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Celtic Fire is the 2017 CD of progressive Celtic music by the Brown County-based band, Celtica.
The CD’s 13 all-instrumental tracks blend contemporary interpretations of intricate, traditional folk melodies from Ireland and Scotland with the semi-classical wonders of modern Celtic music, spiced with just a little kick of rock & roll.
[Scroll down the page to play some streams]
I have the pleasure of being the producer/engineer of the CD, on which I also played classic guitar, bass and virtual drums, and am co-writer of its only original tune, ‘Bouzouki Stomp’ with fellow guitarist Tim Dooley.
A Bit Of Celtica History
Celtica began in the early 1990s, the brainchild of band leader Tammera Lane (hammered dulcimer, piano, keys, psaltery and field organ). This first incarnation of the band lasted for about a decade, but disbanded while Tammera pursued other interests in Wisconsin.
Upon returning to Indiana in 2006, Tammera was encouraged by guitarist Tim Dooley (acoustic guitar, bouzouki, mandolin, bodhran) to revive the band with him.
Based in Brown County, Tammera Lane is a classical-trained pianist who many years ago developed a passion for Celtic music, and branched out to include upwards of 9 instruments in her sound palette, and learning to sing in Gaelic.
Tim Dooley is Tammera’s antithesis in many ways — a rocker by trade (but like Tammera, with Irish roots) who saw Celtic music as a pleasing balance to the more raucous music he played in his bar bands. He, too, added several instruments to his arsenal for Celtica, including mandolin, bouzouki, and the quintessential Irish drum, the bodhran.
For over a decade the two of them performed primarily as a duo, often including stories about the histories of their exotic instruments in the program. Tam and Tim still continue to play many gigs as a duo, even though the band has expanded. Typically, Tammera plays the melodies and Tim provides the rhythmic support, but occasionally takes the lead, as well. The combination of hammered dulcimer and acoustic guitar is a particularly nice combination, fully covering the harmonic spectrum, yet producing a sound that is gentle and soothing, lilting (a word rooted in Gaelic, BTW) in its purity.
In 2009, the duo (along with Clancy Clements on bagpipes) recorded and released Celtica’s debut CD, Labyrinth Walk, a meditative soundtrack for the ancient spiritual practice of “Circling to the Center” (more info on the practice can be found here).
[Tim Dooley left the band in February, 2018.]
The Group Grows
In October of 2013 Tammera, seeking a bigger sound, asked me to join in on classic guitar. While i’ve always had an affection for Celtic music, it wasn’t a style I had taken much time to explore, so I accepted the challenge. Within a couple weeks I had brought my friend and fiddler extraordinaire Carolyn Dutton (I call her ‘The Duchess”) to a rehearsal, and she quickly brought her considerable talents to bear, lifting up the ensemble sound several notches. With Carolyn in the band, we now had two strong melodic instruments who could trade leads and build the intensity of our jams. I focused on laying down a polyphonic fingerstyle guitar accompaniment (playing simultaneous bass lines, rhythmic punctuations and the occasional melodic interjection), which gave Tim more freedom to set the guitar down and pick up his more exotic instruments.
But as many instruments as the band had at their disposal, there were only so many hands to play them. So Tammera added a well-known traditional music duo from Bloomington, Clancy Clements (bagpipes, whistles, and bodhran) and Tom Lozano (hurdy gurdy and various other percussion instruments) to inject their own unique sounds into the mix. Clancy and Tom’s deep knowledge of Celtic music (and world music in general) expanded Celtica’s musical pallete considerably.
information about the “Celtic Fire” CD.
2017: ‘Celtic Fire’
Two years in the making, the new CD shows a distinctively different side of the band from the first CD, ‘Labyrinth Walk‘, which was a much more contemplative musical excursion. ‘Celtic Fire‘, by contrast, is decidedly more upbeat, with the full 6-piece band contributing tracks to the album.
Production began in March of 2015 in my project studio, StringDancer Recording Studio, and by album’s end we had recorded at three different locations in Brown County, Indiana: my original studio in downtown Nashville; in Tammera’s great room at her place; and in the new location at our homestead about three miles outside of town.
Recording the album was a rather on-again-off-again process. With six very busy people in the band, there were months that went by with nothing much going on, interspersed with several periods of focused work. After New Year 2017, things heated up considerably, as the entire band wanted to complete the album and have it ready to market during the March Saint Patrick’s Day season.
Last minute recording sessions were scheduled, and once completed I was finally armed with all the raw material for the album. I sat down in mid-January to begin mixing, at times juggling upwards of 12-14 tracks, and sharing rough mixes with the band via Dropbox, soliciting input. This process took a couple weeks of constant work, plus a group listening session in the studio that lasted an entire afternoon, when final adjustments were made. Having additional ears on a project will definitely reveal alternative perspectives, and this CD is the better for it. In a band with this much talent, consensus is vital if you want to fully leverage everyone’s skill to advantage.
