Is it just me or is the vast majority of abc on the internet pure s**t?
I recently went through some internet tune databases, downloaded them, converted to sheet and spent several days in frustration that most of them are completely useless to me.
for example, I found some O'Neil's collections that are formatted completely wrong. It seems the number of bars per line is completely random, and the errors are so many I would have to spend days correcting them.
the question is why do some folks publish abc's that are so poorly formatted? I find them with the wrong number of beats in a measure, ridiculous amounts of gratuitous accidentals, and I'm ready to delete my whole abc collection on account of this.
Seriously, can't we make some sort of law to ban poorly written abc?
Earl - nobody gets paid for transcribing tunes. Be glad there is anything
at all up there. Feel free to contribute your own; it's hard work - I don't
have time enough, maybe because I don't have Dow's IQ points
I do, I only have two up on the session so far, but it's a start.
You can see that I have paid close attention to detail in getting them as close as possible to the recordings they are from. Although the sheet is made only from the first submission (which I didn't realize at the time) the abc is updated to be accurate to every last note that is discernible. My philosophy emphasized quality when it comes to writing down music. If I bother to write something I want it to accurate if not empirical.
O'Neill's books are full of "mistakes" anyway. Caoimhin Mac Aoidh had some interesting things to say about that in his James O'Neill biography "The Scribe."
Some of the ABCs for the submitted tunes on this site are awful, I hope search engines like the one at tunepal.org are checking the comments as well, since the submissions there are often excellent and/or exhaustive.
When you add original mistakes with abc mistakes you get one messy picture. I can read through most, it's just when tunes become mistakes that problems arise
Databases, by definition, have to be accurate. Any inconsistencies and inaccuracies force you to mistrust the whole. The most useless are those that are contributed to by anyone, regardless of ability or knowledge. Wikepedia is a good example, but at least it gets some semblance of policing. But I find the tune data base here to be the worst kind of offender. It's too late now of course, but for it to be at all useful it should have had some kind or peer review system, just like tunes in the real world. Generally, tunes enter the tradition and survive because they get played. And the rubbish tunes get forgotten. (OK, so there's still far to many that haven't been forgotten yet, but we live in hope.)
And it's unfortunate that data bases such as this, together with popular recordings of course, skew the way the tradition should work. Obscure crap tunes and poor versions of otherwise good tunes keep resurfacing because they can be found with a simple mouse click. And new tunes become popular not because they are good, but because they have been successfully recorded, marketed and and ultimately poorly stored in places like this.
futher to some of the comments above....Earl....aside from the questionable use of dots and abc's to "give an accurate version of tunes" [an impossibility in any case] I'd say you'd be further ahead to use your brain as a data base and scrounge up as many *good* versions of a tune as you can from either fellow players or recordings and use those as your barometer [of taste] and let them be your guide. It couldn't be simpler really. Why waste your time on transcription?
Yes, of course more is less. I like Will's, "the absorbent potential of the internet--it soaks up anything and everything that gets spilled on it." You could also think of it as a solution with a saturation point of infinity.
I wish it was possible to update / alter the sheet music / midis of tunes one has submitted here. It's all too easy to make mistakes when submitting, especially if one hasn't got the hang of abcs as well as one may have thought - they *do* have a lot of potential for pratfalls!
It seems most of the other sites, with abcs, tend to give you only abc (as well as pdf, gif,etc. & midi). Often with limited* means for input (or correction) & the poorly written abc remains & stands alone. At least in our tune section anyone can add comments.
I don't really use abcs (these days) but I do try to read through the comments & maybe compare different members versions (& abcs). It would improve the reputation of the **db if there was a way sheet music could be updated when someone edits their original abc submission.
*some tune archivists are more responsive than others in correcting their database.
**Jeremy can only do so much. The tune submitters & commentators are the db.
I really don't think transcription is a waste of time. I am not sure, but I think some folks don't bother with it is because they don't know how to read it and/or write it. I on the other hand do. I have read enough music in my life time that when I look at a tune on the page I can hear it in my head. that is, only when it is relatively error free and the notes are appropriately spaced to their time value (and notes are grouped together in beats or half measures!!!!!) It really should be no harder to write music without error than it is to spell words correctly, I think some transcribers just lack the practical experience with written music, because it really is a simple language once one takes the time to study it.
Transcriptions are indeed a valuable tool because they can be stored and shared in situations where recordings cannot.
If a tune is written accurately, I can learn it in 1/100th of the time that it takes to learn by ear, then relearn, then relearn again. Well, maybe it's my ear that's faulty, but I don't hear every note the first time I listen to a tune, but I know every note and phrase withing seconds of looking at a transcription.
Also collections like O'Neill's would be very useful as they contain transcriptions of tunes that I DO NOT have recordings for. I don't know about you, but my physical music collection can only be so big. I don't have recordings for every tune I want to learn. e.g. I would love to learn more Fahey tunes, but I don't have any recordings, so I have to use transcriptions. s
"If a tune is written accurately, I can learn it in 1/100th of the time that it takes to learn by ear, then relearn, then relearn again." This isn't in anyway disbelief or criticism, but that's a pretty mind boggling statement. Even allowing for the hyperbole, I'm pretty certain I've never met a trad musician who would make such a claim. That said, I'm also pretty certain that, other than a couple of elderly neighbours, most trad musicians I've played with over say the last fifteen to twenty years, have learnt tunes from manuscript at one time or other. Certainly both my father and mother, who learnt to play in the '40s, can read music. And ABC (though not as used here) and tab have been around in one form or other since the '20s to my certain knowledge. It's just that both are such poor means of taking a tune, something to resort to only if one really has no other choice.
I agree. Writing music down, whether abc or dots, really is a simple language. Because what you are writing down is a simplified versions of the music.
So of course you can learn what's written in a 100th of the time it takes to learn what you should otherwise be hearing.
Again, meant as a observation rather than a criticism, but surely learning tunes isn't like stamp collecting where one can ask a dealer for a particular stamp (a recording or transcription) to fill a gap in a collection. It's more like bird watching, you have to wait for the tune and the player to come along. If you're interested in Paddy's tunes, then when you play with someone new, you ask them if they have any, in a quiet corner (perhaps in the street afterwards) you both go though your repertoires, playing or lilting a phrase or two, till s/he has one you haven't heard, they keep on at it till you have it in your head (or on your mobile phone!), perhaps you ABC the start and a tricky phrase. They tell you who they took the tune from and the circumstances. Hopefully you have a tune to swap. Maybe s/he gives you a number for someone who has a couple of other Fahy tunes or promises to send you a tape (or mp3). For me, the search, the surprise, meeting musicians and the face-to-face interactions are key to what makes it a live tradition.
There is only one other player at the local session who knows Paddy Fahey's No.1, nobody else has any Fahey tunes.
I may have been exaggerating a little when I said 1/100th, but sheet music isn't necesarily only a skeleton. Variations can usually be written on the same staff without making too much of a mess, and if not, they can be written after the tune with a note specifying what measures the variation represents. Tunes can actually be written to stunning detail, and if I have perhaps heard the tune in passing at some point in my life, the exact feel of the rhythm isn't too hard to recall. I know, for instance, how to bow when playing a reel to get the rhythm to sound right. My point in summary; Transcription is a very valuable tool that needs to used properly, rather than just throwing something on the page, and publishing your "rough draft" on the internet
Trouble is they are not just skeletons, they are skeletons with non-representative scraps of soft tissue and odd-and-ends of tendons. The good ones I mean.
Try to accurately transcribe anything Bobby Casey recorded. Good luck!
It's better to strip the tune down to a skeleton when transcribing. It's a
good supplement to recordings or live playing. But if you don't have those
available, you can at least get a good foundation from the transcription.
Once I have heard a tune it is somewhere in my grey matter.
So, if you start it, the circuits reconnect. Perhaps dots & squiggles (no MIDI, thank you very much) may assist while age & atrophication take over. But that's years away. Right?
Seems to me the original question here was about Poorly written abc, and not about whether notation (or abc) was the best way to learn trad music. I'm severely paper trained as a musician, so notation is easiest as a source point for me. However, I also have ears, so if I play that same tune with good players I will adapt and learn from them.
Now, about abc on the web: There are plenty of well done abc files out there. Good basic versions of many tunes. It has been my experience that there are more of them in the Old Timey and Dance Band traditions than in ITM though, and I suspect that is due to a couple of things. First, ITM playing is by its nature a constant set of variations which makes writing down anything difficult, and second too many folks in their efforts to pass on good tunes have exceeded their knowledge of abc and perhaps of notation in general. I suspect some folks get the abc file to "play" correctly and assume that it is then notated correctly.
Finally, it seems to me that the original poster doth complain too much. Many of those "poorly written" files can serve as reasonable starting points. There is more than one way to write music down. It often doesn't conform to the Gardner Read notation book, even in published versions.
Oh, and Random_notes has a good point, if I can just remember what it is....
I'm pretty certain that the real reason abc on the web is so poor is that most musicians raised in the tradition wouldn't dream of passing a tune on to complete strangers that way.
I would say that notation is a pretty poor way of communicating any music - it merely acts as an aide memoir when you know how the music is supposed to sound.
I find that if I learn a tune by ear, once learned it sticks in the memory. But if I listen to a tune and then 'learn' it from the dots it doesn't stick nearly so well. My brain says to itself, "I don't need to memorise this - the dots are there". It's the same for singers learning the words to songs - if the ring binder's open in front of you the words never stick in the brain.
And, yes, there are some oddly formatted abcs on the web and thoosands of different versions of some tunes. But then that's what makes some tunes so good - that they can be pushed about and mangled in a chinese whispers sort of way and still be recognisable.
And, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to transcribe a tune in such a way that on playback (midi or whatever) it sounds like the real thing. I sometimes use Sibelius and a tune transcribed with all the 'correct' notes just sounds awful. It would take so much extra work to make it sound anything decent. I know a fiddler who uses a piano as her default sound on Sibelius because she can't stand the violin sound.
To make good use of the tune database you really have to look in the tune comments. Aside from the dots or no dots issue, if you do use dots you need to look in the comments for decent transcriptions. Also lots of the tunes now have clips, or multiple clips and soundbites of good players playing the tune. You can use the tune database and still learn by ear.
I agree that there are some very poor versions of tunes posted and plenty that are poor as a result of simple abc mistakes, especially from people who have only just learned it. Though I find it odd that you are so critical Earl, considering in the comments of this tune http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/6613 you've made 4 attempts at getting it to your satisfaction and then posted a duplicate tune. It is unfortunate that when an abc error is made on this site it's not possible to correct the resulting dot errors.
Any half decent osteologist can recognise a horse from just one piece of a toe bone. But that doesn't mean one piece of a toe bone is a horse. Paleontologists have been classifying completely new species of dinosaur for decades from mere fragments of fossils. But it's not really like having a living dinosaur in front of you is it?
Poorly written and inaccurate ABCs submitted here - I wonder how many such submissions have first been run through an ABC player so that the submitter can check for mistakes before submitting. It is only too easy to confuse uppercase and lowercase when typing (in fact, some text editors and word processors are quite capable of confusing them for you!), or making errors like leaving out that comma after a low B or the apostrophe after a high c.
Before submitting a tune I always play the ABC through ABCMus at half-speed so that I can listen and check from the original dots. ABCMus also picks up on formatting errors like not notating a triplet properly (it tells you that there are too many notes in that measure).
The final step is to check out the presentation - for example having a neat space each side of a bar line and separating out the beats with spaces, examples being like "| DGG BAG | " and not "|DGGBAG|", or "| GABc dedB |" and not "|GABcdedB|". Also, try not to have more than 4 measures per line. Although all this seems to be icing on the cake it is very important icing because it makes the ABC a lot easier to read and gives some sort of shape and phrasing to the music.
Beware of trying to play a tune from the sheet music on screen on this website. Depending on your monitor, screen resolution, and browser, it can be very difficult to distinguish between an "A" and a "G" below the stave, or a "g" and an "a" above it. When in doubt (like when it doesn't sound quite right) refer to the ABC, or print it out.
