The Folk Orc Tune Book #5 - New York Girls

A.I. Fiddler fiddles in front of New York harbour.

That's right, I chickened out again. A.i. is no more favourable to girls from the Big Apple as it is to girls from Northern Ireland , so here we have a fiddle player jigging away in front of the New York harbour. This week we look at the tune New York Girls.

It's an Irish tune, in 6/8 which makes it a Jig and the key is G major. The rhythm for this tune is at first glance quite a standard jig but when played there is a kind of bounce in the second, fourth, sixth and eighth bars that breaks away from the standard feel. It almost resembles a slipjig feel without actually having it to be a slipjig. Here is the tune in notation and mandolin tab.

There’s no question that the tricky part of this tune is the last line and in particular it is the last two bars which have been a stumbling block for anyone learning it. It is not actually difficult, it is just that the order in which the notes fall create a small obstacle course for your fingers. The trick here is to get your fingers right in the first place, don’t panic, play it slower than you think it should. There is natural tendency to see a long line of notes close together to think that you need to play them faster than the rest of the tune. That is not the case, they are not faster, there is just more of them, which I except is not an entirely helpful revelation, but this is where counting is useful.

Tap your foot slowly and count:

1 2 1 2

Keep tapping your foot slowly on these numbers but count:

1 2 3 2 2 3

Now play bars 17 & 18 or 19 & 20 along with this count. Go as slow as you need to, once you have it, play the whole tune at this speed, try not to speed up in parts of the tune where there are less notes, even if it feels too slow.

Here is a backing track for you to play along to.

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Fingerstyle Version

Working out fingerstyle versions of tunes is a relatively easy thing to do. You can of course make things harder and add in all manner of interesting chord inversions or play around with rhythmic variations, but you don’t have to. A good basic way turn any fiddle tune into a fingerstyle guitar tune is to play the root note of the chord on the first beat of the chord change. That is essentially what is happening here, with a slight rhythmic variation in the tune that can be played with pull-offs (C to B notes in bars 1, 3 and 5).

You can see here that the thumb is playing the root note of each chord, mostly on the pulse.

Quick tip for getting that last unison D note is to slide into the 5th fret, which both makes it easier and sounds cooler, so win win.

Enjoy.

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