2023

Time for some tunes

Although my collection of songs is never static and although there is always room for developing technique, I’ve now essentially rebuilt my trad folk repertoire. I’ve got 26 songs with Irish Bouzouki, 17 with Crane Duet Concertina and 24 unaccompanied. Although I intend to spend just as much time practising, the race to rebuild a performable repertoire is over.

As a floor singer in a typical folk club evening you usually get a couple of songs, and in singing sessions perhaps four or more. My current plan is to do one Zouk song and one Crane song per session, and then to fill in with acapella songs. This means balancing practice time between the Zouk and Crane. The unaccompanied songs look after themselves.

One area I do need to develop is tune playing. My folk club and the session I go to are both interspersed with English tunes drawn from the Lewes Favourites. They’re not exclusively English, of course, but they’re common in English sessions.

I did manage to learn a number of these on Concertina years ago but I find some melodies difficult to absorb or tricky to play at speed on the Crane, so I want to experiment with just chordal accompaniment, either on the Concertina or Zouk or maybe both.