Aha, seeing as this is the other popular discussion of the day (see Tin Whistle Lessons Online for the other one), I can say that my ABC notes are absolutely second to none, although I'm pretty sure some of the people here would never be happy. However, only the people who opt for a personal tin whistle lesson on: www.tinwhistlelessons.com will ever know!
I like nicely laid out abc too. To help me see how the phrasing fits in with the metre, and where the re-used of body parts are. Its the main reason I transcribe things now. And for my later years.
DonaldK says : I would say that notation is a pretty poor way of communicating any music - it merely acts as an aide memoir when you know how the music is supposed to sound.
Amen to that, but probably most of us are thankful to O'Neill and the rest of the tune collectors none the less because we know how it is supposed to sound (well...usually ) and can use their efforts. By the same token we ought to be appreciative of many folks who have done the same sort of thing with abc...particularly when they do it well. Yeah there is a lot of really awful transcription out there, but there are some fine efforts too. Don't I remember something about Caveat Emptor?? (did I spell that right??) Just because it is free doesn't mean that doesn't apply.
Do most folks use abc notation as is, or do you convert it to standard dots? Problems with legibility may well be different depending on which you're looking at. There are abcs out there that are badly legible themselves, but still give you perfectly fine standard notation. Then there are abcs that are reasonably legible, but give screwed up conversions, or can't be converted at all without editing because they violate the technical standards.
Myself, I'm used to standard notation, so I always convert my abcs. I tend to see abc as a sort of programming language - it's nice for it to be intelligible for editing and debugging, but what counts at the end of the day is the standard notation rendering it gives me.
Merry Highlander, I always look forward to seeing your comments within the abc section of thesession.org. On this site we mainly have text. All* the audio is linked to outside sources.
*I don't count MIDI downloads. MIDI does not compare w/Peoples' playing. ;)
Jürgen, I use and regard abc files in much the same way that you do. The usual process is to "learn" a tune at a practice session, recording at the time, then look here for an abc. The abc goes into Melody Assistant to view the score then edit as need be to match the recording. Why do that? Because what was learned the evening before is forgotten by the next morning and I'm more of a visual learner.
The most frequent glitch I find in the abc files is incorrectly entered repeats in the B section. This results in tunes playing as AABAAB.
All Moldy, I'm not standing in judgement over you, of course I'm not, but the process you describe just feels so . . . well, wrong! If I understand what you're saying, you transcribe a live recording of a tune from your local seisiún and then put the work in to learn it. I understand the idea of being a visual learner but other than for watching a musician's technique I don't see how it can help your music making; developing the ear is key and anyone can do it. I'm certain that relying so heavily on the eye is just going to hold you back in the long run.
Over the years I've had hundreds of pupils and while some have found it harder than others I'm struggling to think of anyone with a reasonable control of their instrument who couldn't learn a tune from a recording after listening again and again, especially nowadays with "slowdowner" software.
It's a shared experience amongst trad musicians of my generation and older that when they were younger they'd wear out needles and records, tapes and machines, by playing a phrase again and again and again till they had it under their fingers; a saving grace of digital technology is that the repetition doesn't break the media nowadays. I really can't recall anyone other than tune collectors talking about transcribing tunes before they learnt them. My grandfather once said it was like a small boy killing a bird with a stone to study it.
Each to their own obviously, but do try listening to a recording repeatedly until you can hum/sing/lilt it, only then pick up your instrument and try to get it under your fingers. Try it for a month. Stick with it and I guarantee it'll make you a better musician.
But if you really can't face that, then at least try transcribing directly from your recording without going via someone else's abc.
Apologies if I've somehow misunderstood your process.
"My grandfather once said it was like a small boy killing a bird with a stone to study it. " I like that PJH. I hope we hear it more often here. Lets hear it for the ecologists.
OK, PJ, I did that kind of thing for years, AAAArgh! rewind ! never again, Id much rather have a few dots on paper. I can pick up a lot of, if not most, tunes 2nd/3rd time round, but remember them? no way. I agree ear training is essential, but I cant be arsed with all that rewind stuff anymore. Viva la dots!
ABC is great, Love it, I even write my own tunes in ABC first cos then I can have a neat tidy printed PDF copy. beats my awful scrappy handwriting. Its like spell check; essential. Without it my post would be unreadable!
I just can't make any sense of "I can pick up a lot of, if not most, tunes 2nd/3rd time round, but remember them? no way.". What does "pick up" actually mean? I'm assuming here that you're playing a melody instrument. Are you saying that on the third or fourth repeat you can some how join in or noodle along, following the rough up and down movements of the melody? If so, then there's not many serious seisiúns in Ireland that wouldn't tell you to feck off and come back when you can play! If however you're saying that on a regular basis, for a tune you've never heard before, after the third or fourth repeat you can play the tune with good form, then you're a better man than me. And if you can do that, how can you not remember the tune afterwards. If it's been under your fingers (at seisiún speed) then you have it.
As for remembering a tune you've never heard before after two or three repeats, who can? I can think of perhaps a handful of trad musicians who I've seen do that regularly, and all but one are professionals. If I was trying to learn a tune from a recording I expect to have to listen to it perhaps a hundred times before I'd be able to lilt it and only then would I pick up an instrument but then I'd have it after no more than say 20 minutes and it would be mine for life.
PJ, take that last post there with a huge pinch of salt. One thing that's not often mentioned is that learning tunes by ear is fun and rewarding. Part of the problem is that many dot readers don't realize that learning by ear is not that difficult in the long run and only takes practise.
Personally, I'm not against ABC, dots or any others way of getting the tunes in as long as the main focus is learning by ear. Dots are handy if you have specific tunes to learn for something. What is sometimes funny here is that ear only folk criticize folk who use dots but don't stop to think whether or not they themselves learn as much by ear as those they criticize. Ear v dots does not have to be a clear cut one or the other.
Bogman. I agree entirely. My only points are that to my mind:
1. In learning to play trad, the skill of "learning by ear" is a relatively easy one to acquire yet the most valuable: a good ear and ok techniques, beats an ok ear and great technique all day long.
2. The "best" way to take a tune is from someone in front of you, learning from a recording comes next, and from dots or abc comes a poor third.
3. A detailed transcription of a "performance" (Please God, let's not start that discussion again!) can be a fascinating study e.g. Robbie Hannan's transcriptions of Clancy, but you need to be a long way down the track with the music before they're going to be of much use to you.
4. Dots are fine if you're trying to resurrect a tune e.g. from the Goodman collection, which hasn't been played for years and for which there's no recordings.
PJ, I've been sitting in sessions picking up tunes for 25 yrs, 20 of them in Ireland, and no ones told me to feck of yet
But I will have heard many of these tunes many, many, many times before, through sessions and recordings so its really nothing complicated or hard, unless the tune is....
.I learnt by ear for the first 20 odd yrs of playing, and now, after teaching my self to read I learn many more tunes and much faster. Picking up tunes by ear is simply a matter of practice and experience, plus going through the stages, ie being taught bar by bar by ear .Then picking up tunes on the fly is simply doing the same thing but at a faster pace and without breaks.
On the first time round I pick up some bits, 2nd time round most of the rest. Its not noodling, its simply picking up tunes by ear. Session speed here in East Clare is pretty laid back anyhow.
You say though >how can you not remember the tune afterwards. If it's been under your fingers (at seisiún speed) then you have it.<<
yes I have the tune, but remembering it? thats another matter, Ok some simple tunes Like say, the Dunmore lassies, I can remember after playing a couple or three times, but I can sit in a session and pick up 10-20 tunes of a night[ as long as Im not drinking!!], how am I supposed to remember them the next day?! I Generally need to play them every day for a week or so before I can start them off myself. Yes there are loads of tunes I can play if someone starts them off, but I dont count those as tunes I have, I only count tunes I can start off myself, as ones that are mine.
Structurally many of the tunes can be relatively simple chordally, so aphrase might be a D phrase, a G phrase a D phrase etc, its pretty straight forward in a way.
Saying that I find it easier picking up tunes from fiddlers than from pipers, sure I can do it, but its definitely harder. I need to listen that much closer to really here what they are doing under the cranns and shtuff.
A pretty good assessment there PJ. Learning directly from other people is not that easy these days especially if you live in an area like me where there is next to nobody to learn from in this way. So it's mainly recording for me but I always look for as many sources as possible, youtube is great for this.
I have had an ongoing disagreement with a fiddler friend who learns by dots and listens to very little. His argument is that by learning by ear I am copying other people, despite the fact I'd learn different versions from different people and play close to my favourite. His is just an excuse for laziness IMO. Sticking strictly to dots is just laziness
Please don't take this as antagonism, but I've played for over forty years so am pretty familiar the simple structure of most trad tunes, I've laid down a couple of thousand tunes and settings on CD for my kids for I suspect I've a good grasp of the common motifs and phrases, but even allowing for the easy pace around Feakle, I have to take my hat off to you if you're saying that you can play a tune you've never heard before after one or two goes round.
That said, I'm still struggling to understand exactly what you're doing. If you've heard a tune "many, many, many times before" and have a good command of your instrument then you're doing in a seisiún over the 90 seconds or so its takes to repeat a two part tune what takes me 20 minutes in my kitchen. Fair play to you for that, but in all honesty my sense is that you're remembering tunes once they've started rather than learning them on the fly, as it were, and I don't know a musician who doesn't do that.
I cant see how anyone could learn trad without listening to it! I have a huge collection which is on pretty much any time Im not playing myself. IMO Its only by listening to the pure drop will you be able to play it.
But the by 'ear' argument falls flat when we have a situation where a book/midi taught fellow teaches someone by ear! What is Important, nay essential, IMO is the source. learning by ear is all very well, but who you learn from is the crux of the matter.
What is absolutely essential IMO is to Listen to folk like Bobby Casey, Paddy Canny, Ted Fury , Johnny Doherty Paddy Killoran, Dennis Murphy, John Vesey,Martin Byrnes, John Kelly,Kathleen Collins, etc Box players like Johnny O'Leary, Bobby Gardiner, Jackie Daly, MacMahon, Pipers, Johny Doran, Seamus Ennis, Willie Clancy, whistlers, Brid O'Donohue, Mary Bergin, Micho Russel, concertina,Chris Droney, , flute Paddy Carty, the lot the list could go on and on and on and on.
Bogman, you might point out to your friend that's there's no such thing as an entirely neutral expression of a trad tune. Whoever wrote the tune down made decisions as to what to leave in and what to leave out: one man's variation is another man's vanilla version. In fact, come to think of it, that's actually the whole point! Isn't copying other people and then putting your own stamp on it what makes it trad?
All well and good, PJ, but at least in my circumstances I have very few opportunities to learn tunes directly from other people, so recordings it is. I love it when someone teaches me a tune or I can teach someone else one but that rarely happens. I agree, that is the best way but just not always an option for many of us. :(
Could be PJ.... I do pick up tunes Ive heard before, probably/possibly, but definitely tune Ive never played before.
Saying that Ive backed an awful lot of sessions so where does that fit in? Ive not played the tune itself but I could have played the chords hundreds of times, Where is the line drawn? Ive no idea. I could simply have heard the tune hundreds of times, again ,Ive no idea..
But I do generally know if Ive played the tune/picked it up by ear before, because i kinda know it already.. Saying that though, I might know a tune, its being played, but I cant join in because I cant figure out what tune it is or if I know it!
Quite simply if he's not engaging with other musicians by taking their settings as a starting point then he's not a trad musician. He may be playing trad tunes but he's not part of the tradition. He sounds as daft as someone choosing only to eat food that's colored green.
He is a pretty decent player though PJ and he dose engage with other musicians to a certain degree. Also, many of his tunes come from my transcriptions but moans at me if I hear something I prefer and change the version.
Bogman, doesn't your friend (hmmm.... I can't imagine who this might be) realize that the dots, especially on this website, are someone's interpretation of a tune at that instant in time it was recorded, and that player might well play it differently some other day, or even the next time through the tune? No different from hearing someone's momentary interpretation of a tune, well, worse in my book but nevermind. If you are talking about who I think you are, he himself plays some pretty wild (and cool) variations.
