This guitar does not lie

Spent last week at the 2016 incarnation of Richard Thompson’s Frets and Refrains camp. Last year's camp–my first time–was a transformational experience. This year was inspirational.

I went intending to take Jill Sobule’s songwriting workshop and Sloan Wainwright’s voice workshop. Having spent some time listening to Martin Carthy’s music on the 9-hour drive from Toronto (including breaks and border crossing), I decided I’d at least check out his session on the first day.

Aaaand then I ditched Jill’s workshops for the rest of the week and went to Martin’s morning workshops. I did Jill’s workshops last year and they were a ton of fun, but having done them before I sort of knew what to expect, whereas Martin’s workshop’s definitely offered something different. His guitar style can be best described as idiosyncratic and deceptively simple; a basically melody line and a bass line both supporting the vocals. But there’s more going on that that; his vocal delivery is very much about the storytelling aspect of the song, and the guitar work is in support of that. And he makes this happen using a tuning of his own devising, which no mere mortal guitarist would readily emulate. So it’s not as if you leave Martin’s workshop with a tune you can take away and play, but I left with ideas about delivery and arrangement that I didn’t have before, and am making plans to apply those ideas to specific songs.

[For the curious, here are relatively recent recordings of Martin playing Georgie and Sir Patrick Spens]

Sloane’s voice workshops were a lot of fun–basically work on warm-ups and workouts to help with sound production. Very lighthearted and goofy in some ways but also fundamental to helping the body open up and produce sound. And while not everyone had a chance to sing and get feedback over the three days of the workshop, enough people did that those who didn’t still had plenty of notes to take away.

I actually followed this on the first day with Sloan's performance workshop which effectively amounted to a mini-open mic. Everyone plays part of a song (in the interests of time) and then gives their opinion on their performance before getting feedback from Sloan and the rest of the class/audience. This meant missing Richard’s songwriting masterclass, but I figured it more important to do the thing that scared me.

As chance would have it, Owen, a younger guy who performed before me, did The Waterboys’ “Fisherman’s Blues”, which only happens to be one of my favourite songs and one of my inspirations for taking up fiddling–which I mentioned before going into my own song, an attempt to redeem the delivery of RT’s “The Great Valerio” that I gave at a guitar circle the first night. Valerio came off better this time, mostly because I slowed it down to give myself space to keep voice and hands in synch. It worked, too; I know I sounded better, and one person commented that a lot of people turn it into a dirge, and I didn’t. So ::phew:: on that score. And I also spotted someone in the audience mouthing the words, which was actually kinda cool.

After class Owen asked if I had my fiddle with me and would I be interested in backing him at the Open Mic the next night. Playing fiddle in front of an audience is not my most favourite thing because I’m nervous about my intonation. Which means my hand tenses up, which is a surefire route to actual intonation problems. It’s actually getting reasonably good, but as soon as it goes off, I back off with the bow which means I’m not only out of tune, I’m weak and out of tune.

So I took Sloan’s principles for relaxing in order to sing and applied them to relaxing in order to fiddle. I think it paid off; I know I didn’t hit everything I wanted to, but I got compliments on the fiddling afterwards so it must have been convincing enough. There may yet be video evidence to prove it.

I also followed up with the woman who’d been lip-synching to my performance, and we sat down during a break to do the song together. Just for ourselves, but it came out well enough that we agreed we’d do it at the open mic next year.

The days seemed to go by faster than last year–I almost can’t believe I’m home already. But I’ve come home with a head full of ideas, and am already making a plan to bring to my guitar teacher. And in the same spirit will be making plans to take to my fiddle teachers, as well devising a plan to work on vocals, and get my ass out to open mics and songwriting circles. Which, perforce, also means making plans to write songs. And as happens after camp currently almost everything is a song idea.

I commented last year that I found over a hundred friends I didn’t know I had. What surprised me this year was how many of them remembered me, and how some of those tenuous connections from last year deepened this year. I’ve actually reactivated my Facebook account purely to stay in touch with people via the alumni group that exists there. I guess pre-FB we’d have used a listserv but that’s probably too old-school for most people know. I’m looking forward to deepening those connections next year. And even have a cunning plan for doing so. Which I shall reveal in next year’s post-F&R missive.

There’s far more I could stuff in here; I haven’t even touched on the opening night song circles, the range of amazing performances at the open mic nights, with sound mixed by RT’s own sound engineer, Simon Tassano, the post open-mic jams or the dance party on the final night which included the memorable sight of RT leading everyone around the dance floor to the strains of “Soul Train".