"The Goatwhackers Guide to Rhythm"

It's Sunday afternoon and I'm sitting here in my attic, a place I call, half kidding and half meant, my sanctuary... Outside half frozen drizzle and snow are doing a dance, while the little gardens seen from my attic window lay silent and deserted… Meanwhile Mother nature plays her own environmental CD on my roof tiles, an afternoon people sometimes refer to as "Lazy Sunday afternoon…

Recently a post on the Bodhran Yahoo Group brought to my attention this booklet:so what better time to talk to you all a bit about it…

For those of you who don't know her, Lucy originally a Rock Drummer took to the Bodhran after seeing the band "De Dannan" play in 1995 close to where she was living at the time. Her previous drumming experience, listing extensively to Irish (and other) Traditional music, practice together with having a natural feel for the rhythms and respect for the music, combined with visiting the local sessions a lot made her a competent and creative player very quickly. It did not take long for her to be playing with "Broadstair's" great Melodeon and guitar player Tim Edly and some of Kent's finest folk musicians including fiddler Laura Targett (who made the illustrations for this book by the way) and Guitarist Peter Gazey.

At the "Wiltshire Young Folk Awards" in 2002 Lucy and Laura took first prize, while Lucy also took the price for "best Instrumentalist" Besides teaching at Festivals and The Hammersmith Irish Centre in London, Lucy also performed with The Michael McGoldrick Big Band, James O'Grady and Alan Prosser (Oyster Band), Colette O'Leary (The Bumble Bees), Mark Doherty (River Dance) and many others. Currently she is working with Brendan Power, with whom she and Tim Edly performed on the BBC show "Later with Jools Holland"

Hear Lucy's & her Band play a snippet called "Groove for CJ2"

As an Irish percussionist for over 10 years it occurred to Lucy that most Bodhran tutorials focused mainly on starting to play the drum and get into the Jig and Reel rhythms a bit, after this you where left on your own to try to find more… This inspired her to write this book and make the accompanying 64 track CD

The book starts with some general info, amongst other topics, about the role of percussion in Irish Traditional Music, when you're ready to hit the session, and more important a checklist to let you also find out for yourself when not…

On page 5 the tutorial really heads off with an intro to the different basic rhythms for Reel, Jig, Slip Jig, Polka, Waltz, Mazurka, Hornpipe and Slide.

Notation example for The Slip Jig
©2005 Lucy Randall

After this the book continues with "foot tap" coordination exercises for the different tunes, an extensive section on cross rhythms, the use of double accents and sShifting patterns (a trick I've read here drummers and percussionists use to move the rhythmic pattern up or down a beat or two. New study material for me to like a lot in this little book)… The book concludes with some "mMetronome" exercises for you to work with, and a bodhran related recommendation list.

As I mentioned before the booklet comes with an excellent 64 track CD.

It starts with a bodhran solo by Lucy and continues with a clear example (played slow and fast) for every exercise in the book, so you can at least hear what your suppose to sound like. At the start of each audio fragment the corresponding title, exercise number and, where needed, the page in the book are correctly given aloud. This makes the interaction between the two media formats flawless.

I, in any case was pleasantly surprised by the quality demonstrated here of Lucy's work, the only comment (if you can call it a comment) is that it's just the opposite of a good movie who's been spun out to long to stay exciting. The wealth of exercises and the sometimes too short accompanying text lets me believe there was a lot more where this came from than the 30 pages the booklet holds now. Despite this I can highly recommend this little book to everybody who is interested in the Bodhran and the playing of this wonderful instrument. I would be lying if I said this book will make you a player, it won't, only getting involved, practice and lots of music listening will make you achieve this goal you have set out to achieve, but it sure is a great help up the ladder…

I for one can tell that after seeing this, I'm already looking forward to the later on this year to be published book by "Mel Bay" "Bodhran Technique" Lucy has in store for us…

This is what Paul Marshall said about it on The Bodhrandojo Group page :
"I recieved a copy of Lucy's excellent (but too short :) book and CD
'The Goatwhacker's Guide to Rhythm' that she was kind enough to send to
me. It deals with different types of bodhran rhythms in notation and by
recorded example as well as some useful exercises. Lucy, you're a rocking
player and the book's great, I like the accents in red, simple but effective".

More info about Lucy Randall (You can also order a copy here):
http://www.lucyrandall.co.uk/

Web page for the band Lucy plays with:
http://www.c-p-r.info/

Evening is falling, snow and drizzle are changed to what they call in the weather forecast Light Rain here in Belgium and the smell of my evening dinner is crawling up the attic stairs so,

Greetz all of ya...

Johnny Verplancke (JoBo)
(c)Bredene 02/2006

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