When I was on Skye the other weekend we went to a party at this house a couple of blokes -- classical violinists -- were renting. Well into the night, one of the fellas started talking about composing music and how the composer can create real art with one note that captures the essence of the Highlands of Scotland (yup, that's what he said). I was busy being pished and drinking even more whisky, but if I'd been in a more coherent state of mind I should have said that the beauty and art of our music is its fluidity. There is no *one note* that is art, so much as the tunes themselves which are subject to interpretation in innumerable subtle ways, with melodic variation and even more subtle variation of timing and phrasing (with the caveat that I am not the best person to demonstrate this but obviously F is) etc. And what makes it even better is most of this interpretation happens on the fly and is quite spontaneous. Sheet music doesn't describe, or even come close to describing, ANY of that.
For example2 nights ago I sat with a piper and we played for 7 hours solid to 4.30 am, Most of what he played I could pick up, but later in the evening my brain was a bit frazzled so I took names,so now I have a list of 20 odd tunes , I go online and get a number of different ABC versions and kinda figure out a way of playing them that suites me. Now when we meet again , I will have a bunch of his tunes, different settings probably but at least I will be in the 'game' so to speak. Sure I could have recorded them but firstly a recording might well put yer man off, it does me. Secondly It would take me ages to figure out those 20 recordings, Its much quicker for me to have a bunch of notes that I go through several times a day. All I need is a few bits of paper.
Sure if we sat playing together every night Id have these tunes pretty quick, but he lives at the other end of the country and we meet twice a year approx.
Bogman, SilverSpear, I'm very sympathetic to the plight of musicians born outside of strong Irish communities. It can be a very hard road, though less so now with the likes of YouTube. There are some fine musicians around who've come up that way e.g. Martino Vacca who took both senior titles on the pipes at Tullamore, though perhaps not surprisingly most of them seem to end up in Ireland eventually. Start saving for Willie week, if you love the music you'll have the time of your life.
Classical violinists - "one note that captures the essence of the Highlands of Scotland" - I assume they are no natives of the Highlands of Scotland so how would they know?
They were definitely not from there. Luckily for them, I was too drunk to do anything more than stare blankly and think, "Huh?" And not start laughing. That said, they were actually really nice blokes but reminded of the Victorians I occasionally have to read about for work who have a totally bizarre, over the top, romanticized view of the Highlands. It was like a time machine into 19th century Balmoral. Hilarious.
PJ,
I have been to Willie Week three times and next July will most likely be the fourth. It's great craic. Anyway, there IS a strong trad music tradition in Scotland, both Scottish and Irish. Moving here was definitely the way forward. But unfortunately in this modern day and age where everyone is over committed and stressed out, finding the time to sit and exchange some tunes in the corner is difficult and often neglected simply because someone can sit down with a recording or with the dots and cram a tune into their head without dealing with human interaction. Sad.
Sorry Bogman, I didn't mean to appear condescending.
Ionannas, sounds to me like a wasted opportunity to have someone teach you some of their settings. Taking a tune of someone with them right in front of you is what trad is all about, not blasting through tunes for hours on end.
Oh we werent blasting through tunes, but taking them at a nice easy lilt..
I probably wouldn't remember them anyhow without some form of record. and I did get a lot of tunes from him that night anyhow, if I could just remember what they were
There's certainly a very strong Irish community in Glasgow, with what used to be a very active Comhaltas branch, though I haven't heard so much about it recently. In the '70 and early '80 I played in sessions and at céilís there a good few times.
There are 3 Comhltas branches in Glasgow and the Irish Minstrels branch (St Rochs) is certainly still very active. In fact one of their number, Johnny Canning, just managed to wrestle the All Ireland Fiddle Championship out of Irish hands!
I was listening to Sharon Shannon's Libertango album last night when I heard a track titled "Whitestrand sling."
Although it turns out to be in in Eb or possibly Ab (hard to tell because there are hardly and Ds of any value, flat or natural)
The tune itself is a combination of other tunes, who have had their keys changed to protect the innocent.
There are three parts, the first of which seems to be a combination of the Maids of Mitchelstown, and Jenny Picking Cockles. and the third of which seems to be a version of Boys of Ballisodare (sp?).
I wasn't able to pick this tune out by ear because I don't play in Eb often enough, In fact I assumed my fiddle was out of tune until I checked it. The only way I eventually figured out most of the notes was with Transcribe and by writing down each individual note and then WRITING THEM DOWN as I got them. don't worry, once I get it, I will submit it here so you all can enjoy!
Oh I guess my point may have been lost in the details somewhat.
My thought was that many people who are apparently learning from dots are in fact learning by ear. I remember the last time I learned anything from sheet music, I specifically averted my eyes from the page during certain measures, because I knew from hearing the tune at the session, that the dots were wrong at that part. This is how I am always learning by ear, subconsciously, whether I like it or not.
When it comes to a tune in a difficult or uncommon key, that is when I realize most the power of transcription. When you try to learn by ear something with Eb and Ab your sense of place on the fiddle, for example, is diminished and you cannot depend on your ear besides to tell you that what you thought you heard was wrong. In a step by step, note by note approach, I realize that any note can be represented as a dot on a stave, and it's time can be represented by a stem on said dot....
There is still a crackin' Irish music scene in Glasgow.
Earl, I know people who have an incredibly good ear for intervals and can learn a tune off a set of B pipes, for instance, even if their own set is in D. They can hear the intervals rather than the notes. I am not one of those people but luckily can cheat with software that changes the key.
In Music school, students are taught (probably in Theory and Ear training 101) how to listen to a note and then write it down. This skill is actually somewhat easy to acquire from an already musical mind. I remember even writing down whole chords and four part moving melodies and basslines with inner voices. I know from folks who went further than I, that complex classical pieces can be transcribed live in this way if played slowly enough. Of course you could use this to illustrate why learning by ear is the way, the truth, and the light. But you could also manage to notice that it is all written on the staff. In this way, A clear connection is made in the brain between Aural Input with the output in notation. Folks who learn how to do this see notes (even whole phrases, whole pieces) on a page, and hear them in their heads, the same way a voice in yours is speaking these words to you as you read them. This abstraction that takes place is not as much removed from the world of Aural sensation as it is a dimension of it's expression
Sorry Earl, but I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Most formally trained musicians have the skills to a) hear the music as they're reading it, and b) transcribe music as they hear it. I know I can do both though not with orchestral pieces. So what?
I have been reading music as long as I have been reading the written word.
When I see notation for Irish trad tunes, I can hear a basic skeleton, but by no means does the printed music convey how this music sounds. It is a mere outline. That's all. no more, no less.
I can hear some big heavy foot steps coming .
I think it's Mr Gill
he's not going to like this
Anyway I'm not so keen on this reliance on dots mainly cause I cannot read them and I an not convinced they can portray all of the tune
so I agree with Wyogul
"All Moldy, I'm not standing in judgement over you, of course I'm not, but the process you describe just feels so . . . well, wrong!"
Go ahead and judge PJ, it feels wrong to me too. It has been working though, however inefficiently. It's not the only way I try to get the tune into my head though. The recordings are loaded to the ipod to be played in the car or at other spare moments. What is frustrating me is that I can learn a song after hearing it just a few times whereas for an ITM tune it seems to take weeks to even recall how it starts.
I understand the tradition of learning from live playing of others, and that's how I learn songs, but there's little opportunity here. Sessions are few and anyway there is no way I'm going pick up a tune played at full speed from a single hearing. Even the slow learning session is a 140km round trip. At least this way I can learn the skeleton of the tune and hopefully put some flesh on it later if I get to hear somebody play it.
"The visual is an expression of the aural, and can either be accurate, or not."
No. It's never "accurate". A huge amount of the sound of any music, including classical music as well as traditional, is based on aural tradition. The dots do not tell you how it should sound.
Well, we're a long way from the original topic... But it is interesting. To me the key thing has been said several times, most recently by "ethical:"
=====
A huge amount of the sound of any music, including classical music as well as traditional, is based on aural tradition. The dots do not tell you how it should sound.
=====
That's true. Any well trained music reader brings to the reading process his/her knowledge of the style of the music being read. If the reader's background is sufficient the result is satisfying and if not it is not. Classical music that slavishly follows the notes (particularly in music from before the 20th century when it was assumed the performer understood the traditions) is every bit as awful as ITM played off the page without any understanding of what should go on.
My point: If you don't engage the ear a good deal ahead of time notation won't do you much good if you want to play with others in whatever style. If you do immerse yourself in a style/tradition by listening then notation can be a help as a memory aid, as a starting point for one or more versions of a tune you've not encountered before, and as a means to accumulate a repertoire to which you plan to return. ABC is just one way to gather that notation. It succeeds where any notation can succeed and fails where any notation can fail. And, like other notation, there can be terrible examples. They don't call the Schirmer editions of the Schubert songs "the Yellow Plague" for nothing....
Yes. What music sounds like is the only important issue. And the dots (to any kind of music) do not tell you how it should sound. Very succinctly put.
And yet there is a certain amount of information in the dots and I think that their relevance to any particular style of music could be a measure of what proportion of the final sound can be found in the dots alone.
Running the manuscript through a programme like Sibelius, allotting the correct instruments to the parts, and comparing it with a recording of the real music should give you a general idea.
Much of today's pop music would come out pretty near 100%. Hardly surprising since it is written and performed by computers anyway.
A fair amount of Western classical orchestral music could well come out at as much as 20%. I'm guessing of course and you are welcome to quibble with that figure. But the answer will also depend on how mechanical your live orchestra is playing and, of course, how familiar you are with how a really good live orchestra would play the piece.
Western classical concertos would fair less well. And any kind of singing would be pretty hopeless.
So how would Irish diddley music do? You only need to listen to the midi files here to get the measure of it. Again, it depends on how mechanical your live diddley musician is playing and, of course, how familiar you are with how a really good live diddley player would play the tune, including variation. The crucial difference with the classical music is that at least (with most pieces anyway) all the notes are in the computer's version - even if the timing and phrasing are absent. And this is the crux of it. If you are unfamiliar with the music, you'd be giving a much higher percentage of actual music to the computer's version.
And this is why you shouldn't share tunes in written form with strangers.
"Hardly surprising since it is written and performed by computers anyway" - I've had disagreements with a couple of colleagues about this. The don't write music but insist making music on the computer is composing while my argument is how can it be composing if you can't do it without the computer. You can build music on a computer but it always sounds constructed.
Favourite music joke of all time...
Two DJ's wonder what to do for the evening. One says, "Do you fancy going to the cinema to watch the new blockbuster?" The other replys' "Dunno, who's the projectionist?"
"Paleontologists have been classifying completely new species of dinosaur for decades from mere fragments of fossils" (llig, above). They have also been getting an overall picture of smaller beats from comparing large numbers of individual fossils.
Doesn't scanning through the alternative transcriptions in the comments section here provide information that a single recording might not ?
I think that if you accept that a computer can be a musical instrument, then you must be able to compose on it - or at least for it. But you can't really play music on the computer. You can instruct a computer to play music, then the computer plays it.
I like it, it's a good joke
Is a set of pipes fundamentally different I wonder? You compose on them - or at least for them. But is it still pipe music if it's not played on the pipes? I'd say yes, I play lots of pipe music on my fiddle.
"Doesn't scanning through the alternative transcriptions in the comments section here provide information that a single recording might not ?"
Yes, of course, But it's still not enough information to to give you a tune.
Aye, a Highland piping tune or a fiddle tune is still a Highland piping or fiddle tune even if I am making an a*se of it on uilleann pipes.
I said it above... there is so much subtlety in the way a good player plays a tune, with variation, the timing, and the phrasing, that no computer can capture it. Listen.... you'll hear the way they'll shift the emphasis of a phrase, hold a note there, play a triplet run here, emphasize the on beat one time through and the off beat the second time through, etc etc. How can a computer transcription describe that?
It's been said here before, but if you know the music in and out and are a good reader, you can pick off tunes via sheet music. People do this. I know really good players who do this regularly. But that doesn't mean the sheet music accurately describes the tunes. Just means you're experienced enough to interpret the dots in a way that makes it sound like a tune.
Llig, I don't accept that a computer is a musical instrument, an interface between man and instrument aye. Playing in a serious of notes and then moving them about a grid till they sound right or moving chunks of music to different places is not composing music for me, it's building music.
