Randall Cayford

Some pretty narrow definitions of dance going on here. Try something like "rhythmic body movement" where the particular rhythm may well be undetectable to anyone but the particular dancer. Nearly every musician (who was any good) I've seen dances to their music and in any genre I can think of. It may be pretty twitchy (heavy metal guitar solo or modern jazz or something) but it's always there. Most of the time, there is movement going on in the audience as well. If a musician isn't dancing to their music, it's usually strikingly odd and often the sound gets described as "wooden" or "stiff" or something similar. Body movement is an important part of playing expressively. And that's dance.

What is the significance of the parentheses around several of the chords?

Yes, you can put a whole collection of abc tunes into the tune-o-tron. The preview only shows the first tune and the midi player will only play the first rune but the pdf generated will have all the tunes, one per page.

I don't know which collection you found but the old music project has O'Carolan tunes in abc as well as gif. Using the abc directly or converting it to PDF will give you much better results than working with gif.

Either is fine as long as I know which key is which. Anything I work on quickly gets moved to ABC and added to my reference collection (I lose paper much too easily). So I can easily transpose between them. Thanks!

Very pretty! Did you write it down? Would you be willing to share it?

It's hard to say without more information about your workflow but the obvious item that would change the file size that much is you've changed the compression settings (or a new installation of audacity has a different default than you were using). It sounds like your process is: record on the zoom move file to a computer and open it in audacity export as an mp3 to upload In Audacity, when you export the file, there is a button next to the Format pop down menu. What are the settings you see when you click on that? For comparison, your Debussy piece seems to have been exported with a constant bit rate and quality setting of 32kbps. The default for Audacity is going to be much higher than that. At a 128k setting, your Debussy file is 1.8M. Try exporting your new piece with a 32k setting. The setting sticks so once you've exported a file, all subsequent MP3s will use the same setting. Until you change it or possibly until you install a new version of Audacity.

Oddly, it is labelled in large letters as "Wheatstone" for the name of the instrument with concertina added in small letters below.

Maybe this is just obvious to others but why is everyone concluding that this is a transposing instrument? Wouldn't a possibility be that the instrument is simply tuned to an older (and lower) pitch standard? Or is a whole step farther than would be expected for a different tuning?

I hope this means you're planning to put solo recordings of each of the 30 studies on your site. Seconding David, that would be very, very helpful.

Ah, you're tilting at a different windmill than I thought. I completely agree with you. I suspect every other poster in this thread agrees with you. Has anyone actually said "if you are only going to learn only one, learn ABC and not staff notation"? More than one person? I don't think that's a common attitude. I mostly hear "learn staff notation, then ABC is trivial to pick up". I think most of this thread can be summarized as: when you store and distribute music, use ABC. When you're ready to play it, translate it to staff notation.

Really? There comes a point when music becomes nonsense because the playing tempo overtakes it and removes all expression. Time for the musician to halve the tempo and the dancers to double theirs. Fiddlers can play at a hell of a lick but it still sounds silly and unmusical if it's too fast. This is folk music and folk dancing, neither should require consummate performance skills to achieve, it's not classical music and it's not ballet, do it well by all means but don't expect professional skills from part timers! Really. There's a lot of headroom until you reach nonsense. Dancing double time to half time music makes one frantic and the other slow so it's odd. I wouldn't class fast rapper as requiring professional skills, just a different emphasis and goal. From clips I've seen most of them are more up tempo than the example above though it's true they don't generally seem particularly fast either. I did find a clip of Stevenage at what I consider a reasonable tempo with (I think) a melodeon but he was dropping a lot of notes. Another clip of High Spen was a bit slower but had an accordion of some sort who was cleaner. So it seems possible to do. However, except for Stevenage, every team I found who danced at the tempos I prefer was using a fiddle (cutting edge, fiddle puppets, iron mountain, berea, gridlock). Of course none of those are UK teams. Which still leaves me thinking concertina/accordion may be too slow for fast rapper.

I notice the tempos for these clips are quite slow. I noticed at NEFFA last year that all the East coast rapper sides seem to be dancing much slower than I'm used to. I'm wondering if this is related to a change in instrumentation as a lot of these sides seem to be dancing to concertinas or accordions which is something I hadn't seen before. We've never had any luck finding a free-reed player who could play at rapper speeds so we've always used fiddles. Perhaps this is simply that I know a lot of really, really good fiddle players and far fewer good free reed players. But I'm also wondering if it's just much harder to play really fast on a concertina than it is on a fiddle.

Thanks for the bookmarklet pointer. I had never used one before but that is really nice. Also the EasyABC link. I have been dreading the loss of barfly, which won't run on my next machine (or my current one if I upgrade), so I've been looking for an adequate replacement.

For me, this seems backwards. I'm not about to do anything like that but, if I were, I think: Left:F#/F Right: G#/E makes a lot more sense. While the notes are out of position, they better fit the overall pattern of the English layout. Sequential runs still alternate hands and thirds and fifths are still on the same hand which matches the rest of the instrument.