Paddy Canny R.I.P.

RTE article

And here is the man himself, a rip of a private tape made in his house a while ago, and a few tracks recently aired on RTE's 'Ceilidh House' from way back, when he was right on top of his game - includes a version of 'Cielito Lindo'!

Music Of Sligo (again)

Its nice to play along with recordings rather than just practising as such. However, in the case of a lot of Irish music, higher and lower pitches occur regularly, usually as a means of putting a bit a variety into things (Eb flutes and concertinas played a tone down are typical of this) . Where a recording is consistently high e.g. Frankie Gavin's first where he is tuned up to 'Eb', it might be worth adjusting tuning for a hour or so, but this isn't on when things jump about a lot.

One such recording is 'Music Of Sligo' by Fred Finn and Peter Horan. Several tracks are up in 'Eb', while one is more or less in 'E' (some mistake here surely - the recording is technically so bad that I suspect that tapes were run at the wrong speed somewhere). However in these digital days it is easy to tweak things a bit (in my case using Sound Studio on a Mac) and make things a bit more consistent.

So here's the whole recording, as if played in concert pitch throughout. The speeds have not been altered.

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