For me it was Andy Irvine first and foremost, just Planxty at first, then I started discovering his other projects. And because of Planxty, Donal Lunny, which led me to investigate Bothy Band. This was all mid-late '80s, then as the '90s began I first heard Michael Holmes with Dervish, and Ciaran Curran with Altan, and by then I was pretty well hooked on the idea of it being something I had to try. Till that point I was a singer, and had played percussion in many styles of music and settled on bodhran, but loved the idea of singing and accompanying myself on bouzouki.
In the late '90s I met a guy from a Newfoundland outport, Lorne Warr, and we started playing together. He plays great guitar and mandolin and sings baritone, and I'm a tenor, so we started working out arrangements of songs we loved from Newfoundland, Ireland, and Scotland with lots of vocal harmonies, but I still had no CBOM as the only luthiers I had heard of were in the UK and Ireland, no local dealers, and out of my budget anyway.
Eventually we hooked up with various fiddle players and a terrific simple-system flute and tin whistle player, we were getting plenty of gigs so things were moving along, but I wasn't satisfied just playing bodhran and snare drum and singing. Can't remember how, but eventually I discovered Lark in the Morning in Seattle, and Lorne and I made a trip down to check out their "Hecho en Mexico" cittern at $300 US. That was a fun day - there was a Fylde mandola in the shop, which Lorne played beautifully to the amazement of the other customers. Very memorable, that Fylde. I bought the cittern and brought it back to Vancouver, had a piezo pickup put in, and started working out accompaniment in GDADG tuning, very basic strumming stuff. I think I just printed out Han Speek's GDAD chord chart, the only resource I could find
That instrument is now in the hands of a good friend and former bass player in the band, a little the worse for wear in the much drier climate of Alberta but still played regularly. He's in the market for a new cittern in the near term though, so I pass on what I learn here at the Cafe.
I had a long hiatus from playing until last year, just busy working my butt off, getting married, buying a house, and raising our boy, but got the bug again irresistibly and had to have a new bodhran and bouzouki ASAP (and damned if they didn't come up with an entirely new way of playing bodhran since I stopped - you bodhranistas know what I mean). I bought a really nice Trinity College TC-375 from a member here and am getting my head around the idea of counter-melody accompaniment and eventually melody playing. Won't be truly satisfied until I have a luthier-built instrument, but not in the budget at the moment. Am also going to take possession of my grandfather's 1966 Suzuki bowl-back mando shortly (which I posted about in 2012) and will try my hand at that. Meanwhile Lorne was nominated for an East Coast Music Award this year and moved back to Newfoundland. Makes me wonder what might have happened with me had I stuck with the band!
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!
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