Homebrew Hornpipe Set

These are three hornpipes. (Link to the video is at the bottom.) I’m a large-size fan of the hornpipe, as a form of tune.  I like the way they jaunt.  I learned the first tune in this set, the Homebrew Hornpipe, initially because of its name.  I’m a homebrewer of all kinds of beer, and a drinker of all kinds of beer.  I’m fully absorbed.  I’ve loved beer since way before I legally was allowed to imbibe.  (What I have to say about that is, oftentimes laws are daft.)  So much am I enamored of hornpipes and brewing, I named my homebrewery Hornpipe Brewery.

I also love playing the fiddle and the bagpipes, and a couple other instruments, which spreads me a wee bit thin sometimes; in the words of Bilbo Baggins from the Fellowship of the Ring film, “…like butter scraped over too much bread.”  But I try to manage that diffusion with some applied balance, because letting go of, say, the bodhrán or the mandolin, to focus exclusively on the fiddle and the pipes, would be like deciding which dear friend I never wanted to see again.  I’ve opted to play the jack-of-all-trades role, acknowledging the risk I’m incurring of falling prey to the faults of the dilettante.

There are indeed plenty of accomplished multi-instrumentalists treading the boards.  In the world of Celtic music, and its many tributaries, Ali Hutton and Ross Ainslie (https://rossandali.bandcamp.com/) spring to mind.  In the bluegrass universe, Justin Moses (www.justinmoses.com) is a constant mind-scrambler.  I’m sure you can come up with your own examples.  These folks are astonishing for the abundance of talent they possess, and because of the sheer volume and quality of the work they obviously accomplish to develop their multiple talents.

I’m happy to knock around the fringes of their kind of world.  Keeping my hands on more than one instrument diversifies the enjoyment for me, even at the expense of potential mastery.  I’m not even sure mastery ever was in the cards.  Could I have mastered an instrument or two if I’d started young and stuck with it?  It’s tough to determine whether I have the talent.  More’s the pity there’s not a blood test you can take to measure your talent Midichlorians or something.  I still find fulfillment this way though.  I’ve looked into my own mind, asked myself the sufficiently probative questions, and this is the route I’ve chosen.  We all have to do that, with all kinds of issues in life, all the time.

I played the fiddle and the bodhrán for this set of hornpipes: Homebrew Hornpipe, Harvest Home, and Jackie Tar.  The latter two were a couple of the first fiddle tunes I learned when I started playing the fiddle in earnest, in my early 40s.  I’m in my 50s now.

I started playing the bodhrán a couple years ago, against my own better judgement, actually; I picked one up at a house session one night, and I immediately put it right back down for fear of developing an attachment to yet another instrument.  Then a couple years later, I broke down and got one anyway.  I’m glad I did.

I shot the accompanying video in the Massapequa Preserve on New York’s Long Island.  The preserve is a rare wonder of modern suburbia.  You walk off the sidewalk at any one of loads of entrances into the 400-plus-acre preserve, which sits smack-dab in the midst of the bog-standard ‘burbs, and you’re in the woods.  It’s the product of some prescient thinking by its founders.  Here’s a link to more information: (https://themassapequas.com/massapequa-preserve-overview/)

Click here for the YouTube Video.