It’s been a while since I updated — it always is I’ve been meaning to post these two videos for a while.

The first I did after seeing Breabach play a concert in Wimborne as part of the Celtic Folk club here. They were fantastic. Ewan Robertson plays guitar and sings, Callum MacCrimmon and Donal Brown play pipes, whistles and flutes and the lovely Pasty Reid plays fiddle. Unfortunately Donal wasn’t there, but another fantastic chap took his place (although I can’t remember his name right now). At the concert we indulged in a purchase of their CD – The Big Spree – and it has since (3 weeks now) been a permanent fixture in the car’s CD player. On that CD the band sing a song called The Rolling Hills of the Borders. It was written by Glaswegian Matt McGinn but it’s Breabach’s version that I really like. I attempted my own version (not a patch on their’s but still fun to do).

I also did another music video recently. It’s a couple slides played on the concertina and the fiddle: The Road to Lisdoonvarna and Two Little Boats Went Out to Sea.

For Christmas I was a very lucky boy. I got myself an Rochelle anglo concertina. It’s like an small accordion – in fact, it’s more like two harmonica’s tied together with bellows. It was pretty confusing to play at first because each button plays a different note depending on whether you are drawing air through the bellows, or pushing air out of the bellows.

Anyway, for the past couple of months I’ve been trying to get a bit better, and I’ve now posted my first recording on YouTube.

The tunes are two jigs – The Swallowtail Jig and Out on the Ocean.

I found that to play the anglo, you have to clear your mind of anything and do your best not to think about whether to draw or push the bellows and just let your arms work it out — that’s why there’s a blank look on my face most of the time!!

The music is available on The Session, although I’ve scored it out below, if you want to play along.

The Swallowtail Jig

Out on the Ocean

As with all the multi-track videos I do now, this was recorded into the computer first (while videoing onto tape) and mixed into an MP3. The video was then captured and synched up. This time I was trying out the trial version of Edit Studio 6 which is why there’s a watermark on the video.