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Scottish 2/4 march on Anglo?


Charlie Butterworth

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8 hours ago, Leonard said:

I'm surely interested in your ABC file.

OK, give me a day or so, and I'll post the tunes here. I'll include the marches in

time signatures other than 2/4 and also the duplicates in Hp and equivalent keys. 

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5 hours ago, Charlie Butterworth said:

Little John,

 

i really enjoyed your video playing the 2/4. You gave the march really nice lift.

 

presumably, when talking about thirds and sevenths, you’re referring to how you play the accompaniment?

 

 

Thank you for your kind comments.

 

I'm talking principally about the melody, though whatever happens in the melody would be reflected in the accompaniment. Let me clarify. Pipe music is normally written in the key of A without accidentals. The notes of the scale as written are G A B C D E F G A although the C is closer to C# and the G closer to G# (and F is F#). C and G are the third and seventh notes respectively of the key of A. When the music is transported to a concertina or accordion it can't play the third and seventh that the pipes play, so it has to approximate with either a C or a C# and a G or a G#. In my limited experience both are used, and often within a single tune.

 

 

LJ

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6 hours ago, lachenal74693 said:

OK, give me a day or so, and I'll post the tunes here. I'll include the marches in

time signatures other than 2/4 and also the duplicates in Hp and equivalent keys. 

It took less than a day...

 

Here are the tunes from the (large) file I mentioned - it is the 'scotland' file from the ABCEdit database.

The tunes have been edited a little by me because the 'style' of some of the ABC in the original was a little obscure

(to me at least). I've normalised the default length note to L:1/8 and introduced white space to increase 'readability'.

This is part of my SOPs with downloaded ABC files. I've left other stuff pretty much alone, except for deleting a few

lines here and there which have no relevance.

 

There was some pretty odd stuff in the file. I don't know if it had got corrupted somewhere along the line, but there

was stuff like (say) | A2 B2 c2 d2 | being split across lines, like:

 

| A2 B

2 c2

d2

|

 

which struck me as moderately bizarre, so I cleaned it up a little...

 

There are more tunes than I realised. I thought there were about a dozen. In fact, it runs to 50+ tunes, including duplicates.

I've included all tunes which were in K:Hp, (and the duplicates in other keys), plus all tunes flagged as 'Pipe March'. This

includes tunes with a meter other than the 2/4 specified in the OP, but what the hell. I've sorted them so that the 2/4 tunes

are at the top of the file. Some of them are in what I think of as 'pipe music format' - that is with grace-notes crawling out

of every orifice - I have left them alone, but I guess that for the 'tina, those grace-notes will stand a little judicious 'pruning'...

 

I hope someone finds them interesting/playable on the concertina - I haven't tried any of them yet.

 

[I was doing all of this in the first instance to work up a large ABC file to road-test my automagic tabbing program. This one fit the bill with ~1400 tunes in the file.]

pipe-marches.abc

Edited by lachenal74693
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7 hours ago, Little John said:

 

Thank you for your kind comments.

 

I'm talking principally about the melody, though whatever happens in the melody would be reflected in the accompaniment. Let me clarify. Pipe music is normally written in the key of A without accidentals. The notes of the scale as written are G A B C D E F G A although the C is closer to C# and the G closer to G# (and F is F#). C and G are the third and seventh notes respectively of the key of A. When the music is transported to a concertina or accordion it can't play the third and seventh that the pipes play, so it has to approximate with either a C or a C# and a G or a G#. In my limited experience both are used, and often within a single tune.

 

 

LJ

Thanks. The idiosyncracy of not showing sharps on pipe music is something that doesn’t t bother me anymore, after all it is still evolving as an instrument. You’re correct in that the C# is not quite a “true” sharp while the G tends to run sharp (too sharp in the dry, altitude of Colorado). When I tune my chanter prior to competition, I typically use Just Intonation which gives a better blend against the drones. Seumas MacNeill preferred sharper D and high G.

 

So what you say about this on a concertina or accordion makes sense in that you have to choose which variants of C, F and G to play. I suspect that it mostly comes down to personal preference as to what sounds the best in any given phrase.

 

Of course, on my concertina, the first part of Arthur Bignold fits nicely on the C row, with only a couple of notes taken from the G row. On the Double Ray melodeon, I have experimented with using the C row and also in D and I haven’t decided which one I like better. Part of me feels that I can play it in whatever key I prefer because I am unlikely to play with other instruments. However, I fancy recording the tune on my smallpipes in A, then playing along with it. That would necessitate key of D.

 

Another thing that I have noticed is that choice of key effects bellows (duh!) such that playing long runs of thirds on the C row means that I run out of bellows. So while some aspects of concertina/melodeon are more straightforward than highland pipes, other aspects aren’t such as bellows control, skill with alternate note choices and knowledge of note positions on the keyboard.

 

Thanks for your help.

Charlie

 

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