The String Contingent

Hello from TSC, and welcome to all our new fans!

Since we last posted, we visited New Zealand for a swift 7 gig 10 day tour, from Invercargill to Auckland. We had a great reception at Dunedin thanks to Peter and Dianne Madill, who put us up, fed us, and organised our concert for us. As most of you know, Peter made Graham’s guitar ‘Maddy’, and since Graham started touring with her in April last year, she has had nothing but compliments. It has made such a difference to the trio having ‘Maddy’ on board, as her power, presence and incredibly colourful character has allowed us to really develop the sounds and textures we make together. While there, Peter gave ‘Maddy’ the once over, and reset the neck (quite a normal procedure for a new instrument) – check out the photo below to see this process… Unfortunately, while at Peter and Dianne’s, we discovered the first, and hopefully last, mistake in the text of our current album: Peter’s website address is wrong! While we will be fixing it for the next run of CDs, for all those who currently own ‘TSC II’, please visit Peter at:

http://www.madillguitars.co.nz/

We highly recommend Peter’s guitars, and along with sounding terrific, they are so beautiful that I should warn you about clicking on the link above… once you see them, you’ll not be able to stop thinking about what it would be like to have one in your living room…

The rest of the tour went well also, and we finished with a bang in Auckland with a big 4 band bonanza concert, before flying back the following day to the National Folk Festival in Canberra. While there we released the CD ‘Roots and All’ and accompanying tune book based on the study that Chris undertook at the National Library with Emma Nixon as part of the Folk Fellowship. Their research was on Scottish Fiddle music in Australia, utilising both the manuscript and oral archives. The CD and book showcase a selection of traditional Scottish fiddle tunes found in the archives and were made in collaboration with Emma (fiddle) and Tony Vandermeer (guitar). We arranged the tunes for a variety of instrument combinations including a solo fiddle piece played by Chris in scordatura (alternative tuning of the violin). We are very happy with how the CD and tune book came out, and both items will soon be available to purchase from our website ‘Buy’ page, along with samples of the CD on our ‘Listen’ page.

We are nearing the end of this tour, but we have a few final concerts and festivals before Graham flies home in early May. First up is a fundraising Ceilidh and concert in Sydney this Saturday (21st April) in aid of Cure Cancer Australia, a concert at Wesley Music Centre in Canberra on Sunday (22nd April), a concert in the Hawkesbury (West of Sydney) at Sassafras Creek Cafe on Thursday (26th April), followed by the Mount Beauty Music Festival, VIC, and Wintermoon Festival, QLD. As usual, all the details can be found on our website gig guide.

In other news, we have spent the last few weeks working on new material for our next album. While we could spill the beans, (those who followed our Cowwarr residency blogs will have a good idea of what we are up to…) we’ll hold back on details until next month’s blog update.

Thanks as always for your support, and we look forward to playing music for you again soon,

Chris, Graham, Holly (and Wally T. Wombat).

…Admittedly a couple of days late… Sorry about that, we’ve been a little hectic since finishing our time at Cowwarr, I am posting this from Dunedin, NZ, having enjoyed a great weekend at Yack Folk Festival and a promising start to our NZ tour last night in Invercargill. Here is the last update from our residency at Cowwarr!

And then we were done! So we performed a concert in the wonderful gallery space at Cowwarr on Thursday evening, and premiered all 6 of the pieces that we were working on for the past couple of weeks. The concert was a great success with a large and appreciative audience. We are delighted to have finished up our first composition residency in such a lovely way, and extend our heartfelt thanks once again to Carolyn and Clive at Cowwarr for their support, hospitality, and A1 functionality!

We performed two sets of music. The first set comprised the six new pieces; ‘Waterlily’, ‘Racing Calm’, ‘Talk’, ‘The Hills of Garenin’, ‘Swamp Song’, and ‘Plans Awry’, along with ‘Dovetail’, another recent composition of Chris’s that we worked on during the residency. We were really pleased with the way that the new compositions were received and look forward to playing them more at concerts during the rest of the tour. We also played a second set of music comprising material from both our debut album and our latest album. The whole performance attracted some very positive feedback from everyone and now we’re looking forward to returning to Cowwarr to see everyone again at our next concert! Perhaps next year…

The whole process was very enjoyable for all three of us. As well as being the ideal way to write and rehearse new music, it really is a pleasure to be in one place for an extended period of time. We are normally on the move a lot, travelling between gigs, festivals and cities, and to have the opportunity to be settled, even for a few nights is a bit of a luxury. We obviously enjoy touring a great deal, and the opportunity to meet new people and musicians, see different places, and experience the warmth and appreciation of playing our music to new audiences is one that I am constantly grateful and thankful for. It is also very nice however to be going to sleep in the same bed for a few nights running…

We are now looking forward to a great weekend at Yackandandah Folk Festival, and then it’s off to New Zealand on Monday! The tour goes on and we’re excited about our next trip across the Tasman Sea. We’ll be sure to update you soon, after a 10 day stint in NZ we arrive back in Oz for the National Folk Festival in Canberra, and then we’ll be playing at various other concerts and festivals around the country until May – check out our gigs page for details on these.

Thanks again for checking out our blog from our time at Cowwarr, we’ve enjoyed being here and hope you have enjoyed reading about our time here. For any artists who may be reading this, we really can’t recommend Cowwarr highly enough as somewhere to come and hang out, check out their website for details on residencies.

The first set of the night, complete with music stands!

Another shot from the first set.

The second set at Cowwarr.

Thanks to Clive Murray-White for these photos.

We’ll see you soon, thanks again!

Graham, Chris, Holly and Wally the Wombat

Evening All!

