Jim Van Donsel

Physics Today Magazine has opened up some of its content to the general public. Not sure how long it will last, but in the meantime you can read this editorial on Charles Wheatstone and the EC, dated 21 April 2020. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20200421a/full/ -jim

A few years ago Ransom Smith and I created a nice little fingering generator for Anglos. The original hosting site for this tool is now gone, so I've re-posted the page in a more permanent place: https://jvandonsel.github.io/fingering/fingering.html This generator takes an ABC file, comes up with some decent fingering suggestions, and generates annotations that can be used to create a PDF in standard musical notation, with fingerings added. If any programmers are interested in contributing to the project, I can grant access to the github repo. -jim

Sold. Thanks for looking, jim

Sale pending.

Morse Ceili C/G Anglo, #624, Jeffries layout. Excellent condition, with a few fingernail scratches around the buttons. Hard case. $1900 firm. (New Button Box price is $2550) Buyer pays shipping. Greater Boston area. Donation to c.net if this brings a buyer. -jim

The flute has been sold.

For Sale: Garry Somers R&R Delrin Flute in the key of D. Metal tuning slide. Includes padded flute roll. Excellent condition, beautiful tone. Played for about 1 year. USD 320.00, including shipping in US. International shipping extra. Photos Here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/38449337@N08/sets/72157633745286836 -Jim

@Ransom: try again with the email. I just ditched my old unreliable hosting provider and switched over to a new one today. -jim

Those are all great ideas. I think the concertina type (G/D, C/G, and Jeffries vs Wheatstone layouts) would best be presented as an HTML widget, which would then be passed to the JS script. This is pretty straightforward - just haven't gotten around to it. Chords are a whole different ballgame! So I think the next thing to do is just fix some problems in the hacky tree pruning part of the code. I'll probably rewrite that part to use the A-star algorithm next weekend. -jim

My weekend project was to write a semi-intelligent Anglo fingering generation program. You can try it out at http://www.jimandbarb.net/fingering/fingering.html Simply paste in a tune in ABC format, hit the button, and it will choose some fingerings. This is still a work in progress, but I'm curious if you find this useful. The heuristics the program uses to choose the fingerings are still pretty crude. It prefers certain buttons to others, and avoids finger-hopping. But I still need to teach it about bellows technique. It also only supports C/G Jeffries layouts, but it's not a big deal to add more formats, just a lot of typing. For the technically inclined: This program was written in client-side Javascript, and was really just a way to teach this language to myself. The JS is un-obfuscated, so you can take a look if you want. The program recursively examines all possible fingering combinations, pruning and memoizing parts of the tree for efficiency. It uses the excellent abcjs library for rendering in standard notation. -jim

Michael, any chance you could post a more lengthy comparison after having your Clover for a bit now? BTW, I'm the guy from Boston who ran into you in Poulsbo recently and tried out your Clover on the street. My quick impression was that Irish ornaments spoke much better on the Clover - they sounded crisper than on the Morse. Would you agree? -jim

How on earth were you chosen for this honor, Bob?

You might consider taking it down an octave. It's a little squeaky way up there in the stratosphere. -jim

I'd also highly recommend the CCE Irish music school in Boston. I think Chris Stevens is teaching again this year - an excellent player and teacher. http://www.ccebostonmusicschool.org/ It's a small-group setting. The semester starts at the beginning of February.

The main page for Carroll Concertinas has a gorgeous recording of Noel HIll playing O'Carolan's Concerto. Was this recording ever issued, or was it just something special for Carroll?