Once the band gave me the nod, I shifted into mastering mode, and on February 13, 2017 delivered the master discs to Tammera to send off for duplication.
Celtic Fire – CD Song Order
1. Muineira do Areal
2. Kitchen Girl/Drowsy Maggie
3. Country Dance
4. Dunmore Lasses
5. Sailor’s Return
6. Star Of Munster
7. Kid On The Mountain
8. The Fiddler
9. Now The Green Blade Rises
10. Bouzouki Stomp
11. Road To Lisdoonvarna/Morrison’s Jig
12. Casey’s Hornpipe
13. Laride
Geek Speak (for those so inclined)
As the producer/engineer, ‘Celtic Fire’ presented me with several interesting challenges and opportunities, chief among them:
- Performed almost entirely on acoustic instruments, overlapping frequency ranges required subtle equalization and positioning in the stereo field so the instruments would not sound crowded or obfuscated. The piano and the guitar, particularly, occupy the same broad swath of frequencies in the mid-range, and had to be balanced and tweaked to bring out the best in each instrument without creating a sonic soup of mid-range mush. I think I mostly succeeded in this endeavor.
- Microphone placement is always important in recording acoustic instruments, but in certain cases on this project, critical, requiring a good deal of experimentation. This was especially true with Tammera’s primary acoustic instruments, the hammered dulcimer and field organ:
- The percussive attack of the dulcimer had to be balanced with the incredible sustain of the instrument, so positioning the mic approximately three feet above the soundboard seemed to work best.
- Similarly, the field organ, which is powered by compressed air generated by pumping foot treadles, required sufficient distance so that the mechanical noise of the treadles was minimized, yet the full sound of the reeds faithfully captured.
- There was one aspect of the project that gave me enormous flexibility with the mixes. Since we had tracked most of the album in brief spurts (often capturing only a single musician in the session), without much thought to the overall arrangement of parts, the band had provided me a veritable smorgasbord of melodic renditions, and hence I could pick and choose how the focus might shift, particularly between Tammera’s hammered dulcimer and Carolyn’s fiddle. I discovered ways to build intensity as the melodies cycled, adding the dulcimer to the fiddle on a reiteration, or fiddle to dulcimer.
In many ways I feel the actual engineering of the album was just as much an exercise in creativity for me as my instrumental contributions (plus, you can undo multiple mix tweaks a lot easier than a flubbed note in a solo ;-).
In conclusion…
The last time I worked this long on a CD project was with my 1992 solo album, Midnight In Zagreb. In similar fashion, that project happened in spurts. Some of the music was composed in Croatia in 1988, sequencing began a year later, then the project was on hold during my relocation to California in 1990, and it took two more years for me to get around to completing and releasing the CD. While I had been involved in recording for many years prior, I was new to digital technology, and my home studio rig was quite modest in those days, certainly in comparison to the tools at my disposal today.
But not rushing an album to market has its advantages. Not least among them is what I think of as the ruminative process. The word comes to us from the bovine world, referring to how cows re-chew their cud in their multi-step process of digestion. Being raised on a farm as a lad, I am pretty familiar with ruminants, and how their unique digestive cycle gave us the origin of the term ruminate as “thinking deeply about something”.
The making of ‘Celtic Fire’ was such a process in many ways for the band. For instance, earlier tracks would later be dismissed by one member or another and redone to reflect how the songs were morphing as we all lived with the earlier rough mixes. What started out as a mere segue riff written by Tim, the tune ‘Bouzouki Stomp’ came together over time as Carolyn added a sizzling fiddle solo, which inspired me to lengthen the tune to make room for my response on guitar. While I had originally envisioned adding bass to a few tracks (since the band at present has no bassist), once the low end was there it only seemed proper to add a drum kit to the more upbeat tunes. Taking the time to live with an album better ensures that no stone is left unturned in a band’s quest for their personal best.
So there you go — a bit of a long-winded recap of some of my memories of a recording project which provided me, and the band, with a great deal of satisfaction, and a source of considerable pride. To experience the music for yourself, visit the band’s website and purchase your copy here.
‘Celtic Fire’ in Pictures
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Sample Streams
I’ll get around to posting full songs at a later date. For now, here’s a couple of streams:
CD Release Party advert feat. “Francis O’Jonesey” on voiceover
CD & gig advert w/ Frank Jones on voiceover
‘Celtic Fire’ song sampler
Celtic Fire song sampler
To purchase copies of Celtic Fire, click HERE.