'Cross-intrument' tune learning was one thing I was thinking about Silver Spear. If the recording I have of a tune the way it is played locally is from a fiddler, or I can only hear a banjo properly on a crummy recording of a session, there comes a point where, as new flute player, getting ideas from a helpful 'this is how it lies well on the flute' transcription here is going to be more respectful of the tradition, and educational than trying sort something out myself. But not as good as time spent recordings by different people on different instruments.
I'm really only speaking up for the tunes database as a resource, which is better if the transcriptions are not rubbish.
I did preface with "if you accept that a computer can be a musical instrument". If you don't, then it's a different discussion.
I'm in two minds. It depends on how you define computer. If a computer's interface is qwerty keyboard and mouse then yeah, I'm not convinced. But what if it's a good weighted polyphonic midi keyboard?
And what's the difference between moving notes around on a stave with a pencil and paper and moving them about a grid with your mouse? What's the difference between composing and building?
"So how would Irish diddley music do? You only need to listen to the midi files here to get the measure of it." (llig)
Remember that standard musical notation (of which both abc and those midi files are 1:1 representations) was developed to represent classical music. Even there its interpretation is governed by rules not inherent in the notation itself, depending on style. In a baroque score "ABcd efga" means something subtly different than in a romantic one.
Irish traditional music OTOH, having evolved aurally, didn't have a primary need for notation and thus hasn't developed one tailored to its specific peculiarities. With standard notation we're using a tool made for a slightly different purpose, which is why so many more caveats, or unwritten laws apply, compared to classical music.
Sorry if this is posted twice. It didn't show up here the first time, and I want to be sure it does.
Llig says: "The crucial difference with the classical music is that at least (with most pieces anyway) all the notes are in the computer's version - even if the timing and phrasing are absent. And this is the crux of it."
Sorry Llig, that simply is not true. Improvisation is an important part of the classic music tradition up at least until the time of Beethoven. There are often diddlies added to a degree that obscures the basic melody far beyond what might happen to a particular tune in a good ITM session. But, that didn't keep the music from being printed because it was assumed that THE PLAYERS KNEW WHAT TO DO WITH THE DOTS. Please excuse the shout, but that is the crucial point here.
Llig also says: "So how would Irish diddley music do? You only need to listen to the midi files here to get the measure of it."
Again I have to disagree. MIDI files just badly crank out the notes handed to the program without making any of the decisions about variation, phrasing and articulation that would be part of the performance of a good ITM player working from notation.
Llig is absolutely correct when he says that a person needs immersion in the aural tradition to become a fine ITM player. He is, I think, wrong when he suggests that the dots can't be a useful starting point. For one example of how dots might be useful check out:
For me, there are two problems with using written music as a starting point. Firstly, it's not the most efficient way to develop the most important skill required of a trad musician: the ability to take a tune from someone sat in front of them.; to learn by ear. Surely, it's that that makes it an aural tradition. Secondly, and to my mind more importantly, it doesn't place the music in its social context. Hearing when, how, with what variations or setting, and from whom your "teacher" took the tune is what makes it an oral tradition. It's what forges the link between you and the previous generations.
A trad musician's respect for musicians that can before him/her tends not to be merely abstract but is tied to specific settings usually from named individuals, sometimes from people they've never even met. Looking at the notation you mention, yes you can notate ornamentation and variation but without understanding its context the danger is you learn a sort of ersatz trad, the very thing many accuse Comhaltas of promoting. So of course you can learn and play Willie Coleman's without knowing who he was, but it feels to me a much thinner experience.
cboody, you mean someone who can already read notation coming to trad music? Because all that stuff just clutters up the score for me. I much rather have the plain melody and improvise where and how I ornament depending on Instrument being played. In fact IMO notating the ornaments might lead a newbie in the wrong direction. The basic tune needs IMO to be learnt as is, then slowly variations develop naturally. As your ear , skills and Imagination develop.
IMO what matters is lift and drive in the music, after that come instrument specific ornaments. Some players basically focus entirely on the tune and hardly ornament at all. Dance-ability is Primary IMO.
Im a great fan of the dots, but I consider picking up tunes by ear, from a teacher, to be the way to develop an essential part of the music. I really dont think that the dots alone will get you or anyone very far at all. If you dont have a teacher to break the tunes down bar/phrase by bar, then get one. If you really cant, then maybe slow down software? Ive never used it so I cant speak from experience. But IMO an absolutely essential part of learnig this music is to listen to it a lot. I dont mean these modern bands like Lunessa , dervish etc, very good though they may be. But Solo and duets, no backing.
Folk like Bobby Casey, Paddy Canny, Ted Fury , Johnny Doherty Paddy Killoran, Dennis Murphy, John Vesey,Martin Byrnes, John Kelly,Kathleen Collins, etc Box players like Johnny O'Leary, Bobby Gardiner, Jackie Daly, MacMahon, Pipers, Johny Doran, Seamus Ennis, Willie Clancy, whistlers, Brid O'Donohue, Mary Bergin, Micho Russel, concertina,Chris Droney, , flute Paddy Carty.
This is an art form. You cant expect to learn to become an artist by 'painting by numbers'.
cboody, sorry, you are right, I should have said:
"The crucial difference with the classical music is that at least (since Beethoven) all the notes are in the computer's version"
However, with your second quibble: "MIDI files just badly crank out the notes handed to the program"
The whole point I'm making is that the midi file is an accurate aural representation of the information contained in the written music. And that the difference between that sound and the sound of a decent player is an accurate measurement of what information is missing in the written music.
The dots can not be any more of a useful starting point to learning the music as a book of written words can be a useful starting point for a two year old toddler who is learning to speak.
Thanks for the great responses to me. Thoughtful and thought provoking and not attacking. Wonderful!! Mostly I agree with all said. Some specifics:
I just plain missed your point on the MIDI files Llig . Viewed that way you are absolutely right for me. And if your real point is that music reading should come after learning by ear (as in Suzuki Violin among other things) I also agree that is the best way to gain entry to the trad world. If your point is that music reading is not part of the equation ever I disagree.
Ionannas I think we missed each other. What I was trying to suggest is that having those variants on the page might break down the idea that one should learn a tune from the dots and never varying it. The biggest problem I hear in gatherings I go to is that folks, whether playing bluegrass, old timey, ITM or any other tunes don't learn that there are variants. They use notation in absolutely the wrong way to rigidly repeat what is written down. And, I would never disagree that the best way to get "into" any style is one on one with a good teacher and in sessions where your level of playing is accepted and where you can hear what others do.
PJ I don't disagree that learning by ear is extremely important. I still struggle with it despite many years of other kinds of musical training. But, I think notation can be useful in so many other ways that I would not give it up. Your other point: that learning by notation might get in the way of the social context of tunes is spot on. Not only that, but learning in the context of sessions and by playing with others is a joy that no notation can ever replace.
I don't think we are truly differing very much in where we stand. Perhaps just in my feeling that notation is part of the picture and for some of you it is not. I've other friends that agree with no notation...and some that agree with me. I don't think we are going to ever reach consensus on that bit...
I've never said that music reading should not be part of the equation. I use the dots sometimes, I scribble down tunes for mates sometimes, but I prefer not to. The only real use for it is as a short cut. And I'm not in any hurry. I let tunes just come to me. The tunes I learn are the ones that just come to me subconsciously after hearing them. Having got the gist of them, I'll then put a bit of effort into getting them right. This usually means listening hard when they get played down the pub. But occasionally it includes asking someone, "just show me how that little bit goes?"
The main problem comes when people from other genres of music come to diddley with a pre-learned ability to read music and use that skill to acquire a repertoire quickly. (And web sites like this are a hideous encouragement to such people). If you learn the tunes, or at least your first hundred or so by ear alone, then you will learn the style along with the tunes and this really is the only way. For the tunes are the style, and the style is the tunes. They are one in the same.
I get annoyed when people say such things like, "yeah, learning by ear is important, but not vital". Total b*llocks. Of course it's vital. How else are you going to get the 99% of the music that's not in the dots? And that goes for any genre of music. It's what sets a human performance apart from a computer's
Poorly written abc
Poorly written abc
Is it just me or is the vast majority of abc on the internet pure s**t?
I recently went through some internet tune databases, downloaded them, converted to sheet and spent several days in frustration that most of them are completely useless to me.
for example, I found some O'Neil's collections that are formatted completely wrong. It seems the number of bars per line is completely random, and the errors are so many I would have to spend days correcting them.
the question is why do some folks publish abc's that are so poorly formatted? I find them with the wrong number of beats in a measure, ridiculous amounts of gratuitous accidentals, and I'm ready to delete my whole abc collection on account of this.
Seriously, can't we make some sort of law to ban poorly written abc?
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by Earl Cameron
Re: Poorly written abc
Ah, the absorbent potential of the internet--it soaks up anything and everything that gets spilled on it.
My motto is: In ears we trust.
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by Will Harmon
Re: Poorly written abc
Earl - nobody gets paid for transcribing tunes. Be glad there is anything
at all up there. Feel free to contribute your own; it's hard work - I don't
have time enough, maybe because I don't have Dow's IQ points
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by Hup
Re: Poorly written abc
I do, I only have two up on the session so far, but it's a start.
You can see that I have paid close attention to detail in getting them as close as possible to the recordings they are from. Although the sheet is made only from the first submission (which I didn't realize at the time) the abc is updated to be accurate to every last note that is discernible. My philosophy emphasized quality when it comes to writing down music. If I bother to write something I want it to accurate if not empirical.
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by Earl Cameron
Re: Poorly written abc
O'Neill's books are full of "mistakes" anyway. Caoimhin Mac Aoidh had some interesting things to say about that in his James O'Neill biography "The Scribe."
Some of the ABCs for the submitted tunes on this site are awful, I hope search engines like the one at tunepal.org are checking the comments as well, since the submissions there are often excellent and/or exhaustive.
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by KLR
Re: Poorly written abc
When you add original mistakes with abc mistakes you get one messy picture. I can read through most, it's just when tunes become mistakes that problems arise
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by Earl Cameron
Re: Poorly written abc
Databases, by definition, have to be accurate. Any inconsistencies and inaccuracies force you to mistrust the whole. The most useless are those that are contributed to by anyone, regardless of ability or knowledge. Wikepedia is a good example, but at least it gets some semblance of policing. But I find the tune data base here to be the worst kind of offender. It's too late now of course, but for it to be at all useful it should have had some kind or peer review system, just like tunes in the real world. Generally, tunes enter the tradition and survive because they get played. And the rubbish tunes get forgotten. (OK, so there's still far to many that haven't been forgotten yet, but we live in hope.)
And it's unfortunate that data bases such as this, together with popular recordings of course, skew the way the tradition should work. Obscure crap tunes and poor versions of otherwise good tunes keep resurfacing because they can be found with a simple mouse click. And new tunes become popular not because they are good, but because they have been successfully recorded, marketed and and ultimately poorly stored in places like this.
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by ...
For example.......
http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/1794
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by Kenny
Re: Poorly written abc
MG...
so you're saying more is less? at least when it comes to this website? it's a lovely irony of the internet in general no?
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by skin&bow
Re: Poorly written abc
futher to some of the comments above....Earl....aside from the questionable use of dots and abc's to "give an accurate version of tunes" [an impossibility in any case] I'd say you'd be further ahead to use your brain as a data base and scrounge up as many *good* versions of a tune as you can from either fellow players or recordings and use those as your barometer [of taste] and let them be your guide. It couldn't be simpler really. Why waste your time on transcription?
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by skin&bow
Re: Poorly written abc
Yes, of course more is less. I like Will's, "the absorbent potential of the internet--it soaks up anything and everything that gets spilled on it." You could also think of it as a solution with a saturation point of infinity.
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by ...
Re: Poorly written abc
I wish it was possible to update / alter the sheet music / midis of tunes one has submitted here. It's all too easy to make mistakes when submitting, especially if one hasn't got the hang of abcs as well as one may have thought - they *do* have a lot of potential for pratfalls!
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by nicholas
Re: Poorly written abc
It seems most of the other sites, with abcs, tend to give you only abc (as well as pdf, gif,etc. & midi). Often with limited* means for input (or correction) & the poorly written abc remains & stands alone. At least in our tune section anyone can add comments.
