Two launches of a new book on the life and music of Chris Droney

[Peter Laban]

On the off chance of stating the bleeding obvious, you could go to the recordings, buy the case and take it from there. It will also be much more musical than any midi player.

[Dan Worrall]

2 hours ago, Peter Laban said:

On the off chance of stating the bleeding obvious, you could go to the recordings, buy the case and take it from there. It will also be much more musical than any midi player.

I agree completely with Peter; very much the best to learn from the playing of the master himself. The transcriptions should, in most cases, pretty much match him note for note in his first playing of each tune. The tunes themselves can be found on YouTube if you cannot find them for purchase. Search on Chris Droney, and either Down from Bell Harbour, The Fertile Rock, or The Flowing Tide (his best 3 CDs). I believe that all the tunes from each of those recordings are on the You Tube site; not sure who posted them.

Then use some sort of slow down software to slow him down to learning speed. I use The Amazing Slow Downer, from Roni Music, but there are others. Your PC probably has the ability to record audio from a YouTube, but I'm not too good at the particulars of that. Record the audio and then put that audio on your PC along with your slowdowner software of choice. 

 

It would be great to get those recordings re-issued for sale again. 

 

And if you live in the US, consider coming to the Palestine Old Time Music Festival March 21-23 2024. Chris Droney's daughter Ann Droney Kirrane will teach at our concertina workshop there, and her playing is very much in his style. We also will be doing both slow and to-tempo sessions of tunes from that book. There is a posting that I made on this site giving more information (search my name on this site and you'll find it). Send me a PM if you wish to join in!

 

Either way, good luck. It is a great style to learn on the concertina.

[Peter Laban]

34 minutes ago, Dan Worrall said:

Then use some sort of slow down software to slow him down to learning speed.

 

YouTube has a variable speed option of its own.so no real need for anything else.

[Paul Pereyda Karayan]

On 12/29/2023 at 9:44 AM, richard said:

Hi 

I am really enjoying this book and trying to soak it up. It is clear besides being so full of information and music, it is a project of love.

 

I don't read music so well and I would like to utilize all the transcriptions of Chris Droney's playing that are in the book. Are those transcription somewhere online where I can use them to plug into a midi player, or what ever technology that will play them for me to learn?

 

Thanks,

Richard

 

You may find that @Michael Eskin's great tools help you out here:

https://michaeleskin.com/abctools/abctools.html

 

I also have taken photos of scores and then had a ChatGPT or similar transcribe it to note names... ymmv!

 

--- for other ideas: 

 

audio from youtube: try - https://ezmp3.cc/

 

the amazing slow downer has gotten a bit tepid, i use either Transpose (chrome plugin) or Moises because they'll also let you transpose. 

[Paul Pereyda Karayan]

@Dan Worrall - breathtakingly good book and music history in this one. really a masterpiece. cheers

[Michael Eskin]

Using the PlayScore2 app on a mobile device you can take a picture of almost any score and either play it, or if you're willing to pay for a subscription ($7/month or about $50/year) export it as MIDI or MusicXML.  There are other music OCR apps out there, but I have found that PlayScore2 is the most robust I've used.

My ABC Transcription Tools can read a MusicXML file exported by PlayScore2 and transcode it to ABC for playback.

My ABC Transcription Tools are at:

https://michaeleskin.com/abc

Full details on PlayScore2:
https://www.playscore.co/
 

 

Edited April 10 by Michael Eskin

[Dan Worrall]

On 4/9/2025 at 9:37 PM, Paul Pereyda Karayan said:

@Dan Worrall - breathtakingly good book and music history in this one. really a masterpiece. cheers

Thanks Paul, much appreciated. Enjoy the tunes!