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3 hours ago, Vince Herman said:

My concertina arrived in Cleveland at Midnight.

I LIVE in Cleveland.

But FedEx still says 9 more days for delivery.

 

Just a guess, but might it be a consequence of the coronavirus situation?  Things slowing down because of extreme cleanliness precautions and maybe even staff shortages?

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I don’t know how it's working out in these days of virus related concerns, but my past experience has been that one a package gets this close, it's likely to be delivered in the next day or two.  I have to wonder if the delivery date specified wasn’t a rough estimate applied at the time it was surrendered for shipping and it moved along much quicker than expected.

 

If this as a current estimate based on location things must be in real turmoil with the shipping company.

 

Maybe it will show up Monday and surprise you.

 

Good luck.

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IT'S HERE!!  IT'S HERE!!

I told myself that I would wait until my work day is over before I put effort into playing anything.  Oh, I got it out of the cast to look at.  I pushed and pulled while pressing some random buttons.  But then I put it back and worked at my day job.

For lack of any books to study from (yet) I will play around with this:

 

Sailor's_Hornpipe.png

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Congrats on getting it!!

 

That's an ambitious tune to start with. It'll get you into cross-rowing, anyway ( in bar 8, where the F# is).

If I were you, I'd play it an octave lower than that score you posted. Up there, it will sound squeaky, whereas an octave lower you'd be in voice range, and could share the work between the hands, and even get to use the accidentals row (in bar 10)!

 

Good luck, and have fun!

 

And stay at home and keep healthy!

Chers,

John.

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The bubble wrap got removed in the garage and then I went and washed my hands. The case and the concertina have been quarantined inside the box for a week already. And yes I’ve been having a lot of fun playing it. ?

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On 3/30/2020 at 5:24 PM, Anglo-Irishman said:

If I were you, I'd play it an octave lower than that score you posted. Up there, it will sound squeaky, whereas an octave lower you'd be in voice range, and could share the work between the hands, and even get to use the accidentals row (in bar 10)!

John, that is some good advice.  I transposed it down an octave and had a go at programming in the Anglo tabulature in a style that looks (to my newbie eyes) to be in style with the Gary Coover books.

Yes, the button tabs are all over.  I have not found how to have my plugin set a consistent height.

Yes, the line for pull or draw is not ideal and in Gary Coovers style is all above the staff.  As I understand it, lines cannot be drawn from my plugin so I am using an underscore above the button tab.

But it certainly is enough to start practicing with!

Edit: I manually lined up the tabs better.  This version as more presentable.

 

Sailor's_HornpipeDownOctave.png

Edited by Vince Herman
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Don, I use Musescore to create lead sheets and sheet music in general.  It is a free and very full featured tool for putting music on to paper.  They are pushing for 'Pro' membership that lets you download existing sheet music that other users have created.  Currently I have not signed up for the subscription.

When I started playing Ukulele I would find music online that I wanted to play but it was never in a format that fit my needs.  With Musescore I can (relatively) easily put the notes on the staff, adjust things to make them fit the way I want and print them out or create a PDF to display on a tablet.

The plugins are tiny programs that let you do extra stuff.  One example, notenames, simply puts the name of each note above the staff.  You can see in the image I attached that the first line is some notes I entered.  The second line shows the names of the notes as created by the notenames plugin.  I am a computer programmer for a living so it was easy to modify that code to put the concertina tabs on instead of note names, as you can see in the third line.

It is not perfect by any means.  I have not done extensive testing for accuracy so it might not find the right button.  Even if it does find a button, who knows if it is the best.  My code finds the first button in the matching pitch, starting with the top of the right hand.

And the pull indicator bar is simply an underscore above the tab.  I would like it better as a full line but this is a start.

Oh, I should mention that the tabulature I create follows my understanding of the style used by Gary Coover.  I own only one book on the Anglo concertina and it is one of his.

 

 

PluginExamples.png

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Hi Vince,

 

Does Musescore have an option to draw straight lines after you've put in the music?

 

Maybe there's an "expression" tool? I just find it helps to know at a glance if a passage is all push or all pull. Otherwise, this is a probably the best approximation.

 

Now if it could put in the note names in abc pitch, that would be wonderful! (Are you listening, Musescore developers?)

 

 

Gary

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Hi Gary!  There is a line tool but it is not exposed to the plugin API.  They are considering adding it. 

I can put the lines in manually after the plugin puts in the tabs.
There are some other things that I want to do with this plugin.  Rather than simply selecting the first button that matches I want to pop a dialog to show the options among multiple buttons, as is the case with A being on 3 different buttons.

I think that this plugin should work with multi note chords but I expect that it will become confused if it finds some notes on a push and some on a pull. 

And I do not handle grace notes.  I yanked out grace note support to make the code less complex while I was leaning how to use Musescore plugins.

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23 hours ago, Vince Herman said:

My code finds the first button in the matching pitch, starting with the top of the right hand.

Aha! I wondered why your tab made so much use of the pull G on button 4a, LH! The way I play it, the press G on button 5, LH, at those points gives a nice, steady flow to the tune.

It might be an idea to change your tabbing algorithm to first scan the two inner rows for the required note, and only if it's not found there, scan the accidentals row. And while you're at it, you could further bias the search by identifying the key (e.g. C), and looking for the notes in the row of that key (i.e. middle row) first, then the other "key" row (G, inner), and then the accidentals row. I would say that's roughly my approach when working up a new tune.

As you say, this cannot be the optimum in every case, so your idea of offering the user a choice of "Gs", for instance, is a good one. Sometimes you may have to play the different suggestions through to ascertain which of them is ergonomically and musically better.

And while you're still at it, a neat feature would be the "Legato Option": if this is "On", your routine would try to get as many notes as possible in sequence in the same bellows direction.

 

OK, let's not get carried away! I used to be a programmer myself, and this kind of thing sort of takes me back ...

Cheers,

John

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John, I love it!

My first change will to make the search sequence like this:

C-right

C-left

G-right

G-left

Accidental-right

Accidental-left.

I *think* I can query the score to get the key.  If it is G, swap the G and C search order.

Edit: I have change the search order to be CR-CL-GR-GL-AR-AL and the attached sheet is the result.  Much improvement.

 

Sailor's_HornpipeNewSort.png

Edited by Vince Herman
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