All You Rude Boys and Girls (who play or used to play brass or brasswind)

Note: If are not familiar with the term "Rude Boy", you don't know enough about the ska music genre to be interested in this.

Trew Ska'ish

The Trew Ska'ish Project

A topic that pops up from time to time in our posts is the "Trew Ska'ish" project. Basically, this is a whimsical if not totally insane effort to do traditional Scottish music on synthesizers. The results of experimentation to date are available in the form of MP3s that you can download from our Facebook music page (donald.rickert1 on Facebook). These experimental pieces were scored using Notation Composer (mostly from 18th and 19th century sheet music) and arranged by Don Rickert. Quantized MIDI sequences were then exported and lots of processing with a popular DAW (Abelton Live!) was done, mixing in some audio of actual acoustic intruments being played as part of the process.

What's with the name?

"Trew Ska'ish" is a pun of sorts. "Trew" means trousers or pants in Scots, but is pronounced "true". Ska'ish is Scottish with a glottal stop, as it is actually pronounced in some parts of Scotland. The spelling we use is "Ska" (as in the musical genre) instead of "Sco"…now, are we not clever?

ONE STEP BEYOND!

Now, we are taking it to the next stage, re-arranging this Scottish-Trad-Synth music into plausible Ska versions. This will, of course, involve adding ska bass parts and the crucial sax and trumpet parts. There will be lots of instrument substitution such as changing flute parts to sax, accordion to melodica, and so forth.

We need collaborators who either used to play or still play tenor sax, baritone sax or trumpet and really understand the role of brasswind in Reggae and Ska, particularly the colloquial harmonies distinctive to the genre. If you opt in, you will use notation software to score nice brasswind parts for the primary melody. In most cases, the bass, guitar and percussion parts will already be scored.

Bass Players Too!

Even though I use to play bass in a Reggae/Ska band, we could probably use some help from bass players who understand the "rock-steady" bass style

The End Game: What is it?

You must understand and embrace the fact that the primary goals are fun and the challenge of seeing if we can pull it off.

The PRODUCT will be a full-length CD that will probably be distributed as individual MP3s (via iLike), iTunes and physical CDs (through Amazon) as well. You will get full credit for your contribution. Your percent of any money we make on this is something we need to negotiate on an individual basis.