Jack Campin

It's unreasonable to require users of your ABC to locate and change such an obscurely named and located option. R: is fine for personal use but not for published material.

C: and O: both have definite meanings - G: and I: are both left vague in the specs ("group" and "information"), so their semantics is up for grabs. N: or a comment line are other possibilities.

Using R: is almost always a mistake. You can't tell what a player program will do with it. I use G: to indicate the kind of dance the tune is meant for - no program will do anything "creative" with that.

I don't think there's anything wrong with (3AB<c - I just tried it on both BarFly and abcm2ps and it works fine on both. But if abc2midi doesn't play the three notes in (3ABc as the same length, it's a bug. abc2midi has always been the most infuriatingly bug-ridden piece of widely adopted ABC software.

In the mid-1950s he drank in the same pub in London as Malcolm Lowry, who played the ukulele (and seems to have been rather more likeable, albeit permanently sozzled). I wonder if they ever played together?

An interesting extra wrinkle on the "Derry effect": the Doppler shift does not simply transpose pitches, but affects different frequencies by different ratios. The result is that chords will sound harmonically different depending on relative motion - if the wind blows fast enough, major changes to minor or the other way round. (Though the windspeed required would probably be high enough that you'd be more worried about the bell tower standing up than what it sounded like).

Well I tried to follow that up. See the thread I started about "Posting when not logged in". I might try to reconstruct what I wrote someday.

I have just wasted a lot of time writing a post when I wasn't logged in (the forum had expired my session). On trying to post it, everything I'd written just vanished, no way to recover it using the back button. That shouldn't happen. On every other forum I've used, you don't get a text entry box to create a reply unless you're logged in.

However, if you use some spiffy recently introduced feature there is a good chance that a lot of people will have software that can't process it, and they'll be left looking at a piece of uncommented alphabet soup with no way to guess what you intended it to do. This is more of a problem now than ever before, with mobile platforms of various kinds all introducing different limitations. Unless you have a very good reason to the contrary, try to keep it simple in anything you make public. And if you do use tricky features, explain them (preferably by supplying audio and score files generated from the ABC source with your favoured software using the versions current at the time you're writing, or by uploading the source you transcribed from).

If you write :| |: , a barlength checker like the one built into BarFly will report an empty bar. You don't want to mess up error checking with spurious errors. Using the ABC-standard notation will avoid this. BTW these days it is a bit silly to worry about the P: notation not being standard, given the variety of notations people have found useful. Have a read of this: https://monoskop.org/images/a/a7/John_Cage_Notations_1969.pdf or https://archive.org/details/JohnCageNotations1969

Are you playing a Duet? The versions of tunes on thession.org are single-line melodies, there won't be a bass part.

There is an enlightening discussion of "Blood Red Roses" here: http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=34080 The history of shanties gets mind-bogglingly convoluted and confusing.

"Fiddler's Green" is not a shanty. It's a modern English song. Here it is sung by John Conolly, who wrote it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-yzh8bO6PM I think Bill Whaley is using an English concertina to accompany him. He plays Anglo as well.

It says "compatible with" SeaMonkey - does that mean it requires it? I could never get SeaMonkey to work on my setup.

For B flat and E flat instruments, or anything that can join in with them. Tuesday 23 August 2016 1pm to 3pm back room The Golden Lion I attach a PDF for a sheet of business-card-format flyers. Pass them on. degraeve.com.83.104.236.247.pdf

The P: notation is more flexible where it fits, and for folk tunes it usually does. Try getting this into six lines of score using traditional repeats and segnos. X:150 T:Music For A Found Harmonium (in D and F) Z:Jack Campin, http://www.campin.me.uk/ F:Jack Campin's Nine-Note Tunebook % last edit 03-02-2013 C:Simon Jeffes S:Penguin Cafe Orchestra: "Broadcasting from Home" (EG Records 1984) P:ABABCDAECDABABB M:C| L:1/8 Q:1/2=100 N:originally in C and E flat. N:There should be a continuous stuttering D playing N:throughout (a key on the harmonium was broken) N:one note is off-range, octave shift indicated K:D P:A D|FDGD FDDD|FDGD FDCD|FDGD FDDD|EDCD FDD:| P:B D|EDCD EDCD|FDCD FDCD|GDED CDGD|FDDD D2D:| P:C K:C F|cFEF GF2F|cFEF E3F |cFEF GF2F|cFEF E3 :| P:D K:F F|BFDF GF2F|BFDF GF2F|BFEF GE2F|BFEF GE2G| K:D cGEG CG2G|cGEG CG2G|cGEG CG2G|cGEG CG2|| P:E D|EDCD EDCD|FD=CD FDCD|GD[B,B]D GDCD|FDDD D2D:| tmp_vJl2oq.pdf

Is this for Argentinian tango music or the Turkish variety? I don't think the bandoneon was used much for Turkish tango music when it got established, it would be interesting to hear those old classics given an Argentinian accent.

I'll be in Budapest next Friday - will you still be there?

Saying it's in C tells you to use the appropriate chords for it (like, start by hitting the C bass button if you're using an instrument that has one) and tells you what notes you have to play with if you want to extend it with a variation of your own. It's future-proofing for what the tune might turn into rather than a static description of the notes provided.

That's the Neapolitan Tarantella aka Tarantella Napolitana. Like all tarantellas it's a ritual exorcism dance in its origin. I've got a version on my website here: http://www.campin.me.uk/. Look in the Edinbal files - ABC or PDF. As Don says you can fake the G sharps (use the E below instead).

There are quite a few tarantellas from different places in southern Italy and Sicily. All of them will fit a 20-button anglo but none of them is a wedding dance.

Here's the tune in ABC as fished off the web and reformatted a bit: X:1 T:O'Sullivan's March B:Dance Music of Ireland, O'Neill, no. 51 N:transposed from key of D M:6/8 L:1/8 K:G g|dBB GBB|dcB c2e|dBB GBG|AGG Gge| dBB GBc|dcB c2e|dBd gdB|AGG G2:| g|edg edg|e/f/gf edB|dBg dBg|dBg def| g3 bge|dcB c2e|dBd gdB|AGG G2:| Notice: most of the notes are part of a G major common chord (low to high, GBdg). Learn where those four notes are in the tune and on your instrument and you're most of the way there.

The definition you quoted is right as far as it goes - the 6-note wholetone scale is equitonic. But it's only one among many. Concertinas would be good instruments to use for experimenting with such scales, since they have very stable tuning.

"Equitonic" doesn't mean that. Some African and south-east Asian cultures have musical genres where the scale has five or seven pitches with all adjacent intervals the same size. That means the only interval they have in common with Western music is the octave, and melodies have no tonal centre.

Older peals weren't tuned to a diatonic scale, and as Dave says, the way the scale is used is not tonal - the permutational form means no note can be a tonal centre, and like Schoenberg's 12-tone system, every note is used equally often. It would be interesting to know what tuning system is being described here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11080531/Bid-to-re-tune-18th-Century-church-bells-rejected-to-preserve-their-heritage.html I've just been listening to Bartok's second vioin concerto - there is a passage in that where there is a 12-tone sequence but the music still sounds completely tonal. Bartok was dead chuffed with it and boasted that, in effect, he'd found a bug in Schoenberg's programme. Pitch set doesn't determine tonality, either way. Anybody here tried playing a concertina tuned to an equitonic scale? I think some of the African ones may be set up that way.