Syncopation in reels

Some tunes have inherent syncopation in their rhythms, which are created by certain patterns of notes. In reels, a run of notes split up by repeating pairs of the same note in between them creates a syncopated rhythm for that section of the tune.

Tonight we learnt The Mouth of the Tobique, which is a French Canadian three part reel. The third part of the tune has this syncopated rhythm.

Once we’d learnt the tune we looked at a couple of bowing options in the first and second parts, using a 1 down 3 up bowing pattern to help to break up the long runs of notes. We also tried playing around with chords in the syncopated part of the tune.

We did some more work on playing Crabbit Shona, the jig that we learnt last week. We worked on the first part of the tune, looking at where to place the emphases in the syncopated bars of the tune.