I don't really use abcs (these days) but I do try to read through the comments & maybe compare different members versions (& abcs). It would improve the reputation of the **db if there was a way sheet music could be updated when someone edits their original abc submission.
*some tune archivists are more responsive than others in correcting their database.
**Jeremy can only do so much. The tune submitters & commentators are the db.
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by Ben Steen
Re: Poorly written abc
I really don't think transcription is a waste of time. I am not sure, but I think some folks don't bother with it is because they don't know how to read it and/or write it. I on the other hand do. I have read enough music in my life time that when I look at a tune on the page I can hear it in my head. that is, only when it is relatively error free and the notes are appropriately spaced to their time value (and notes are grouped together in beats or half measures!!!!!) It really should be no harder to write music without error than it is to spell words correctly, I think some transcribers just lack the practical experience with written music, because it really is a simple language once one takes the time to study it.
Transcriptions are indeed a valuable tool because they can be stored and shared in situations where recordings cannot.
If a tune is written accurately, I can learn it in 1/100th of the time that it takes to learn by ear, then relearn, then relearn again. Well, maybe it's my ear that's faulty, but I don't hear every note the first time I listen to a tune, but I know every note and phrase withing seconds of looking at a transcription.
Also collections like O'Neill's would be very useful as they contain transcriptions of tunes that I DO NOT have recordings for. I don't know about you, but my physical music collection can only be so big. I don't have recordings for every tune I want to learn. e.g. I would love to learn more Fahey tunes, but I don't have any recordings, so I have to use transcriptions. s
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by Earl Cameron
Re: Poorly written abc
"If a tune is written accurately, I can learn it in 1/100th of the time that it takes to learn by ear, then relearn, then relearn again." This isn't in anyway disbelief or criticism, but that's a pretty mind boggling statement. Even allowing for the hyperbole, I'm pretty certain I've never met a trad musician who would make such a claim. That said, I'm also pretty certain that, other than a couple of elderly neighbours, most trad musicians I've played with over say the last fifteen to twenty years, have learnt tunes from manuscript at one time or other. Certainly both my father and mother, who learnt to play in the '40s, can read music. And ABC (though not as used here) and tab have been around in one form or other since the '20s to my certain knowledge. It's just that both are such poor means of taking a tune, something to resort to only if one really has no other choice.
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
I agree. Writing music down, whether abc or dots, really is a simple language. Because what you are writing down is a simplified versions of the music.
So of course you can learn what's written in a 100th of the time it takes to learn what you should otherwise be hearing.
But you are only learning a 100th of the music.
1%
It\s your statistic ... think about it.
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by ...
Re: Poorly written abc
Again, meant as a observation rather than a criticism, but surely learning tunes isn't like stamp collecting where one can ask a dealer for a particular stamp (a recording or transcription) to fill a gap in a collection. It's more like bird watching, you have to wait for the tune and the player to come along. If you're interested in Paddy's tunes, then when you play with someone new, you ask them if they have any, in a quiet corner (perhaps in the street afterwards) you both go though your repertoires, playing or lilting a phrase or two, till s/he has one you haven't heard, they keep on at it till you have it in your head (or on your mobile phone!), perhaps you ABC the start and a tricky phrase. They tell you who they took the tune from and the circumstances. Hopefully you have a tune to swap. Maybe s/he gives you a number for someone who has a couple of other Fahy tunes or promises to send you a tape (or mp3). For me, the search, the surprise, meeting musicians and the face-to-face interactions are key to what makes it a live tradition.
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
There is only one other player at the local session who knows Paddy Fahey's No.1, nobody else has any Fahey tunes.
I may have been exaggerating a little when I said 1/100th, but sheet music isn't necesarily only a skeleton. Variations can usually be written on the same staff without making too much of a mess, and if not, they can be written after the tune with a note specifying what measures the variation represents. Tunes can actually be written to stunning detail, and if I have perhaps heard the tune in passing at some point in my life, the exact feel of the rhythm isn't too hard to recall. I know, for instance, how to bow when playing a reel to get the rhythm to sound right. My point in summary; Transcription is a very valuable tool that needs to used properly, rather than just throwing something on the page, and publishing your "rough draft" on the internet
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by Earl Cameron
Re: Poorly written abc
No. Tunes cannot be written in stunning detail. At best, the writing can only be reminders of something you can recall.
PJ, I loved your post very much. Thankyou.
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by ...
Re: Poorly written abc
... pulling chair up closer to listen in. Sounds like this could be a good one...
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by grego
Re: Poorly written abc
Trouble is they are not just skeletons, they are skeletons with non-representative scraps of soft tissue and odd-and-ends of tendons. The good ones I mean.
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by David50
Re: Poorly written abc
I don't mean 'non-representative' . 'Subjectively selected' maybe.
# Posted on October 8th 2009 by David50
Re: Poorly written abc
Try to accurately transcribe anything Bobby Casey recorded. Good luck!
It's better to strip the tune down to a skeleton when transcribing. It's a
good supplement to recordings or live playing. But if you don't have those
available, you can at least get a good foundation from the transcription.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by Hup
Oxymorons
Once I have heard a tune it is somewhere in my grey matter.
So, if you start it, the circuits reconnect. Perhaps dots & squiggles (no MIDI, thank you very much) may assist while age & atrophication take over. But that's years away. Right?
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by Ben Steen
~
david, & of course scar tissue begins to grow when otherwise healthy cells become confused. ;)
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by Ben Steen
Re: Poorly written abc
Seems to me the original question here was about Poorly written abc, and not about whether notation (or abc) was the best way to learn trad music. I'm severely paper trained as a musician, so notation is easiest as a source point for me. However, I also have ears, so if I play that same tune with good players I will adapt and learn from them.
Now, about abc on the web: There are plenty of well done abc files out there. Good basic versions of many tunes. It has been my experience that there are more of them in the Old Timey and Dance Band traditions than in ITM though, and I suspect that is due to a couple of things. First, ITM playing is by its nature a constant set of variations which makes writing down anything difficult, and second too many folks in their efforts to pass on good tunes have exceeded their knowledge of abc and perhaps of notation in general. I suspect some folks get the abc file to "play" correctly and assume that it is then notated correctly.
Finally, it seems to me that the original poster doth complain too much. Many of those "poorly written" files can serve as reasonable starting points. There is more than one way to write music down. It often doesn't conform to the Gardner Read notation book, even in published versions.
Oh, and Random_notes has a good point, if I can just remember what it is....
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by cboody
~
they don't just hold your hat up. ;)
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by Ben Steen
Re: Poorly written abc
I think the word I was after is 'indicative'. In the sense of 'most times people do something like this'.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by David50
Re: Poorly written abc
I'm pretty certain that the real reason abc on the web is so poor is that most musicians raised in the tradition wouldn't dream of passing a tune on to complete strangers that way.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
"Seems to me the original question here was about Poorly written abc, and not about whether notation (or abc) was the best way to learn trad music."
It's the same thing really, seeings as notation (abc, dots, tab etc) is a poor way of communicating Irish music. Especially, as PJ says, to strangers.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by ...
Re: Poorly written abc
I would say that notation is a pretty poor way of communicating any music - it merely acts as an aide memoir when you know how the music is supposed to sound.
I find that if I learn a tune by ear, once learned it sticks in the memory. But if I listen to a tune and then 'learn' it from the dots it doesn't stick nearly so well. My brain says to itself, "I don't need to memorise this - the dots are there". It's the same for singers learning the words to songs - if the ring binder's open in front of you the words never stick in the brain.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by DonaldK
Re: Poorly written abc
And, yes, there are some oddly formatted abcs on the web and thoosands of different versions of some tunes. But then that's what makes some tunes so good - that they can be pushed about and mangled in a chinese whispers sort of way and still be recognisable.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by DonaldK
Re: Poorly written abc
And, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to transcribe a tune in such a way that on playback (midi or whatever) it sounds like the real thing. I sometimes use Sibelius and a tune transcribed with all the 'correct' notes just sounds awful. It would take so much extra work to make it sound anything decent. I know a fiddler who uses a piano as her default sound on Sibelius because she can't stand the violin sound.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by DonaldK
Re: Poorly written abc
To make good use of the tune database you really have to look in the tune comments. Aside from the dots or no dots issue, if you do use dots you need to look in the comments for decent transcriptions. Also lots of the tunes now have clips, or multiple clips and soundbites of good players playing the tune. You can use the tune database and still learn by ear.
I agree that there are some very poor versions of tunes posted and plenty that are poor as a result of simple abc mistakes, especially from people who have only just learned it. Though I find it odd that you are so critical Earl, considering in the comments of this tune http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/6613 you've made 4 attempts at getting it to your satisfaction and then posted a duplicate tune. It is unfortunate that when an abc error is made on this site it's not possible to correct the resulting dot errors.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
Any half decent osteologist can recognise a horse from just one piece of a toe bone. But that doesn't mean one piece of a toe bone is a horse. Paleontologists have been classifying completely new species of dinosaur for decades from mere fragments of fossils. But it's not really like having a living dinosaur in front of you is it?
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by ...
Re: Poorly written abc
Whereas playing in a session is.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by ethical blend
Re: Poorly written abc
Poorly written and inaccurate ABCs submitted here - I wonder how many such submissions have first been run through an ABC player so that the submitter can check for mistakes before submitting. It is only too easy to confuse uppercase and lowercase when typing (in fact, some text editors and word processors are quite capable of confusing them for you!), or making errors like leaving out that comma after a low B or the apostrophe after a high c.
Before submitting a tune I always play the ABC through ABCMus at half-speed so that I can listen and check from the original dots. ABCMus also picks up on formatting errors like not notating a triplet properly (it tells you that there are too many notes in that measure).
The final step is to check out the presentation - for example having a neat space each side of a bar line and separating out the beats with spaces, examples being like "| DGG BAG | " and not "|DGGBAG|", or "| GABc dedB |" and not "|GABcdedB|". Also, try not to have more than 4 measures per line. Although all this seems to be icing on the cake it is very important icing because it makes the ABC a lot easier to read and gives some sort of shape and phrasing to the music.
Beware of trying to play a tune from the sheet music on screen on this website. Depending on your monitor, screen resolution, and browser, it can be very difficult to distinguish between an "A" and a "G" below the stave, or a "g" and an "a" above it. When in doubt (like when it doesn't sound quite right) refer to the ABC, or print it out.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by Trevor Jennings
Re: Poorly written abc
Aha, seeing as this is the other popular discussion of the day (see Tin Whistle Lessons Online for the other one), I can say that my ABC notes are absolutely second to none, although I'm pretty sure some of the people here would never be happy. However, only the people who opt for a personal tin whistle lesson on: www.tinwhistlelessons.com will ever know!
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by tinwhistletutor
Re: Poorly written abc
This is not an advertising board, it's a discussion board.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
"gives some sort of shape and phrasing to the music."
I should have written "helps you to see the shape and phrasing of the music"
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by Trevor Jennings
Re: Poorly written abc
How do most musicians, raised in the tradition, pass on a tune to a complete stranger?
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by Ben Steen
. . .
online, that is.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by Ben Steen
Re: Poorly written abc
tunes are passed on to others in many ways, but only if more people could pass tunes on in the way that Tommy Peoples can...
is it about the number of tunes? how many flowers are in a beautiful garden?
are you "sharing"a collection of notes or an emotion, a feeling, a time, a place a passion?
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by The Merry Highlander
very poetic but not so practical, Merry. ;)
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by Ben Steen
Re: Poorly written abc
I like nicely laid out abc too. To help me see how the phrasing fits in with the metre, and where the re-used of body parts are. Its the main reason I transcribe things now. And for my later years.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by David50
Re: Poorly written abc
delete the "of". I didn't.
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by David50
Re: Poorly written abc
Why not practical? A complete starnger ? hmmm I have made complete stangers into close friends by playing a tune...
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by The Merry Highlander
Re: Poorly written abc
"tunes are passed on to others in many ways"
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by Ben Steen
1 example ~
http://www.thesession.org/tunes/index.php/search?member_id=9529
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by Ben Steen
Re: Poorly written abc
Nothing wrong with abcs... i use them all the time...
but
"but only if more people could pass tunes on in the way that Tommy Peoples can... "
Thats where my focus is currently...
