What a great thread - I missed it the first time round, having joined Mudcat less than a year ago.

"Desert Dancer", your post covers most of the topics (and more) that Mary Humphreys and I tried to cover when we ran a traditional song accompaniment workshop at the Sidmouth Festival last year. For most of the workshop we played recordings of traditional singers with accompanists and let various discussions spring from that.

It's amazing how simple many of them were. Let's go through some of your points:

Different techniques:
- unison with melody
- harmony line in parallel or counterpoint to melody
- chordal accompaniment

We also had examples of drones - we actually do a couple of songs accompanied by a bagpipe drone and one with the chanter playing a harmony as well.

(I should point out that we have lots of instruments but never use a guitar, so some of this may require some liberal interpretation for guitarists)

How to deal with different song rhythms:
- rhythmic
- free rhythm

Once you get away from sustained chords, drones and countermelodies there is a completely different accompaniment style (I tagged it the "rhythm method") where you just mark time to the beat of the tune. This works with some some songs. We played "Hind Horn", the opening track of Chris Coe's album, as an example of this.

Free rhythm is where the accompanist either cops out and plays drones and slow moving chords or has to become very familiar with the song as performed by the singer. We do both, with different songs.

How to build the accompaniment?
- start with the song, then add pieces?

We've always done it that way. Partly for the historical reason that Mary and I only met recently and she has hundreds of songs waiting to be organised into duo performances.

- varying instrumentation within or between songs
- the continuum from unaccompanied voice thru sparse to lush

There you have to go with what you've got. We're lucky having a banjo, cello (those two together are wonderful, by the way), concertinas and melodeons to choose from. Even then there are some songs that simply have to be performed unaccompanied.

Melodic bits aside from the song itself
- tags for breath and/or ornamentation between lines or verses
- instrumental introductions, breaks, closers

What to say about them? They are the nitty gritty of arrangements and the craft of it is finding ways to solve those problems which at least do not detract and at best score extra musical points.

When recording, it seems necessary to make more elaborate arrangements. The way it works is that when you are performing live, the audience has the extra interest of being able to watch you; in a recording you have to add some artificial interest, so you take the opportunity to add more instruments and changes of texture than you would (or evn could) live. (Don't overdo it, of course.)

Vocal teamwork:
- unison as a valid option
- harmony (2 voices, more voices)
- counterpoint

Outside our scope (except that much of it applies to instrumental accompaniment too) but we've seen Keith Kendrick and Lynne Heraud do a harmony singing workshop and they identified some basic components:
- holding a note while the melody moves (yes, we're back to drones again!)
- following the melody a third above or below
- real counterpoint where the harmony part moves in different directions.
Of course any good harmony singing is a mixture of those but if you're having trouble working something out it's worth having that mental checklist.

Other things I have to think about:
- the choice of instruments is influenced by what key Mary wants to sing in. Anglo concertinas and melodeons are limited key wise.
- with a cello, am I going to play mid range harmony or a bass line, or maybe a bit of both?

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One of my music teachers said that you could divide musicians into two types : soloists and accompanists. I thought I was an accompanist; he thought I was a soloist. Whatever, the fact remains that these are two different skills and some of the earlier posts in this thread illustrate what happens when somebody who is good at one tries to do the other. I think a good musician should be able to do some of both, which means working on the weaker of the two skills. It has to do with personality as much as musical ability.

Finally, good accompaniment is about listening. The nicest compliment a musician ever paid me was "he's got big EARS"

Anahata

By the way, we're doing the trad song accomaniment workshop again at the St Neots Folk Festival - Bedfordshire, UK, May 10.