hellllooooo morpheus! (diary of a drug fiend)

[bluegreen17]

today's wake up music:
altan: suil ghorm^ciaran's capers^australian waters^caide sin don te sin?^clan ranald/j.b.'s reel/paddy mac's reel/kitty sheain's fr. 'runaway sunday'

jigs,reels and strathspeys are great wake up music. i can tell the difference between a reel and a jig,but i'm not too sure what the difference is with a strathspey. anyway,i love jigs the best...they're literally just my speed...for my dancing feet!

wow. i slept for six hours last night...thank you vicodin! i can see how people get addicted to these if it's the alternative to pain...well,maybe there's a high too but i think my high is from relief of five days' constant intense pain.

yeehaaaa!!!!

Comments

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Technically, a strathspey is a type of reel originally from a particular region (uh, that'd be the valley -- "strath" -- of the river Spey), but the "strathspey reel" diverged enough to start being thought of as a separate classification at some point. If you listen for the "Scottish snap", which breaks a quarter note into something in between [a sixteenth and a dotted eighth] and [a thirty-second and a double-dotted eighth], strathspeys are usually chock full of them, which is most of what gives the strathspey its particular feel. dum dum daDAda dum da DADUM dum da DADA dum...

Also, the stresses in the rythym section come out a little different -- for a Scottish reel, my strum pattern will start out something like:

"| 1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4 |"

and then get modified depending on what the melody tells me to do. For a stratspey I'll usually start with a straight four beat, or more often something like this:

"| 1 [rest] &3& 4& |"

where the "&" beats are Scottish snaps instead of landing squarely on the eighth-notes. Also, and I'm not sure how obvious this is just listening, reels tend to have a "cut time" (2/2) feel and strathspeys usually have a 4/4 feel (and are occasionally written out as 12/8).

It's my understanding that the differences in the dance steps are more important than the differences in the music, but I haven't paid as much attention to the dancers as I ought.

I find strathspeys a real bitch to sight-read, but often easier to play (at least on guitar) than many reels. But I'm usually not playing melody on either, anyhow, so it doesn't often matter.

Argh! I was going to suggest a couple of tracks that I think would make the difference clear, but I just glanced at what we (uh, "we" would be The Homespun Ceilidh Band (http://www.homespunceilidh.com)) have available as MP3 files and realized that we don't have any strathspeys posted as samples. Oops.

---

As for the Vicodin, IIRC people taking it for pain are less likely to become addicted (not that it doesn't happen); and my personal experience is that I don't notice any "high" if the pain was bad enough to warrant taking the drug in the first place. Though just the feeling of relief from persistent, oppressive pain is, as you mentioned, quite a lift all by itself.

Unfortunately it only lasts about four hours for me.

[bluegreen17]

wow. serendipity that you stumbled upon my journal (which has barely a cult following...thank you cult!) and this entry in particular since you know about this stuff. thank you very much. i will have to see if i can figure it out by listening closer and to more different examples of strathspeys and reels. it took me a while to figure out that jigs were slower...i'm kind of dense sometimes!

in regards to the vicodin,what are IIRC people? i don't know what that acronymn means.

thanks for taking the time to explain all that stuff!

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

"IIRC" == "If I Recall Correctly" or "If I Remember Correctly" ... I probably should've put a comma after it.

Spotted your journal entry while reading the
"friends" page for a community we're both in. You mentioned strathspeys, so that kind of grabbed my attention.

Happy to explain stuff when I have time -- always glad to find more people listening to that stuff. ;-)

BTW, more important than tempo, jigs are in 6/8 time (DAdadaDAdada), except for slip jigs which are in 9/8 (for dancers with three legs). Jigs are usually slower, but there are some reels (mostly Irish) that get played really fast a lot of the time ("Morrison's", "Swallowtail") and a few reels that get played a little slower sometimes (I've actually heard a version of "Guilderoy" slowed down so much it was nearly an air instead of a reel).

For some tunes, the tempo depends mostly on whether it's being played for dancing or just for listening.

[bluegreen17]

ah,the plot thickens...but that's interesting stuff to know!