 20 instruments right now and I continually "catch and release" them.
  37. CelticDude
    CelticDude
    So I finally learned this on mandolin; here it is:



    You also get 2 bonus tunes - the Mooncoin Jig and Dusty Windowsills. I pretty much can't just play one tune by itself anymore. They get too lonely...

    Thanks to Jill for posting and playing it so well.
  38. Rob Fowler
    Rob Fowler
    That was awesome, Dana! What a great production. It sounds like your Collings has changed a lot....sounds even better than before.
  39. Grommet
    Grommet
    Nice medley Celtic Dude. Loved the whistle onrnamentation.

    Scott
  40. Jill McAuley
    Jill McAuley
    Great stuff Dana! And I agree with Rob, your Collings has really come into it's own - sounds awesome-er than before!!
  41. Eddie Sheehy
    Excellent picking Dana. BTW, it's cheating to show a PHOTO of you smiling...
  42. John Kelly
    John Kelly
    Good set, Dana. Like the whistle coming in on the tunes. A lot of drive here and gets the feet tapping!
  43. maudlin mandolin
    maudlin mandolin
    Brilliant set, Dana. Particularly impressive was the fact you played those tricky triplets in the second section of Mooncoin Jig - I find it a hard piece anyway so do not attempt them. But it is a good tune which deserves its own thread.
  44. CelticDude
    CelticDude
    Thanks, everyone, for the kind words. So the Collings sounds better? I do have a set of Elixirs on it, that were on sale, rather than J74's, but I don't hear a difference. And I thought engelmann didn't break in the way harder woods do? Anyway, I still like the sound a lot; it's cured MAS. For now. (Although the electric octave is leading to AAS - amplifier acquisition syndrome...)

    AFA smiling pictures - all's fair in love and video productions... I did download a trial version of PowerDirector, so I can double-screen me playing mando and whistle. All smiles of course. We'll see how that goes.

    BTW I'm psyched - a new seisun started a month ago, and it's only 10 minutes away. We did play Mooncoin Jig last Monday, amongst others (I knew about 2/3 of the tunes.) Woohoo!
  45. Simon DS
    Simon DS
  46. John Kelly
    John Kelly
    Well played, Simon. A great favourite in all our sessions over here.
  47. John W.
    John W.
    Nice playing of this jig, Simon.
  48. Simon DS
    Simon DS
    Thanks Gents, and thanks all others who left a ‘like’ on my YouTube channel, it’s like Christmas again.
  49. gortnamona
    gortnamona
    great jig and playing Simon, i must relearn this one
  50. Frankdolin
    Frankdolin
    And once again Simon, Great pickn'!
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