I never thought it possible but I am playing my own tunes.
It started about a year ago when my close Aunt died and I just thought I would write a tune to dedicate to her.I was going on a long car journey and decided to have a go.The first thing was obviously to turn off the radio and make a start. Not knowing how to start it was difficult, tunes do not just come into your head, you have to work on it, so initially I chose a tune or part of a tune that I liked and manipulated it and then worked on it from there.
Unfortunately I do not write out music as I have always played by ear, so in this case the bit I decided to keep, I had to remember it the whole journey and rush in and put it on dictaphone.I always try to take a dictaphone with me since then.The first tune took about two weeks.
One tune the B part I just picked up the concertina and I thought now what would be a dream base line and the tune evolved from that, it took all of ten minutes.The A part to go with it took a week.
Many of you who have been playing English Country dance music will know that usually the first eight bars of the A are almost identical to the second eight bars and the B similar, it is the reason why people like Chris Timson and other experienced players can here a tune a couple of times and be playing it the third time round.There are obviously some exceptions. I am trying to break that system to make the tune more interesting.
I have learnt a lot from Jim Lucas who is an interesting tune writer,who kindly sent me a couple of tunes.Jim`s tunes go in a totally different direction to what you think and expect them to go and rather takes you by surprise ,I found this style and the tunes interesting and have tried to be a bit more original since.
The wonderful thing about writing your own material is that you can change it around,add to,rewrite sections etc something you cannot do to other peoples tunes.
I have had some great laughs,I write it and cannot play it. I listen to the tune and suddenly realise where I have heard it before.
It is great fun and hearing other people play your music is an unbelievable thrill why not have a try,it costs no money and brightens up a long drive.
Al

Alan,
Do you have your tunes in your tune book here? If you know how to abc it's really easy. If not, someone you know may be able to abc it for you. If not, email me an mp3 and I'll have a go

My first tune I wrote just after my mother died. The A part was a guitar tune I had made up years before but I put together a B part and found it was quite difficult to play on the whistle, which I was learning at the time. I left it that way since I thought it would be good fingering practice. On the concertina, now I'm learning that, I still love the tune but haven't persuaded anyone else to play it. I've written 3 tunes so far and a common theme seems to be I use too many notes

I agree it's a lot of fun just to fiddle (or concertina) around. You're right, you can change things to suit yourself with the added bonus that no one can tell you it's not supposed to sound like that I'd love to hear what other people think of my tunes - what they like what they don't like. When writing your own stuff it's often difficult to be objective about it and I'm not easily offended


I have my tunes in my personal tunebook here at concertina.net and I'm pretty sure it's set to public view.

Note sure if you can see other members tunebooks directly so here is the link to mine

http://www.concertina.net/mytunebook/?u=ro...beech@mcgill.ca

>I never thought it possible but I am playing my own tunes.

Alan modestly refrains from adding that his tunes are really good -- catchy, danceable and concertina friendly. I brought his "Chocolate Rabbit" to a recent session and people loved it.

I did the abc for Alan's tune book. I'm pretty busy these days, but you should be able to do the same thing from his sound files. Just be warned: he never plays the same tune the same way twice (not that there's anything wrong with that...).

Have fun.

A few things have occurred to me while I was looking for tunes by Alan. I tried to find if Alan has a tune book expecting a link on his member page but no. I can search through the tune-o-tron for Alan's material but only if I know his email address - which is protected information so I can't see it. I looked for the Chocolate Rabbit on JC's abc tune finder to no avail.

Just a thought but it would be really nice to be able to link from a person's personal page to their tunebook to see what tunes they liked, or if they had a collection they wanted people to see.

The worst thing is if you find you have not played your own tune for some time, you might find you cannot remember the notes - and no one else can remember them for you. I have written two very simple and modest tunes, and that happened to me with the first one. For the second, I made sure I wrote it down as soon as possible.

- John Wild

I find it difficult to play music/songs/tunes OTHER than my own! (Though, I'm trying to help that.)

I am probably too nice to myself, that's why I like to play my own stuff. I can do it my own way. I do kind of prefer to keep it simple, and usually short.

I do have a Tunebook that I just made public, so I could add the link to:
http://www.pbase.com/geranimom/songs (It's a blue-highlighted link in the text, there.) But, especially since I am not much of a trad/Celtic player at this point, my tunebook seems a bit weird. (ABC is better suited for that type, usually.)

