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Sheet Music


fnirt

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What's your sheet music collection look like? What do you WANT it to look like?

 

I'm still learning, so I'm not doing a lot of improvising or jamming. I use a lot of sheet music as I'm still learning to commit songs to memory. One thing that's bothering my (too logical) personality is my collection of books, papers, printouts, etc.

 

Do any of you "standardize" your sheet music? I've tried to start using ABC format, but finding certain arrangements (or even the song at all) in ABC can be difficult, even using the tune finder, etc.

 

I'd love to have a stack of printouts, all in the same format, etc. of all of the tunes I'm learning not only for the anal-retentiveness, but so they can all be large enough for me to read, etc.

 

Am I crazy, or what?

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My sheet music collection is and lots of books, Xeroxed copies, hand-written blobs... quite a mess. But I don't mind as I rarely use it.

 

I learn tunes primarily by ear (slow jamming seems to be the best way for me) and use the blobs only as a reminder. Sometimes I use a digital dictaphone to help me learn them. If I need to slow them down I use the Amazing Slow Downer.

Edited by Richard Morse
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Like Richard, I have learned most of my tunes from others, or from just having them in my head for many years before I took up concertina. When I need to laboriously learn a tune from music, I go to books, O'Neill, Robin Williamson, the Boys of the Lough, et al. Since I am primarily a singer, most of my music library consists of song collections.

 

My last experiences with sheet music was in the 50s when I was studying piano. I found that most of the sheet music was full of purposefull mistakes, ie. you couldn't play a piece just like the recording unless you bought both the sheet music and the record, except for classical music.

 

What kind of music do you play?

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As an avid arranger of tunes into sets, I use ABC as I can get the maximum number of tunes onto a page. Formatting/justifying is not perfect, but I get by. PLUS, I can sit typing into a text file at work and no one knows I am arranging music.

The amound of resource available on the net in ABC must be the biggest reason to use it.

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My collection of music is in paper and electronic forms.

 

I have a number of books e.g. the English Country Dance Manuals, The Joshua Gibbons Manuscripts etc. and a large collection of handwritten tunes collected over the years and arranged generally in types - reels, jigs and named (usually English) dance tunes.

 

Increasingly I transcribe or create tunes into electronic forms so that I can store and index them, print them in different combinations, prepare them for use at dances or workshops or publication and tranfer them to other musicians.

 

The useful sources of tunes (for me) on the web are in ABC, graphic formats (gif, jpg, pdf) and occasionally in proprietary formats (Noteworthy etc).

 

I increasingly use MusicXML to enable transfer of notation from one standard to another and have adopted Sibelius as my notation program of choice. I use runabc to provide a suite of abc utilities and have added the abc2xml program to allow abc to be transferred to other formats.

 

As far as I know ABC is the only file format which combines notation information with a (simple) database structure with more than one tune per file.

This has its advantages for storing and indexing tunes but at the moment I'm not convinced that any of the abc applications provide sufficient functionality to compare with the likes of Sibelius, Finale etc. (A personal view).

 

There is a notation interface format caled NIFF which was popular some time ago but it seems to have gone into a black hole. I'm hoping that MusicXMl will fill the gap.

 

There is a new usenet group uk.music.notation where such discussions are welcome.

 

 

regards

 

Howard Mitchell

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The bulk of my music is in straight ABC format which I find easier to read than manuscript. I hold my current repetoire on business cards, one per tune, in a business card folder.

 

Details can be found at my site. See my sig for a link.

Lester, that is a great idea!

 

Even on tunes I haven't played in a while, a quick memory jog on the fist few bars will usually get me off and running.

 

Thanks for sharing that system on your site,

 

Dick

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The bulk of my music is in straight ABC format which I find easier to read than manuscript.

I also find ABC much easier to read (for traditional tunes, where you are effectively looking only at a melody line) than standard musical notation.

 

For musical notation, I find I have to translate from note position to note name, and that gives me the fingering. ABC gives me the note name, skipping a step, so I find myself taking existing sheet music and translating it to ABC to make it easier to learn and work from.

 

--Dave

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I'm about to have to start translating to ABC, as well, since it's becoming easier to read than regular sheet music. (I don't have a background in music, so I'm learning to read it right now too.) Also, some of the ABC tunes I'm finding differ from the tunes in some of my books as far as arrangement goes.

 

I play a mix of Sea Shanties (Blow the man down, What do you do with a drunken sailor, etc.) and folk (Go tell Aunt Rhody, Oh Suzanna, etc.) and eventually I'd like to begin the ridiculous practice of playing contemporary pop songs, just for fun. My friends think it's eccentric to play a concertina. When I can play Madonna or Britney Spears or whatever for them they'll think me completely insane, which is what I prefer. :) Hard to find some of that stuff online, so that's where playing by ear will have to get better..

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fnirt, I personally know "I Think We're Alone Now" and "I just Called to Say I Love You" on the concertina. It's part of a project my friends and I are doing involving a concertina, guitar, pennywhistle, trumpet, and harmonica. It's, umm... interesting.

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Most of the sheet music I play from is in a large three ring binder. Some pages are Xeroxed straight from books and other sheet music I have around the house. Some are Xeroxed from books borrowed from friends or public libraries. I also have transcribed a considerable number of tunes and songs by hand into fake sheets. I've been doing this for nearly thirty years so as pages get tattered, I Xerox or re-Xerox them and they are mere shadows of what they were. In recent years I've been scanning music into my computer so that reprints are not degraded. I also have Allegro so I don't need to transcribe by hand anymore and it is much easier to transpose! The “book” is large enough so that I lose track of what is in it. Every once and a while I undertake trying to organize the entire collection into one large pdf file. But, as I do, I run across something interesting and stop to play it. I don't think I'll ever get there. Maybe I should hire it out.

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