Hi Jeeneia,

Your friends are lucky to have someone like you to help them have more fun. It sounds like the changes you make are to written music. That's well and good. The changes I was talking about are to music learned by ear and performed by ear.

Not that I have anything against dots and scores. I use them myself, but rarely in the world of traditional music, once I get beyond the learning stage. I guess that I was hoping to have a discussion about how music changes through the act of playing it, the folk process on a personal scale. Quite a different thing than the valuable service of arranging you are doing for your friends.

When I play the old songs and tunes I like with my friends, we mess around with many aspects of the music, tempo, dynamics, ranges, all sorts of ways to accompany the tune, harmony, chords, interesting rhythms... all by ear in an improvisational way without dots. This keeps things fresh and new with surprising discoveries every time we get together.