I will probably try to fix up a few of the entries.

By having a public tunebook, I think it shows your e-mail address to the public. But, if you are using an e-mail address that you don't mind changing if you run into a problem, then, I guess that's no big deal.

For me, it doesn't need to be a long time. Sometimes while composing I'll come up with a musical phrase I really like, but by the time I've written down the first part, I can't remember or even reproduce the rest. Very frustrating! And I always write down my tunes -- if I can remember them long enough to do so, -- because some stick in my mind, but most don't, and I can never predict which will be which. (And at this point I've written more than 300.)

All of mine are in my computer now, as well as in printed copies. That began when I realized I had written a few tunes and started collecting the scraps of paper, thinking I might have as many as a dozen. I was quite surprised to discover I had more than 100. That was a few years ago, now.

Sorry, Turp- I'm supposed to post Chocolate Rabbit for Alan in the Tune-o-tron but I haven't figured out how to put it into midi from Noteworthy Composer . My son is never around when I'm thinking of it- I'll try to fix that this weekend.

Otherwise, I'll play it for you at the Squeeze-In!

On the subject of writing your own tunes, I'd love to do more than I have. I've written a couple of waltzes, but they come out of the clear sky and I can't try to get them to come. My muse is quirky, I guess.

It's pretty easy. Once you have your tune open in NWC, select "File/Save As" from the main toolbar, and use the dropdown menu for "Save as type" at the bottom of the Save As window to select "Type 1 Midi File".

Sounds like fertile ground for a Waltz Composition workshop at the Squeeze-In. My tunes also come out whenever and at irregular intervals. I can go a year without producing one and yet sometimes 3 or 4 trot out in a week. They just come when they come.

I had tried this but after doing that I couldn't find the file.
Something seems to be wrong with Noteworthy on my computer- right now it won't open at all right now which could be a disaster. My son has probably been messing with it; I'll have to put him on to the task of getting at it.



Count me in!

Yes, quoting myself, here.

Just thought I'd mention that Yahoo MailPlus has a feature called AddressGuard. This is in addition to the typical Spam Guard.

It's really nice. You must set up your basic 'real' e-mail address, but you never have to use that one -- instead, you can set up 'disposable' e-mail addresses -- up to five in all.

You can use up to all five, at the same time. Each one uses the same root -- i.e., Person-first@yahoo, Person-second, etc..

If one or more gets spammed or abused, you can delete it.

You can also change the root.

Soooo....it's very convenient for using in forums and for the Tunebook or anywhere your address may be exposed. Saves having to totally close an e-mail address and reopen another.

Also -- my personal experience has been that the worst spam comes to the owners of dot-com addresses. People scour the 'WhoIs' registry list, I guess, and if the .com-owner has no IDProtect set up, he/she gets the spam.

Having listened to Jim Bessers Lake City Wedding Waltz it is about time it reached a wider audience Jim.
Your comments re Chocolate Rabbit has taken me a bit by surprise Jim,thanks ,I will do my best to get Jeremy to put it and a few more(MP3 format) on my site before he goes on holiday,If anyone would like an MP3 of it I will gladly send it by email in the interim.
alan_jenny(at)decoverly(dot)fsnet(dot)co(dot)uk

I have to keep you on your toes David I cannot make it easy for you you are too good at it.
Al
ps No one has mentioned Connet Waltz I wrote for the Big band project or added their playing to it yet.Not another sob in a lay bye ,not forgetting Henk poised with his mixer waiting to get started.

Alan kindly sent me an mp3 file of Chocolate Rabbit which I have transcribed into abc and posted here in the tune-o-tron

Right now the personal tune page is a URL which includes your email address. It is this that would release email addresses to the nefarious spammers out there. I would think the tune book could be linked instead to your membership profile so there need not be an email address anywhere in sight. If an individual tag is required to distinguish each user, could not your user number substitute instead - I'm number 534.

When browsing through thesession.org I find it fun to browse through the tunes that different people have in their tune books. A little voyeuristic I suppose but then if you want to keep it private you can do that with the click of a button.

What do you think? Would you like the personal tune books to be more accessible to other people?