# Posted on October 9th 2009 by The Merry Highlander
Re: Poorly written abc
DonaldK says : I would say that notation is a pretty poor way of communicating any music - it merely acts as an aide memoir when you know how the music is supposed to sound.
) and can use their efforts. By the same token we ought to be appreciative of many folks who have done the same sort of thing with abc...particularly when they do it well. Yeah there is a lot of really awful transcription out there, but there are some fine efforts too. Don't I remember something about Caveat Emptor?? (did I spell that right??) Just because it is free doesn't mean that doesn't apply.
Amen to that, but probably most of us are thankful to O'Neill and the rest of the tune collectors none the less because we know how it is supposed to sound (well...usually
# Posted on October 10th 2009 by cboody
Re: Poorly written abc
Some interesting words here regarding O'Neills;
[on the video clip]
http://daviscwatson.blogspot.com/2008/08/seeking-funding-for-documentary-on.html
# Posted on October 10th 2009 by piobagusfidil
Re: Poorly written abc
Do most folks use abc notation as is, or do you convert it to standard dots? Problems with legibility may well be different depending on which you're looking at. There are abcs out there that are badly legible themselves, but still give you perfectly fine standard notation. Then there are abcs that are reasonably legible, but give screwed up conversions, or can't be converted at all without editing because they violate the technical standards.
Myself, I'm used to standard notation, so I always convert my abcs. I tend to see abc as a sort of programming language - it's nice for it to be intelligible for editing and debugging, but what counts at the end of the day is the standard notation rendering it gives me.
# Posted on October 10th 2009 by Jürgen
Short story
it was in the days of innocence ~
young musician: get yourself to a session, Random. Then you will hear these tunes & more than you can ever imagine.
young random: how will I know what the tunes are?
young musician: The tunes are to be found in "O'Neill's 1,001 Dance Tunes."
The night arrives ~
young random: These tunes, are they the tunes of O'Neill?
old musician: yes
surprised random: you play them differently from what I read & practiced.
everyone: congratulations!
# Posted on October 10th 2009 by Ben Steen
I cannot hear you ~
Merry Highlander, I always look forward to seeing your comments within the abc section of thesession.org. On this site we mainly have text. All* the audio is linked to outside sources.
*I don't count MIDI downloads. MIDI does not compare w/Peoples' playing. ;)
# Posted on October 10th 2009 by Ben Steen
Re: Poorly written abc
Jürgen, I use and regard abc files in much the same way that you do. The usual process is to "learn" a tune at a practice session, recording at the time, then look here for an abc. The abc goes into Melody Assistant to view the score then edit as need be to match the recording. Why do that? Because what was learned the evening before is forgotten by the next morning and I'm more of a visual learner.
The most frequent glitch I find in the abc files is incorrectly entered repeats in the B section. This results in tunes playing as AABAAB.
# Posted on October 10th 2009 by All Moldy
Re: Poorly written abc
All Moldy, I'm not standing in judgement over you, of course I'm not, but the process you describe just feels so . . . well, wrong! If I understand what you're saying, you transcribe a live recording of a tune from your local seisiún and then put the work in to learn it. I understand the idea of being a visual learner but other than for watching a musician's technique I don't see how it can help your music making; developing the ear is key and anyone can do it. I'm certain that relying so heavily on the eye is just going to hold you back in the long run.
Over the years I've had hundreds of pupils and while some have found it harder than others I'm struggling to think of anyone with a reasonable control of their instrument who couldn't learn a tune from a recording after listening again and again, especially nowadays with "slowdowner" software.
It's a shared experience amongst trad musicians of my generation and older that when they were younger they'd wear out needles and records, tapes and machines, by playing a phrase again and again and again till they had it under their fingers; a saving grace of digital technology is that the repetition doesn't break the media nowadays. I really can't recall anyone other than tune collectors talking about transcribing tunes before they learnt them. My grandfather once said it was like a small boy killing a bird with a stone to study it.
Each to their own obviously, but do try listening to a recording repeatedly until you can hum/sing/lilt it, only then pick up your instrument and try to get it under your fingers. Try it for a month. Stick with it and I guarantee it'll make you a better musician.
But if you really can't face that, then at least try transcribing directly from your recording without going via someone else's abc.
Apologies if I've somehow misunderstood your process.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
"My grandfather once said it was like a small boy killing a bird with a stone to study it. " I like that PJH. I hope we hear it more often here. Lets hear it for the ecologists.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by David50
Re: Poorly written abc
OK, PJ, I did that kind of thing for years, AAAArgh! rewind ! never again, Id much rather have a few dots on paper. I can pick up a lot of, if not most, tunes 2nd/3rd time round, but remember them? no way. I agree ear training is essential, but I cant be arsed with all that rewind stuff anymore. Viva la dots!
ABC is great, Love it, I even write my own tunes in ABC first cos then I can have a neat tidy printed PDF copy.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by piobagusfidil
Re: Poorly written abc
I just can't make any sense of "I can pick up a lot of, if not most, tunes 2nd/3rd time round, but remember them? no way.". What does "pick up" actually mean? I'm assuming here that you're playing a melody instrument. Are you saying that on the third or fourth repeat you can some how join in or noodle along, following the rough up and down movements of the melody? If so, then there's not many serious seisiúns in Ireland that wouldn't tell you to feck off and come back when you can play! If however you're saying that on a regular basis, for a tune you've never heard before, after the third or fourth repeat you can play the tune with good form, then you're a better man than me. And if you can do that, how can you not remember the tune afterwards. If it's been under your fingers (at seisiún speed) then you have it.
As for remembering a tune you've never heard before after two or three repeats, who can? I can think of perhaps a handful of trad musicians who I've seen do that regularly, and all but one are professionals. If I was trying to learn a tune from a recording I expect to have to listen to it perhaps a hundred times before I'd be able to lilt it and only then would I pick up an instrument but then I'd have it after no more than say 20 minutes and it would be mine for life.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
PJ, take that last post there with a huge pinch of salt. One thing that's not often mentioned is that learning tunes by ear is fun and rewarding. Part of the problem is that many dot readers don't realize that learning by ear is not that difficult in the long run and only takes practise.
Personally, I'm not against ABC, dots or any others way of getting the tunes in as long as the main focus is learning by ear. Dots are handy if you have specific tunes to learn for something. What is sometimes funny here is that ear only folk criticize folk who use dots but don't stop to think whether or not they themselves learn as much by ear as those they criticize. Ear v dots does not have to be a clear cut one or the other.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
Bogman. I agree entirely. My only points are that to my mind:
1. In learning to play trad, the skill of "learning by ear" is a relatively easy one to acquire yet the most valuable: a good ear and ok techniques, beats an ok ear and great technique all day long.
2. The "best" way to take a tune is from someone in front of you, learning from a recording comes next, and from dots or abc comes a poor third.
3. A detailed transcription of a "performance" (Please God, let's not start that discussion again!) can be a fascinating study e.g. Robbie Hannan's transcriptions of Clancy, but you need to be a long way down the track with the music before they're going to be of much use to you.
4. Dots are fine if you're trying to resurrect a tune e.g. from the Goodman collection, which hasn't been played for years and for which there's no recordings.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
PJ, I've been sitting in sessions picking up tunes for 25 yrs, 20 of them in Ireland, and no ones told me to feck of yet
But I will have heard many of these tunes many, many, many times before, through sessions and recordings so its really nothing complicated or hard, unless the tune is....
.I learnt by ear for the first 20 odd yrs of playing, and now, after teaching my self to read I learn many more tunes and much faster. Picking up tunes by ear is simply a matter of practice and experience, plus going through the stages, ie being taught bar by bar by ear .Then picking up tunes on the fly is simply doing the same thing but at a faster pace and without breaks.
On the first time round I pick up some bits, 2nd time round most of the rest. Its not noodling, its simply picking up tunes by ear. Session speed here in East Clare is pretty laid back anyhow.
You say though >how can you not remember the tune afterwards. If it's been under your fingers (at seisiún speed) then you have it.<<
yes I have the tune, but remembering it? thats another matter, Ok some simple tunes Like say, the Dunmore lassies, I can remember after playing a couple or three times, but I can sit in a session and pick up 10-20 tunes of a night[ as long as Im not drinking!!], how am I supposed to remember them the next day?! I Generally need to play them every day for a week or so before I can start them off myself. Yes there are loads of tunes I can play if someone starts them off, but I dont count those as tunes I have, I only count tunes I can start off myself, as ones that are mine.
Structurally many of the tunes can be relatively simple chordally, so aphrase might be a D phrase, a G phrase a D phrase etc, its pretty straight forward in a way.
Saying that I find it easier picking up tunes from fiddlers than from pipers, sure I can do it, but its definitely harder. I need to listen that much closer to really here what they are doing under the cranns and shtuff.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by piobagusfidil
Re: Poorly written abc
A pretty good assessment there PJ. Learning directly from other people is not that easy these days especially if you live in an area like me where there is next to nobody to learn from in this way. So it's mainly recording for me but I always look for as many sources as possible, youtube is great for this.
I have had an ongoing disagreement with a fiddler friend who learns by dots and listens to very little. His argument is that by learning by ear I am copying other people, despite the fact I'd learn different versions from different people and play close to my favourite. His is just an excuse for laziness IMO. Sticking strictly to dots is just laziness
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
Please don't take this as antagonism, but I've played for over forty years so am pretty familiar the simple structure of most trad tunes, I've laid down a couple of thousand tunes and settings on CD for my kids for I suspect I've a good grasp of the common motifs and phrases, but even allowing for the easy pace around Feakle, I have to take my hat off to you if you're saying that you can play a tune you've never heard before after one or two goes round.
That said, I'm still struggling to understand exactly what you're doing. If you've heard a tune "many, many, many times before" and have a good command of your instrument then you're doing in a seisiún over the 90 seconds or so its takes to repeat a two part tune what takes me 20 minutes in my kitchen. Fair play to you for that, but in all honesty my sense is that you're remembering tunes once they've started rather than learning them on the fly, as it were, and I don't know a musician who doesn't do that.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
I cant see how anyone could learn trad without listening to it! I have a huge collection which is on pretty much any time Im not playing myself. IMO Its only by listening to the pure drop will you be able to play it.
But the by 'ear' argument falls flat when we have a situation where a book/midi taught fellow teaches someone by ear! What is Important, nay essential, IMO is the source. learning by ear is all very well, but who you learn from is the crux of the matter.
What is absolutely essential IMO is to Listen to folk like Bobby Casey, Paddy Canny, Ted Fury , Johnny Doherty Paddy Killoran, Dennis Murphy, John Vesey,Martin Byrnes, John Kelly,Kathleen Collins, etc Box players like Johnny O'Leary, Bobby Gardiner, Jackie Daly, MacMahon, Pipers, Johny Doran, Seamus Ennis, Willie Clancy, whistlers, Brid O'Donohue, Mary Bergin, Micho Russel, concertina,Chris Droney, , flute Paddy Carty, the lot the list could go on and on and on and on.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by piobagusfidil
Re: Poorly written abc
midi taught? what the feck is that?
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
Bogman, you might point out to your friend that's there's no such thing as an entirely neutral expression of a trad tune. Whoever wrote the tune down made decisions as to what to leave in and what to leave out: one man's variation is another man's vanilla version. In fact, come to think of it, that's actually the whole point! Isn't copying other people and then putting your own stamp on it what makes it trad?
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
woops, please ignore that question. I can work it out.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
Yes PJ, funny thing is that's his argument for not learning by ear. Drives me nuts.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
.....but his way is learning from dots and then putting your stamp on it. Just inhibits his ability to learn IMO.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
All well and good, PJ, but at least in my circumstances I have very few opportunities to learn tunes directly from other people, so recordings it is. I love it when someone teaches me a tune or I can teach someone else one but that rarely happens. I agree, that is the best way but just not always an option for many of us. :(
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Poorly written abc
Whoops, cross posted with Bogman, who said more or less the same thing. LOL.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Poorly written abc
Could be PJ.... I do pick up tunes Ive heard before, probably/possibly, but definitely tune Ive never played before.
Saying that Ive backed an awful lot of sessions so where does that fit in? Ive not played the tune itself but I could have played the chords hundreds of times, Where is the line drawn? Ive no idea. I could simply have heard the tune hundreds of times, again ,Ive no idea..
