In this episode of the Ear Laboratory series, I take you through the process of building up my arrangement for Miss McLeod’s Reel, a “melodic” style version that attempts to replicate a fiddle rendition by Adam Hurt.
First, here’s Adam’s original version on the fiddle (the banjo comes in the 2nd time through):
Next, here’s how the sounds on solo banjo:
In the lessons below, I’ll walk step by step through the process of taking Adam’s version and mapping it onto the banjo.
“Miss McLeod’s Reel” from scratch, A part
As shown in the video, here are the melody notes for the version that Adam plays in banjo tab form, listing the possible locations we might play those notes, before we’ve made any decisions about how we’ll go about doing so (think of this as the puzzle we’re trying to solve when creating our arrangement):
And here’s the final arrangement that I played and demonstrate in the video (i.e. one “solution” to the puzzle):