Graham here with today’s update from Cowwarr. Hope you’re having a good week wherever you may be in the World, let us transport you to this quiet corner of Victoria for a minute or two…

Outside Chris and Holly's place at Cowwarr; 'Casa del TSC'

Our time here is nearly up! Can’t believe it has gone by so quickly. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed our time here, it’s been an amazing experience to get to work in such a focussed fashion on new material. Of course we’re not done yet, we’ve the small matter of a new music concert tomorrow night first… But the whole experience has been incredibly rewarding, and we’re very grateful to CC and Clive here at Cowwarr for making it such a rewarding and functional experience.

Today we played through everything and looked at various corners and bits of all the pieces. They are now at the stage where the writing is done, and we’re looking more at how we want to perform them tomorrow night at the concert. Obviously we all have our own ideas about how the works should be executed, and part of the attraction for me in playing with The String Contingent is the challenges we set each other. Tomorrow morning we’ll record everything and listen back to make sure we’re happy with everything – it’s really useful to do it this way, listening back to ourselves without having to focus on playing or reading music… Then we’ll have the afternoon to polish anything that needs it and then it’s concert time!

Now, a couple of notable omissions from this blog have been brought to our attention. They are canine in nature, and hard to ignore. Here at Cowwarr, the resident dogs are called Fleur and Dexter, and they have been a constant source of amusement and (welcome) distraction. Sadly I haven’t got any photos of them to share with you, I will seek to remedy this tomorrow. In the meantime, here is a herd of Cowws, the eagle-eyed and keen among you will notice yesterday’s Coww at the forefront of the picture, here she is with her friends behind the shop…

Herd about all the Cowws?

And that’s really it for now. We’ll be sure to post again tomorrow after the concert to let you know how it goes, hopefully we’ll get some pro photos up for you and perhaps even some more audio. Thanks again to you for checking out our blog, we hope to see you soon!

Graham

Chris here again with today’s highlights!

Our aim today was a final play through of our chosen six new pieces for the concert on Thursday. After that, one last edit of parts before we begin two days of rehearsal and call the pieces ‘done’ for now. We have just about made it, with Graham and Holly currently finishing their editing, while I went for a walk to take a photo of today’s Coww. Wally the Wombat was a little afraid and over-excited at first, but looks like he’s enjoying himself all the same:

We spent the most time working on Holly’s piece ‘’Waterlilly’ today, as this piece had the most work done to it since we recorded everything last Friday. It’s remarkable how changing a tiny detail, such as shifting a part up an octave, or changing one note in a chord, or unifying our attack on a passage, can make sense of something that just didn’t sound right before. I am constantly reminded that composing the first 90% of a piece can happen in a few hours, but the remaining 10% can take weeks. The devil is indeed in the detail. Happily, it’s these details that are the ear candy we listen for in music, and they can turn a pretty tune or a grooving riff into something so much more. I may have spent 45 minutes working on the last 4 bars of one of my pieces…  but it sounds great, now!

And rehearsal is much the same: being able to play through a new piece takes an hour or so, but weeks to really nail it. Unavoidably, much of the work that has to be done first is technical stuff, playing in time and in tune, and getting basic dynamics and articulations happening. Then comes the fun part, adding all the details and personal expression. Today, the metronome never went off, and everything was about accuracy and control. Some time tomorrow, all being well, everything will be solid, and we can start recording ourselves again and think more about how we want things to sound. We are, however, getting much better at moving swiftly through the first stage of technical work, and this is mostly due to us just getting better as musicians individually and corporately, and playing in time and in tune when we approach something new, not just after hours of practise. The aim is of course to be able to sight read perfectly, first time, and be thinking right away about musical issues. Give us another 20 years…

Holly informs me that I am required to post some MIDI direct from Finale, the music notation software we use, so everyone can hear what we have to hear while composing music. All I can say is, I’m sorry for you, but here it is, a snippet from Swamp Song, a piece of mine.

Swamp Song

And finally, Holly doing her left hand technical exercises in the sun:

More tomorrow,

Chris.

We’ve been off galavanting around Victoria over the weekend with gigs in Melbourne (with Lucy Wise), then at Burrinja Cultural Centre in Upwey and also at the Benalla Art Gallery – all went well and after a late dinner in Warburton on Sunday night (at a great Polish restaurant called The Jester) we’ve made it back safely to the Cowwarr Art Space.

It has been a beautiful day out here and we’ve been straight back into practice and composition. Before leaving here on Friday morning we did a preliminary recording of the pieces we’ve been working on. Being able to sit back and listen we find really helpful in deciding what still needs to be developed within a piece before you can call it ‘done’. It also makes it glaringly obvious which bits we each need to practice! We listened to the recording in the car on our way back to Melbourne and discussed the various thoughts and ideas we each had for each piece, so we arrived back here with a definite plan of attack, which is what we have been carrying out today.

I have been working on my piece ‘Waterlily’ and found some different chords to make the transitions into each section of the piece smoother. I also developed a chord progression for the end (e.g. now the piece actually has an end!) and have plans for a bass melody to draw the piece together at the close. That may not sound like much, but it seems to have taken an age! We’re going to have a play of it tomorrow to try out some different textures I’d like to use…

We use computer software for musical notation which plays back the score using electronic sounds or ‘MIDI’ (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) that sound rather different to real acoustic instruments. To get the computer to sound remotely ‘musical’ require hours of inputting articulation, dynamics, phrasing etc. I don’t usually bother doing much of that as I have Chris and Graham to play through things with instead. That means the difference between us and the computer playing the same music can be rather amusing – We’ll put up some samples for you to compare tomorrow.

Just on dusk I went for a walk up the road to take a photo of today’s Coww, peacefully hanging out at the local shop…Ta da!

There may be a whole herd tomorrow….