*** John Sherman's ***
*** Celtic Guitar Page ***

AN UPDATED VERSION OF THIS PAGE (WITH BETTER GRAPHICS) CAN BE FOUND AT:

http://www.jshermanmusic.com/DADGAD.php

Celtic guitar, simply put, is that body of music arranged for guitar that includes the traditional musical repertoire of the Celtic regions of Europe (primarily Ireland and Scotland, but also including Wales, Brittany, the Isle of Man and Galicia) or that can claim to be influenced by it. Most guitarists employ modal tunings to capture the flavor of this music-- I use the D-A-D-G-A-D tuning, one of the more common, which I'll be describing my own approach to on this page.
I've been spared the daunting task of providing a larger overview of the subject by the efforts of two fine cybercolleagues, Pat Kirtley and Art Edelstein, each of whom has a large and detailed web page discussing various aspects of Celtic guitar, including a comprehensive list of guitarists working in the field and their recordings.

Pat is the 1995 National Fingerstyle Champion and master of a variety of musical idioms in addition to Celtic-- Art is a frequent contributor to national guitar publications and author of his own Internet guide for guitarists (he also constructed the original edition of this Web page!)

For more general information, check them out. In the meantime--

Obviously, this is a subject that would be beyond the scope of your average Web page to address comprehensively. There are some principles, however, that I've found very useful to apply in coming up with my own arrangements of Celtic music:

If your guitar is tuned to D-A-D-G-A-D, you will find that about one and a half octaves of a D-scale can be rendered on the upper four strings of the instrument without entailing much left hand movement.

If you practice this scale, you will notice that a player also has the option of letting some of these notes continue to ring while subsequent ones are being played, allowing the guitar to achieve a harp-like effect.

Many Celtic melodies can be effectively rendered largely within this register--this allows the bottom two strings to be used for rhythmic accompaniment, or to provide a droning effect similar to that achieved with the pipes. The opening bars of "The March of the King of Laois" illustrate this nicely:

Note that I exploited the technique of allowing the 4th string to continue ringing by playing the last note on the 5th string.

Another powerful technique is to mimic the ornamentation used by other instruments in Celtic music. In the example above, I play a fast triplet in the first measure by rapid alternate plucking of the 5th and 4th strings with the thumb and forefinger. This mimics the "cran" and "birl" movements used in piping, or a fiddler's use of a bowed triplet.

Fast hammer-ons and pull-offs can be used, much as fiddlers use them, to get the sharp mordants, grace notes and rolls that appear in Celtic music.

For example, where a fiddler would play as notated in figure 3, the guitar would play as shown in figure 4's tab:

The roll shown in figure 5 (notated singly, then in an expanded form) would be rendered as shown in figure 6.

Listening to what other instruments do to Celtic melodies, as well as reading the sheet music for them where possible, is a great way to spice up your own guitar arrangements.

An excellent tune for developing fluency in the scales as rendered in DADGAD tuning is "The Independent Hornpipe". Notation and tab for the A part of this tune is shown below.

A bound volume of complete transcriptions of 28 of the tunes I have arranged (including the one above) is now available from Mel Bay Publications with accompanying "So Inclined" CD for $19.95. This book is also available through me, as are individual copies of these tunes for $1.00 a copy plus $2.00 shipping. (Presently included tunes are listed on the late-breaking news page, accessible from my homepage). To order them, mail a check or money order to: Walhalla Park Productions, 410 Clinton Heights Ave. Columbus Ohio 43202

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