KIMIAD
Traditional Breton - Arr: Fretsource
Download Kimiad as a PDF file for offline viewing and printing.
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Kimiad is a beautiful traditional song from Brittany, a region of Western France known for its strong Celtic culture. This arrangement for solo fingerstyle guitar focuses on bringing out the melody over arpeggiated chords. See the link below the scoreif you want a downloadable PDF version for offline viewing or if you want to print out the score.
Playing Tips for Learners
As Kimiad's melody is normally heard as a vocal, try to play it with a singing style. That means you can be more flexible with the timing. You can also add embellishments to the melody in the form of brief grace notes. You can see where I've included a few in the notation (the small notes such as the one in bar 5). You can put them in anywhere you feel that they enhance the melody. Play them as pull-offs or hammer-ons as appropriate. You can also see where ties have been used between the last note of some bars and the the first note of the following bar. This has the effect of anticipating the note before the beat, which is a common vocal technique.
As it's very short, being only a single verse of the original song, you can repeat it, but in that case, you should try to vary it on the second run through, with even more embellishments and ornaments.
Kimiad - Mode and Chords
Kimiad is a song in the Mixolydian mode (A Mixolydian). The 'two sharp' key signature (F# and C#), normally associated with music in the keys of D major and B minor, is acceptable for music in A Mixolydian as the scale is A B C# D E F# G. The tonal centre of the song is A, and the music has a major quality due to the major 3rd, C#, above the tonal centre, but, unlike the key of A major, it has no major 7th (G#) leading note. Instead, it has a flat 7th (G natural), and it's the combination of the major 3rd and flat 7th that produce the unique sound of the Mixolydian mode. The chords, too, are all formed from the notes of A Mixolydian. That's why G major and E minor (both having G natural instead of G#) are featured in prominent positions.
As Kimiad's melody is normally heard as a vocal, try to play it with a singing style. That means you can be more flexible with the timing. You can also add embellishments to the melody in the form of brief grace notes. You can see where I've included a few in the notation (the small notes such as the one in bar 5). You can put them in anywhere you feel that they enhance the melody. Play them as pull-offs or hammer-ons as appropriate. You can also see where ties have been used between the last note of some bars and the the first note of the following bar. This has the effect of anticipating the note before the beat, which is a common vocal technique.
As it's very short, being only a single verse of the original song, you can repeat it, but in that case, you should try to vary it on the second run through, with even more embellishments and ornaments.
Kimiad - Mode and Chords
Kimiad is a song in the Mixolydian mode (A Mixolydian). The 'two sharp' key signature (F# and C#), normally associated with music in the keys of D major and B minor, is acceptable for music in A Mixolydian as the scale is A B C# D E F# G. The tonal centre of the song is A, and the music has a major quality due to the major 3rd, C#, above the tonal centre, but, unlike the key of A major, it has no major 7th (G#) leading note. Instead, it has a flat 7th (G natural), and it's the combination of the major 3rd and flat 7th that produce the unique sound of the Mixolydian mode. The chords, too, are all formed from the notes of A Mixolydian. That's why G major and E minor (both having G natural instead of G#) are featured in prominent positions.