The Dairy Girl

Hello and welcome back!

My tune for today is The Dairy Girl, number 141 in the ITMA's Pigot. This isn't as obscure a tune as I would like - apologies for that - but I like the tune a lot, and for the specific reasons of quality and versatility.

The setting put forward on The Session is from O'Neill's, and is a perfectly good setting, but includes the B flat associated with the key. The other referenced setting, from Petrie, is currently beyond my grasp, but in any case, this setting avoids the B flat entirely, allowing you to play it with only the notes of the C major scale. In fact, in the book, it was written without the flat in the key signature. With a D instrument, you could easily play this in G, etc. This tune also sits very comfortably in G on the concertina, and decently in C in a couple places. I'll grant that it wouldn't be a great chore to figure out what to play instead of the B flat, but the work is done already. I've also elected to play it in the original key both to prove my point and to keep it sounding this way - at least on my instrument, it has a somewhat sweeter and less aggressive sound in this key than in G, and the high and low C options are functional but distant.

This time, I'm including the (near) original alongside a copy with a suggestion of my own - feel free to ignore it, but I imagine it might be helpful to have an indication of which time through the B part you're on, and to achieve that, I've simply recycled material from the tune.

(PDF download for original)

(PDF download for edited)

I've done my best to record it cleanly, although this one does still present challenge to me even after some good practice. I find it tires my arms out more rapidly than I expect it to, and my self-accompaniment is sparse because frankly I have little experience in F. There are absolutely opportunities for denser accompaniment on the instrument, which I will progressively improve over time. However, I have a few tunes coming up that are requiring significantly more effort, and I'm putting them off until they're done cooking.

I'm very much looking forward to the arrival of my microphone - recording with my laptop sounds terrible, and recording with my phone produces files that only sort-of work. My current means of getting recordings on here is as follows:

1. Record in built-in Recorder app on phone.
2. Share recording with Google Files app to gain access to the file.
3. Attach the newly-available file to a file in Obsidian (more on that later).
4. Obsidian synchronizes the file between my phone and my laptop.
5. Open the file on my laptop in Audacity.
6. Re-export the file to address file format issues.
7. Upload to Audio.com.
8. Share as embed code to get the number for the sound.
9. Copy the number into the address in my pre-formatted embedded player.

All in all, not so bad.

I haven't yet acknowledged the great efforts put forward by the people who worked on these books, presenting tunes and text both - they are Nicholas Carolan and Caitlín Ní Eigeartaigh, alongside the efforts of Jackie Small in setting the music.

I hope you enjoy the tune!

Axel