But I do generally know if Ive played the tune/picked it up by ear before, because i kinda know it already.. Saying that though, I might know a tune, its being played, but I cant join in because I cant figure out what tune it is or if I know it!
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by piobagusfidil
Re: Poorly written abc
Quite simply if he's not engaging with other musicians by taking their settings as a starting point then he's not a trad musician. He may be playing trad tunes but he's not part of the tradition. He sounds as daft as someone choosing only to eat food that's colored green.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
He is a pretty decent player though PJ and he dose engage with other musicians to a certain degree. Also, many of his tunes come from my transcriptions but moans at me if I hear something I prefer and change the version.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
Bogman, doesn't your friend (hmmm.... I can't imagine who this might be) realize that the dots, especially on this website, are someone's interpretation of a tune at that instant in time it was recorded, and that player might well play it differently some other day, or even the next time through the tune? No different from hearing someone's momentary interpretation of a tune, well, worse in my book but nevermind. If you are talking about who I think you are, he himself plays some pretty wild (and cool) variations.
When I was on Skye the other weekend we went to a party at this house a couple of blokes -- classical violinists -- were renting. Well into the night, one of the fellas started talking about composing music and how the composer can create real art with one note that captures the essence of the Highlands of Scotland (yup, that's what he said). I was busy being pished and drinking even more whisky, but if I'd been in a more coherent state of mind I should have said that the beauty and art of our music is its fluidity. There is no *one note* that is art, so much as the tunes themselves which are subject to interpretation in innumerable subtle ways, with melodic variation and even more subtle variation of timing and phrasing (with the caveat that I am not the best person to demonstrate this but obviously F is) etc. And what makes it even better is most of this interpretation happens on the fly and is quite spontaneous. Sheet music doesn't describe, or even come close to describing, ANY of that.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Poorly written abc
For example2 nights ago I sat with a piper and we played for 7 hours solid to 4.30 am, Most of what he played I could pick up, but later in the evening my brain was a bit frazzled so I took names,so now I have a list of 20 odd tunes , I go online and get a number of different ABC versions and kinda figure out a way of playing them that suites me. Now when we meet again , I will have a bunch of his tunes, different settings probably but at least I will be in the 'game' so to speak. Sure I could have recorded them but firstly a recording might well put yer man off, it does me. Secondly It would take me ages to figure out those 20 recordings, Its much quicker for me to have a bunch of notes that I go through several times a day. All I need is a few bits of paper.
Sure if we sat playing together every night Id have these tunes pretty quick, but he lives at the other end of the country and we meet twice a year approx.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by piobagusfidil
Re: Poorly written abc
Bogman, SilverSpear, I'm very sympathetic to the plight of musicians born outside of strong Irish communities. It can be a very hard road, though less so now with the likes of YouTube. There are some fine musicians around who've come up that way e.g. Martino Vacca who took both senior titles on the pipes at Tullamore, though perhaps not surprisingly most of them seem to end up in Ireland eventually. Start saving for Willie week, if you love the music you'll have the time of your life.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
Classical violinists - "one note that captures the essence of the Highlands of Scotland" - I assume they are no natives of the Highlands of Scotland so how would they know?
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
No need to be sympathetic PJ, there is life outside strong Irish communities.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
Bogman,
They were definitely not from there. Luckily for them, I was too drunk to do anything more than stare blankly and think, "Huh?" And not start laughing. That said, they were actually really nice blokes but reminded of the Victorians I occasionally have to read about for work who have a totally bizarre, over the top, romanticized view of the Highlands. It was like a time machine into 19th century Balmoral. Hilarious.
PJ,
I have been to Willie Week three times and next July will most likely be the fourth. It's great craic. Anyway, there IS a strong trad music tradition in Scotland, both Scottish and Irish. Moving here was definitely the way forward. But unfortunately in this modern day and age where everyone is over committed and stressed out, finding the time to sit and exchange some tunes in the corner is difficult and often neglected simply because someone can sit down with a recording or with the dots and cram a tune into their head without dealing with human interaction. Sad.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Poorly written abc
Sorry Bogman, I didn't mean to appear condescending.
Ionannas, sounds to me like a wasted opportunity to have someone teach you some of their settings. Taking a tune of someone with them right in front of you is what trad is all about, not blasting through tunes for hours on end.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
No problem PJ, I know it wasn't meant is it looked. Off out for some tunes now
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
Oh we werent blasting through tunes, but taking them at a nice easy lilt..
I probably wouldn't remember them anyhow without some form of record. and I did get a lot of tunes from him that night anyhow, if I could just remember what they were
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by piobagusfidil
Re: Poorly written abc
There's certainly a very strong Irish community in Glasgow, with what used to be a very active Comhaltas branch, though I haven't heard so much about it recently. In the '70 and early '80 I played in sessions and at céilís there a good few times.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
There are 3 Comhltas branches in Glasgow and the Irish Minstrels branch (St Rochs) is certainly still very active. In fact one of their number, Johnny Canning, just managed to wrestle the All Ireland Fiddle Championship out of Irish hands!
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by No Cause For Alarm
Re: Poorly written abc
I was listening to Sharon Shannon's Libertango album last night when I heard a track titled "Whitestrand sling."
Although it turns out to be in in Eb or possibly Ab (hard to tell because there are hardly and Ds of any value, flat or natural)
The tune itself is a combination of other tunes, who have had their keys changed to protect the innocent.
There are three parts, the first of which seems to be a combination of the Maids of Mitchelstown, and Jenny Picking Cockles. and the third of which seems to be a version of Boys of Ballisodare (sp?).
I wasn't able to pick this tune out by ear because I don't play in Eb often enough, In fact I assumed my fiddle was out of tune until I checked it. The only way I eventually figured out most of the notes was with Transcribe and by writing down each individual note and then WRITING THEM DOWN as I got them. don't worry, once I get it, I will submit it here so you all can enjoy!
cheers
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Earl Cameron
Re: Poorly written abc
Oh I guess my point may have been lost in the details somewhat.
My thought was that many people who are apparently learning from dots are in fact learning by ear. I remember the last time I learned anything from sheet music, I specifically averted my eyes from the page during certain measures, because I knew from hearing the tune at the session, that the dots were wrong at that part. This is how I am always learning by ear, subconsciously, whether I like it or not.
When it comes to a tune in a difficult or uncommon key, that is when I realize most the power of transcription. When you try to learn by ear something with Eb and Ab your sense of place on the fiddle, for example, is diminished and you cannot depend on your ear besides to tell you that what you thought you heard was wrong. In a step by step, note by note approach, I realize that any note can be represented as a dot on a stave, and it's time can be represented by a stem on said dot....
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Earl Cameron
Re: Poorly written abc
There is still a crackin' Irish music scene in Glasgow.
Earl, I know people who have an incredibly good ear for intervals and can learn a tune off a set of B pipes, for instance, even if their own set is in D. They can hear the intervals rather than the notes. I am not one of those people but luckily can cheat with software that changes the key.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Poorly written abc
In Music school, students are taught (probably in Theory and Ear training 101) how to listen to a note and then write it down. This skill is actually somewhat easy to acquire from an already musical mind. I remember even writing down whole chords and four part moving melodies and basslines with inner voices. I know from folks who went further than I, that complex classical pieces can be transcribed live in this way if played slowly enough. Of course you could use this to illustrate why learning by ear is the way, the truth, and the light. But you could also manage to notice that it is all written on the staff. In this way, A clear connection is made in the brain between Aural Input with the output in notation. Folks who learn how to do this see notes (even whole phrases, whole pieces) on a page, and hear them in their heads, the same way a voice in yours is speaking these words to you as you read them. This abstraction that takes place is not as much removed from the world of Aural sensation as it is a dimension of it's expression
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Earl Cameron
Re: Poorly written abc
There are pipes in B? you mean Bb?
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Earl Cameron
Re: Poorly written abc
There are I am reliably informed Pipes in B.
I think I learn everything by ear anyhow, I listen to the guy playing the tune[in this case me] and remember the melody and fingering.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by piobagusfidil
Re: Poorly written abc
Either I was hallucinating, taking something, or I have played and heard pipes in B. The jury is still out.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Poorly written abc
Sorry Earl, but I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Most formally trained musicians have the skills to a) hear the music as they're reading it, and b) transcribe music as they hear it. I know I can do both though not with orchestral pieces. So what?
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
I have been reading music as long as I have been reading the written word.
When I see notation for Irish trad tunes, I can hear a basic skeleton, but by no means does the printed music convey how this music sounds. It is a mere outline. That's all. no more, no less.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by Wyogal
Re: Poorly written abc
I can hear some big heavy foot steps coming .
I think it's Mr Gill
he's not going to like this
Anyway I'm not so keen on this reliance on dots mainly cause I cannot read them and I an not convinced they can portray all of the tune
so I agree with Wyogul
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by bazouki dave
Re: Poorly written abc
"All Moldy, I'm not standing in judgement over you, of course I'm not, but the process you describe just feels so . . . well, wrong!"
Go ahead and judge PJ, it feels wrong to me too. It has been working though, however inefficiently. It's not the only way I try to get the tune into my head though. The recordings are loaded to the ipod to be played in the car or at other spare moments. What is frustrating me is that I can learn a song after hearing it just a few times whereas for an ITM tune it seems to take weeks to even recall how it starts.
I understand the tradition of learning from live playing of others, and that's how I learn songs, but there's little opportunity here. Sessions are few and anyway there is no way I'm going pick up a tune played at full speed from a single hearing. Even the slow learning session is a 140km round trip. At least this way I can learn the skeleton of the tune and hopefully put some flesh on it later if I get to hear somebody play it.
# Posted on October 11th 2009 by All Moldy
Re: Poorly written abc
So there is not a division between the dots and the ear. The visual is an expression of the aural, and can either be accurate, or not.
# Posted on October 12th 2009 by Earl Cameron
Re: Poorly written abc
random, i may have had a few drinks and tend to get very sentimental... like is said i use abc... probably should nt even be in this thread! lol
# Posted on October 12th 2009 by The Merry Highlander
Re: Poorly written abc
"The visual is an expression of the aural, and can either be accurate, or not."
No. It's never "accurate". A huge amount of the sound of any music, including classical music as well as traditional, is based on aural tradition. The dots do not tell you how it should sound.
# Posted on October 12th 2009 by ethical blend
Re: Poorly written abc
Well, we're a long way from the original topic... But it is interesting. To me the key thing has been said several times, most recently by "ethical:"
=====
A huge amount of the sound of any music, including classical music as well as traditional, is based on aural tradition. The dots do not tell you how it should sound.
=====
That's true. Any well trained music reader brings to the reading process his/her knowledge of the style of the music being read. If the reader's background is sufficient the result is satisfying and if not it is not. Classical music that slavishly follows the notes (particularly in music from before the 20th century when it was assumed the performer understood the traditions) is every bit as awful as ITM played off the page without any understanding of what should go on.
My point: If you don't engage the ear a good deal ahead of time notation won't do you much good if you want to play with others in whatever style. If you do immerse yourself in a style/tradition by listening then notation can be a help as a memory aid, as a starting point for one or more versions of a tune you've not encountered before, and as a means to accumulate a repertoire to which you plan to return. ABC is just one way to gather that notation. It succeeds where any notation can succeed and fails where any notation can fail. And, like other notation, there can be terrible examples. They don't call the Schirmer editions of the Schubert songs "the Yellow Plague" for nothing....
# Posted on October 13th 2009 by cboody
Re: Poorly written abc
Yes. What music sounds like is the only important issue. And the dots (to any kind of music) do not tell you how it should sound. Very succinctly put.
And yet there is a certain amount of information in the dots and I think that their relevance to any particular style of music could be a measure of what proportion of the final sound can be found in the dots alone.
Running the manuscript through a programme like Sibelius, allotting the correct instruments to the parts, and comparing it with a recording of the real music should give you a general idea.
Much of today's pop music would come out pretty near 100%. Hardly surprising since it is written and performed by computers anyway.
A fair amount of Western classical orchestral music could well come out at as much as 20%. I'm guessing of course and you are welcome to quibble with that figure. But the answer will also depend on how mechanical your live orchestra is playing and, of course, how familiar you are with how a really good live orchestra would play the piece.
