Scottish & Irish folk songs combined with Lord of the Rings music and Celtic music fun at Renaissance Faires

Brobdingnagian Bards Tales

The latest music news, stories, and events of The Original Celtic Renaissance music group, the Brobdingnagian Bards. CELTIC GEEK at its Best! Find out more from the Nagians page.

Vote for the Brobdingnagian Bards

The 2005-06 Austin Music Poll has now begun. Last year, we won Best Novelty Band. This year, I want to Best Folk Band. But we need your help.

I setup a webpage with voting suggestions for us and several of our Celtic friends. ANYONE around the world can vote for an Austin band. But only one vote person, per IP address.

Please, please, please help us out. Vote and find a friend to vote also.


We may not've been eligible for the Celtic Music Awards or the Renaissance Festival Performer Awards, but this we are and could do brilliantly.

--posted by Marc Gunn of the Brobdingnagian Bards, Celtic Folk Music
  Friday, December 30, 2005
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Brobdingnagian Fairy Tales on iTunes

Did you know that I convert all my music to MP3. It makes my life much much easier to have all my music in one location.

Mind you, it has taken a LOT of time to convert it. Now that I host the Renaissance Festival Podcast and the Irish Celtic Music Podcast, I Really wish more bands would just send me the MP3s rather than having to rip every dang CD.

Fortunately, our music is available as MP3s. Brobdingnagian Fairy Tales is our latest CD to make it to iTunes. It's been there for a while. I'm just now getting around to telling you about it.

Sorry! But I hope you like the ease.

--posted by Marc Gunn of the Brobdingnagian Bards, Celtic Folk Music
  Wednesday, December 28, 2005
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Christmas in Brobdingnag Now Available at CD Baby

Yay! Our Christmas CD, Christmas in Brobdingnag is finally live on CDBaby.

Wait! Christmas is over. Dangit!

Ah well, if you missed out on it.
You can pick up your copy now.
Better late than never...

And you don't have to worry about them running out of copies of the CD next year which is what happened with my cat CD

--posted by Marc Gunn of the Brobdingnagian Bards, Celtic Folk Music
  Monday, December 26, 2005
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A Couple Celtic Notes

I just got some notes saying that the paypal link for our Christmas CD was not working below. So I updated it. You can now order it at through our Celtic Music Store.

Also, I recently updated our Celtic Weddings webpage to include a lot more info about Celtic wedding music and musicians. Our CD's been a huge hit, but there are other great CDs out there as well.

--posted by Marc Gunn of the Brobdingnagian Bards, Celtic Folk Music
  Monday, December 12, 2005
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Louisiana Ren Fest in Review

It is trips like these that remind me why I love being a musician so much. We just got back from a brilliant adventure in Louisiana.

We drove out there on last Monday so we could perform at their School Days event. Last year was our first year doing a School Days function and we didn't know what to expect. We were grossly unprepared. This year, we did some great preparation. We worked out the format on the drive up. This included deciding on what songs to play that we would play over and over and over again for our three shows.

This was the first time since our first year that we did the SAME show for each performance. We're big on rotating our set list to keep it interesting for us as well as our audience. So doing that for School Days was a big change. And it was a hit. We picked some good songs and Andrew did a fantastic job educating the few kids who could sit still long enough.

It inspired us a lot this past weekend too. Not to say we played the same show over and over. Fortunately, we have enough songs to avoid doing that, but it was the presentation that really made it for me. It still kinda boggles my mind when when we put on, what I consider, a great show. And we had several.

You see, one of the big challenges facing music groups at Renaissance faires is that if you only play music, you don't keep a crowd UNLESS you have a big sound or something highly visual. Bagpipes and drums go over amazingly. We talked with one group there who did a couple stage shows and they ran into this problem too. People don't want to sit and watch a thirty minute music set. So you have to provide additional entertainment. Their response was to add more comedy and only play three songs. We, however, were able to play a full eight songs, and keep people glued to their seats while others came to join in the fun. It was highly rewarding to see.

Plus, I had my first ever successful time hawking a show. I've never been fond of hawking, but our secluded stage kinda demanded that we hawked our show. So I did, and it was fairly successful at bringing in a few new faces to our crowd.

The rest of the time was a blast too. We hung out with Vince Conaway, the hammered dulcimer rock star ;), Craig o'Farrington, the beautiful and fun Limey Birds, The Tortuga Twins, The Duelists, The Pirate Shantyman and his Bonnie Lass, and of course, the ultimate, amazingly talented and admirably humble Owain Phyfe. We were truly blessed with some amazing musicians and friends. It was a delight.

Then, of course, we could not help but be even more blessed and thankful to be hosted by Haeuser family. They are wonderful people.

I also got one of the coolest Christmas presents outside of my Amazon.com WishList. It was Emilee Rush who is a brilliant photographer in Oklahoma City area. She took my rocking autoharp picture you see as my userpic. But she made Andrew and me each a photo album filled with pictures she's taken of us at most of our gigs this past year. It's like a visual journal of everything we've done this year. It's too cool!

All in all a great adventure. OH! And I also got a few compliments for my new kilt I got from Things Celtic. The temperature was cold most of the weekend, but I was surprised how easy it was nonetheless wearing the kilt.

Okay, time to forage through a few hundred email now. Slainte!

Labels:

--posted by Marc Gunn of the Brobdingnagian Bards, Celtic Folk Music
  Monday, December 12, 2005
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Christmas in Brobdingnag, Vol 1

Andrew's putting the final touches on the CDs. The product is a five song EP featuring:

1. Little Drummer Boy (Listen)
2. Carol of the Bells (Listen)
3. Bog Down in Christmas (Listen)
4. What Child Is This? (Listen)
5. Christmas Time in Texas (Listen)


It's shorter than we hoped. Some of the live podcast tracks had some glitches in them which made them useless. So it is all music. The CD Cover is what you see above. We kinda lucked out. We had only three submissions of the CD cover and while we liked parts of them, they weren't quite what we were hoping for. So on a whim, I scoured my photo archive and found a picture that was just perfect. So much so that Andrew even approved it IMMEDIATELY.

That might not mean much to you, but Andrew has Very picky tastes IMHO when it comes to images that portray us. At times, it's nerve-wracking as we face a deadline. But I think it always pays off. This one, well, it was just there.

The picture on the cover was taken last year in The Netherlands when my friend Ingrid took me to a fantasy faire there. I forget the name of the band, but it was a Dutch group that played bagpipes and drums in a traditional Dutch tradition, complete with kilts. I didn't realize the Dutch had a kilt wearing tradition. Hopefully, we can get everything sent off by the time we leave for Louisiana for the final weekend of the Louisiana Renaissance Festival.

UPDATE: Everything is ordered. We're doing a rush job for the first one hundred copies. They should on Friday. So we should have them ready for the Louisiana Renaissance Festival.

The Price Tag online is just $8.97 + Shipping.

Christmas music in Brobdingnag

Anyone who orders them, I'll start mailing the CDs out the following week.

--posted by Marc Gunn of the Brobdingnagian Bards, Celtic Folk Music
  Sunday, December 04, 2005
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