One problem that I find with creating my own tunes is when I find myself humming something that sounds good, record it into a minidisk or whatever, then get home and find it unplayable when I pick up a concertina! I think I like accidentals too much.
At other times I have spent days asking people if they recognise what I am playing as I can't decide if i've heard it somewhere or if I have composed it myself!

Robin Madge.

I'd like to add to the chorus of praise for this tune - Alan sent me a copy and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Despite my best intentions I haven't learnt it yet though.

In terms of writing, these days I write more songs than tunes per se - and anything that I write initially as a tune tends to be subsumed into a song at some point anyway.

I'd certainly agree with Alan regarding the "deconstruction" approach of taking a tune that you know well, with an established structure, and re-arranging/replacing elements of it until it becomes your own. I do this with songs quite often - a narrative song that I wrote recently started life as the Peter Bellamy setting of "Danny Deever" and although there's still a hanging in it, it's now a different song altogether, though it shares the same overall shape.

Stuart

Thanks Stuart,there is nothing like the thrill of writing a tune and it being liked by others, a fantastic experience and particularly when a tune is written for someone close and people join in,it is a very moving and emotional experience.
Robins experiences parrallel mine,but the funniest was after writing Auntie Ada`s waltz it gave me confidence to write another.I wrote what I thought was a fantastic tune and the next day when I listened to it ,it sounded familiar and after listening to it again I realised where it had come from,it was Auntie Ada`s waltz again, but at a different speed with different emphasis on certain notes.I have now done that twice.I almost copied exactly something from "The King and I" and "Mary Poppins"
luckily without Dick Van Dyke`s Cockney accent.
As Jim Lucas says it is good to collect useful phrases,the hardest thing is recognising them when they arrive.
Al

With your assistance I would like to broaden this discussion as I am getting myself confused.I have been thinking about my music writing and an interesting situation is confusing me.I mentioned in an earlier posting about trying to make a tune more interesting, not make tha first 8 bars of the A be almost the same as the second 8 bars of the A and likewise with the B music.However analising the response to what I have written, it is that format that seems to work for popularity.A tune that within a few times of playing everybody joins in.Players ask what was that tune etc,where something which I consider much more technical and slightly more difficult to play gets a farely cool response ,even after playing it say four times at subsequent sessions.I love to hear complicated tunes,one of the members of our session writes, what I can only say, are fantastic tunes and very complex in their construction and the more I hear them the more I like them.Hence my confusion,I am playing about with two tunes at the moment one difficult the other easy,so easy it could easily used for Morris Dancing ,I could however make it more complicated, but I am not sure.I know this is all a matter of preference, but what do you look for in a tune? In many cases we hear a tune once and it is dismissed in our minds " All right but". A tune a tron tune for example a couple of minutes and never heard again. Or should one just say "I like it so I shall play it no matter what". Good way to clear a bar I suppose.
Al

I guess the point is that there are many qualities that make for a good tune. Ease of learning on the fly might make a tune satisfying to session players but that doesn't mean tunes that don't have that quality are not good. Complicated tunes may be nice to listen to or useful for showing off and either of those might also be part of the definition of a "good tune."

I think there is another aspect to be considered, however. The genre of tunes we are talking about are at their root dance tunes. I think an important consideration in deciding if a tune "works" is whether you can dance to it.
Humpph!

Is it? Why should we limit ourselves? I think that is one class -- or several classes -- of tune we could be talking about. Among other tunes I've written are many slow airs and a couple that might best be described as "baroque" sonatas. But of course, there are many kinds of dance... polska, contra, balkan, swing, tango, Morris,... even "slow dance".


Agreed.

I agree entirely, Jim. Conversely, though (and to address Alan's musing about what makes a good tune), for me something that makes a great tune is whether it will stand up to whatever treatment you decide to give it... If you try playing Constant Billy as an air, it still works - it changes character completely, but is still musically satisfying.

One of my favorite cuts is "The Lollipop Man" -- which I first learned as a Morris tune, -- as played by flutist John Skelton on his CD One At a Time.

Dear Mr Humpph
For easy please insert simple in the text that Morris tunes are intricate ,addictive tunes normally structured like I have been suggesting, the first eight bars of the (A) similar or nearly identical to the next eight bars and the same in the( B ).
Constant Billy and Shepherds Hey as examples, but tunes like Princess Royal would be the exception.
Al






edited to remove the little smilie which appears when you try to put brackets round a B