Western classical concertos would fair less well. And any kind of singing would be pretty hopeless.
So how would Irish diddley music do? You only need to listen to the midi files here to get the measure of it. Again, it depends on how mechanical your live diddley musician is playing and, of course, how familiar you are with how a really good live diddley player would play the tune, including variation. The crucial difference with the classical music is that at least (with most pieces anyway) all the notes are in the computer's version - even if the timing and phrasing are absent. And this is the crux of it. If you are unfamiliar with the music, you'd be giving a much higher percentage of actual music to the computer's version.
And this is why you shouldn't share tunes in written form with strangers.
# Posted on October 13th 2009 by ...
Re: Poorly written abc
"Hardly surprising since it is written and performed by computers anyway" - I've had disagreements with a couple of colleagues about this. The don't write music but insist making music on the computer is composing while my argument is how can it be composing if you can't do it without the computer. You can build music on a computer but it always sounds constructed.
Favourite music joke of all time...
Two DJ's wonder what to do for the evening. One says, "Do you fancy going to the cinema to watch the new blockbuster?" The other replys' "Dunno, who's the projectionist?"
# Posted on October 13th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
"Paleontologists have been classifying completely new species of dinosaur for decades from mere fragments of fossils" (llig, above). They have also been getting an overall picture of smaller beats from comparing large numbers of individual fossils.
Doesn't scanning through the alternative transcriptions in the comments section here provide information that a single recording might not ?
# Posted on October 13th 2009 by David50
Re: Poorly written abc
I think that if you accept that a computer can be a musical instrument, then you must be able to compose on it - or at least for it. But you can't really play music on the computer. You can instruct a computer to play music, then the computer plays it.
I like it, it's a good joke
Is a set of pipes fundamentally different I wonder? You compose on them - or at least for them. But is it still pipe music if it's not played on the pipes? I'd say yes, I play lots of pipe music on my fiddle.
"Doesn't scanning through the alternative transcriptions in the comments section here provide information that a single recording might not ?"
Yes, of course, But it's still not enough information to to give you a tune.
# Posted on October 13th 2009 by ...
Re: Poorly written abc
Aye, a Highland piping tune or a fiddle tune is still a Highland piping or fiddle tune even if I am making an a*se of it on uilleann pipes.
I said it above... there is so much subtlety in the way a good player plays a tune, with variation, the timing, and the phrasing, that no computer can capture it. Listen.... you'll hear the way they'll shift the emphasis of a phrase, hold a note there, play a triplet run here, emphasize the on beat one time through and the off beat the second time through, etc etc. How can a computer transcription describe that?
It's been said here before, but if you know the music in and out and are a good reader, you can pick off tunes via sheet music. People do this. I know really good players who do this regularly. But that doesn't mean the sheet music accurately describes the tunes. Just means you're experienced enough to interpret the dots in a way that makes it sound like a tune.
# Posted on October 13th 2009 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Poorly written abc
Llig, I don't accept that a computer is a musical instrument, an interface between man and instrument aye. Playing in a serious of notes and then moving them about a grid till they sound right or moving chunks of music to different places is not composing music for me, it's building music.
# Posted on October 13th 2009 by bogman
Re: Poorly written abc
'Cross-intrument' tune learning was one thing I was thinking about Silver Spear. If the recording I have of a tune the way it is played locally is from a fiddler, or I can only hear a banjo properly on a crummy recording of a session, there comes a point where, as new flute player, getting ideas from a helpful 'this is how it lies well on the flute' transcription here is going to be more respectful of the tradition, and educational than trying sort something out myself. But not as good as time spent recordings by different people on different instruments.
I'm really only speaking up for the tunes database as a resource, which is better if the transcriptions are not rubbish.
# Posted on October 13th 2009 by David50
Re: Poorly written abc
I did preface with "if you accept that a computer can be a musical instrument". If you don't, then it's a different discussion.
I'm in two minds. It depends on how you define computer. If a computer's interface is qwerty keyboard and mouse then yeah, I'm not convinced. But what if it's a good weighted polyphonic midi keyboard?
And what's the difference between moving notes around on a stave with a pencil and paper and moving them about a grid with your mouse? What's the difference between composing and building?
# Posted on October 13th 2009 by ...
Re: Poorly written abc
"So how would Irish diddley music do? You only need to listen to the midi files here to get the measure of it." (llig)
Remember that standard musical notation (of which both abc and those midi files are 1:1 representations) was developed to represent classical music. Even there its interpretation is governed by rules not inherent in the notation itself, depending on style. In a baroque score "ABcd efga" means something subtly different than in a romantic one.
Irish traditional music OTOH, having evolved aurally, didn't have a primary need for notation and thus hasn't developed one tailored to its specific peculiarities. With standard notation we're using a tool made for a slightly different purpose, which is why so many more caveats, or unwritten laws apply, compared to classical music.
# Posted on October 13th 2009 by Jürgen
Re: Poorly written abc
Sorry if this is posted twice. It didn't show up here the first time, and I want to be sure it does.
Llig says: "The crucial difference with the classical music is that at least (with most pieces anyway) all the notes are in the computer's version - even if the timing and phrasing are absent. And this is the crux of it."
Sorry Llig, that simply is not true. Improvisation is an important part of the classic music tradition up at least until the time of Beethoven. There are often diddlies added to a degree that obscures the basic melody far beyond what might happen to a particular tune in a good ITM session. But, that didn't keep the music from being printed because it was assumed that THE PLAYERS KNEW WHAT TO DO WITH THE DOTS. Please excuse the shout, but that is the crucial point here.
Llig also says: "So how would Irish diddley music do? You only need to listen to the midi files here to get the measure of it."
Again I have to disagree. MIDI files just badly crank out the notes handed to the program without making any of the decisions about variation, phrasing and articulation that would be part of the performance of a good ITM player working from notation.
Llig is absolutely correct when he says that a person needs immersion in the aural tradition to become a fine ITM player. He is, I think, wrong when he suggests that the dots can't be a useful starting point. For one example of how dots might be useful check out:
http://www.tiompanalley.com/index_files/tunes/TunesLst.htm#Fiddle
Look at My Darling Asleep, Willy Coleman's and Star of Munster for one example of how notation might be useful to those learning the tradition.
# Posted on October 14th 2009 by cboody
Re: Poorly written abc
For me, there are two problems with using written music as a starting point. Firstly, it's not the most efficient way to develop the most important skill required of a trad musician: the ability to take a tune from someone sat in front of them.; to learn by ear. Surely, it's that that makes it an aural tradition. Secondly, and to my mind more importantly, it doesn't place the music in its social context. Hearing when, how, with what variations or setting, and from whom your "teacher" took the tune is what makes it an oral tradition. It's what forges the link between you and the previous generations.
A trad musician's respect for musicians that can before him/her tends not to be merely abstract but is tied to specific settings usually from named individuals, sometimes from people they've never even met. Looking at the notation you mention, yes you can notate ornamentation and variation but without understanding its context the danger is you learn a sort of ersatz trad, the very thing many accuse Comhaltas of promoting. So of course you can learn and play Willie Coleman's without knowing who he was, but it feels to me a much thinner experience.
# Posted on October 14th 2009 by Sweeney Astray
Re: Poorly written abc
cboody, you mean someone who can already read notation coming to trad music? Because all that stuff just clutters up the score for me. I much rather have the plain melody and improvise where and how I ornament depending on Instrument being played. In fact IMO notating the ornaments might lead a newbie in the wrong direction. The basic tune needs IMO to be learnt as is, then slowly variations develop naturally. As your ear , skills and Imagination develop.
IMO what matters is lift and drive in the music, after that come instrument specific ornaments. Some players basically focus entirely on the tune and hardly ornament at all. Dance-ability is Primary IMO.
Im a great fan of the dots, but I consider picking up tunes by ear, from a teacher, to be the way to develop an essential part of the music. I really dont think that the dots alone will get you or anyone very far at all. If you dont have a teacher to break the tunes down bar/phrase by bar, then get one. If you really cant, then maybe slow down software? Ive never used it so I cant speak from experience. But IMO an absolutely essential part of learnig this music is to listen to it a lot. I dont mean these modern bands like Lunessa , dervish etc, very good though they may be. But Solo and duets, no backing.
Folk like Bobby Casey, Paddy Canny, Ted Fury , Johnny Doherty Paddy Killoran, Dennis Murphy, John Vesey,Martin Byrnes, John Kelly,Kathleen Collins, etc Box players like Johnny O'Leary, Bobby Gardiner, Jackie Daly, MacMahon, Pipers, Johny Doran, Seamus Ennis, Willie Clancy, whistlers, Brid O'Donohue, Mary Bergin, Micho Russel, concertina,Chris Droney, , flute Paddy Carty.
This is an art form. You cant expect to learn to become an artist by 'painting by numbers'.
# Posted on October 14th 2009 by piobagusfidil
Re: Poorly written abc
cboody, sorry, you are right, I should have said:
"The crucial difference with the classical music is that at least (since Beethoven) all the notes are in the computer's version"
However, with your second quibble: "MIDI files just badly crank out the notes handed to the program"
The whole point I'm making is that the midi file is an accurate aural representation of the information contained in the written music. And that the difference between that sound and the sound of a decent player is an accurate measurement of what information is missing in the written music.
The dots can not be any more of a useful starting point to learning the music as a book of written words can be a useful starting point for a two year old toddler who is learning to speak.
# Posted on October 14th 2009 by ...
Re: Poorly written abc
Thanks for the great responses to me. Thoughtful and thought provoking and not attacking. Wonderful!! Mostly I agree with all said. Some specifics:
I just plain missed your point on the MIDI files Llig . Viewed that way you are absolutely right for me. And if your real point is that music reading should come after learning by ear (as in Suzuki Violin among other things) I also agree that is the best way to gain entry to the trad world. If your point is that music reading is not part of the equation ever I disagree.
Ionannas I think we missed each other. What I was trying to suggest is that having those variants on the page might break down the idea that one should learn a tune from the dots and never varying it. The biggest problem I hear in gatherings I go to is that folks, whether playing bluegrass, old timey, ITM or any other tunes don't learn that there are variants. They use notation in absolutely the wrong way to rigidly repeat what is written down. And, I would never disagree that the best way to get "into" any style is one on one with a good teacher and in sessions where your level of playing is accepted and where you can hear what others do.
PJ I don't disagree that learning by ear is extremely important. I still struggle with it despite many years of other kinds of musical training. But, I think notation can be useful in so many other ways that I would not give it up. Your other point: that learning by notation might get in the way of the social context of tunes is spot on. Not only that, but learning in the context of sessions and by playing with others is a joy that no notation can ever replace.
I don't think we are truly differing very much in where we stand. Perhaps just in my feeling that notation is part of the picture and for some of you it is not. I've other friends that agree with no notation...and some that agree with me. I don't think we are going to ever reach consensus on that bit...
# Posted on October 15th 2009 by cboody
Re: Poorly written abc
I've never said that music reading should not be part of the equation. I use the dots sometimes, I scribble down tunes for mates sometimes, but I prefer not to. The only real use for it is as a short cut. And I'm not in any hurry. I let tunes just come to me. The tunes I learn are the ones that just come to me subconsciously after hearing them. Having got the gist of them, I'll then put a bit of effort into getting them right. This usually means listening hard when they get played down the pub. But occasionally it includes asking someone, "just show me how that little bit goes?"
The main problem comes when people from other genres of music come to diddley with a pre-learned ability to read music and use that skill to acquire a repertoire quickly. (And web sites like this are a hideous encouragement to such people). If you learn the tunes, or at least your first hundred or so by ear alone, then you will learn the style along with the tunes and this really is the only way. For the tunes are the style, and the style is the tunes. They are one in the same.
I get annoyed when people say such things like, "yeah, learning by ear is important, but not vital". Total b*llocks. Of course it's vital. How else are you going to get the 99% of the music that's not in the dots? And that goes for any genre of music. It's what sets a human performance apart from a computer's
# Posted on October 15th 2009 by ...
Re: Poorly written abc
Amen to Llig!
Over and out.
# Posted on October 16th 2009 by cboody