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Santa Clara Valley Fiddlers Association |
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SCVFA Beginners' CircleJust starting out, or haven't played traditional music in a while? The Beginners' Circle is for you! We got off to a good start in October 2005, and plan to continue every month at the regular first-Sunday jam, as long as there's interest. Look for a "Beginners' Circle" or "Slow Jam" sign, or ask at the admission desk. The goals are to help players get more comfortable playing by ear, learn to coordinate with others in an informal group, and build repertoire. Depending on interest we can also discuss ways to learn tunes, jam-group dynamics and etiquette, differences among styles, and more. One of our experienced members will generally lead the tunes, answer questions and offer various kinds of help. Normally the leader will be on hand starting at about 2:00 for an hour or so. Naturally the group can play together before and after that, too! (The schedule may vary somewhat to accomodate other events taking place at the jam. Check the newsletter or the Events Page for updates.) We'd like to have a variety of leaders, to provide exposure to different tunes and playing techniques. So if you're an experienced player and would like to help, let us know! We'll try to publish the tunes (or at least the names) on this page before the jam, and start with those. Other tunes can be worked on too, as the participants wish. So bring your fiddle, mandolin, guitar, dulcimer, bass, whistle or whatever, and give it a try. We'll meet just outside the cafeteria door at the jam. Thanks! to our volunteer leaders, who have included Jean Avram, Paul and Laura Barnett, Dave Barton, Tom Clausen, John Heron, Norio Kawato, Sarah Kirton, Mark Llewellyn, Pete Showman, Ann Whitesell and John Williamson. TunesYou can get all the sheet music through April 2007 in one PDF file: all tunes by date or all tunes by name (~900 kB), or get them individually below. Many of the tunes have MIDI and MP3 audio files (see note below), usually at a slow speed such as 60 bpm (beats per minute) as well as at a typical playing speed such as 90 or 100 bpm.
If you'd like to participate and have other favorite tunes you'd
like to work on, let us know. You can call Pete Showman at (408) 255-0297,
or email us at
*OT=old-time, BG=bluegrass, Ir=Irish Note: MIDI files are small (about 4-16 kB), as they only contain instructions to the sound card on your computer, which makes the actual sound. The quality varies considerably depending on your computer. MP3 files are recordings, so should sound the same on most systems -- but even though compressed, they're fairly large (about 300kB to 1MB). Mail links on this page are not clickable to avoid attracting spam. Sorry for the inconvenience. Updated by PSS 8/22/07. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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