Re: [abcusers] [OT] The Scottish schottische
I can't answer your question on a Highland Schottische. However, I did find the following two pages on the 'net which may be of some assistance. http://www.abdn.ac.uk/scottskinner/display.php?ID=JSS0918Creator=1Creator_Manuscript=1 http://www.abdn.ac.uk/scottskinner/display.php?ID=JSS0919Creator=1Creator_Manuscript=1 They are two consecutive pages of a dance book by James Scott Skinner. There are descriptions of dance steps for a Highland Schottishe and a German Schottishe. I can't provide a definitive answer on the difference between a strathspey and a highland reel either. However, the FAQ page on Alan Ng's Irish music website http://www.irishtune.info/ implies that the term Highland reel might be used by people in Northern Ireland for Strathspey. Now I'll let the people who know what they're talking about answer. Randy. At 11:03 AM 30/07/2004, you wrote: I suppose I shouldn't bother the list with questions that strictly speaking have nothing to do with abc, but since there are so many British music experts here, I take the chance: As far as official kowledge goes, the schottische (and the ecossaise) is a continental 18th/19th Century attempt to imitate Scottish music, about as genuine as a von Bismarck tartan. Yet in a early 20th Century collection of Scottish fiddle tunes I found Orange and Blue (usually known as a strathspey) presented as a Highland Schottische. What does that mean? The Scots trying to imitate Scottish music? Did the dance at some point make it to its assumed home country? Or does the schottische actually have some genuine roots in the highlands? And since I'm bothering you all anyway: is there any difference between a strathspey and a highland reel? Frank Nordberg http://www.musicaviva.com http://www.abc-notation.com http://www.online-guitarist.com http://www.tablatvre.com http://www.mandolin-player.com http://www.blues-harmonica.com http://www.irish-banjo.com http://www.blues-banjo.com http://www.folk-banjo.com http://www.roarogfrank.com To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] smaller notes among others
Kristian Nørgaard asked:
| Is it possible to write a part of the melody with smaller notes than
| then rest.
| This is often used when you want to show a short melodyline, which isn't
| part of the main melodi.
|
| It should show up in the same staff as the rest.
John Chambers responded:
snip snip
The idea was that you could then write {1C2DE F3G}AB and the C2DE F3G
notes would follow the rules for ordinary notes, but would be drawn
with very small notes. To get the Baroque-style measured ornaments,
you could write something like |{2d3c}c6 d2|, for example. The d3c
notes would be drawn larger than grace notes, and would have the
correct lengths, though of course they would take away from the 6
counts of the real c6 note.
And, of course, one of the reactions of most other musicians would be
that this is idiotic notation which nobody in their right mind would
ever even want to use. But the Baroque crowd would be happy.
I purchased a book of fiddle tunes (not Baroque fiddle tunes, in case you
might wonder ;) ) only this past weekend which uses both grace notes of
varying length within a single ornament and smaller notes to show short
melody lines not part of the main melody. The smaller notes are used to
show when a fiddler might play a non-melody note on an string adjacent to
the string on which the melody note is played (and of course to show what
note is played).
There are abc transcriptions where unisons occur only few times in a given
piece. It may be of interest to a non-fiddler to know which note in each
case is the melody note. If we make the assumption that the melody note is
always the note of highest pitch, then there is no problem, but in the case
of this particular book that I am speaking of, there are many cases where
the non-melody note is higher pitched than the melody note, sometimes in
many note phrases that also contain non-melody notes lower than the melody
note. This could leave the non-fiddler with a fairly large number of
choices in figuring out the proper melody (of course, since there is
usually no standard version of a fiddle tune, I suppose that very few would
get too worked up if the non-fiddler just picked notes, as long as the
result sounds good).
Is your notation meant for grace note phrases only? Otherwise, how might
you use the notation you describe above to show different note sizes for
notes played at the same time, rather than as a kind of grace note? Say
for example if at some point in a tune I want to write [GB], but I want to
make it clear that G is the melody note and B is the non-melody note, and
thus I want B to be smaller. What would I do?
Randy.
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[abcusers] Looking for a Tune
Hello, I'm looking for an abc version of the accordion classic, Beer Barrel Polka. Can anybody help me out? Randy. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Keyboard layout
Hello Everybody, Thanks for your input on keyboard layout. I see that I differ from other abc users in that I have opted to relearn how to type on the Dvorak keyboard, and that I avoid the usage of the mouse if at all possible. Keyboard shortcuts all the way, man. The Dvorak keyboard doesn't have the quality that all letters abcdefgh are keyed with the same hand. Of course, even with a qwerty keyboard, you still need the right hand for the |,[],: , characters, which are used quite frequently. Or is this what you used the mouse for? If having the right hand free for the mouse is important, the keys could be remapped so that all the frequently used characters, including |,[],:,, are on the left hand. This may even be better having all the letters abcdefg on one row. (Incidentally, Dvorak also designed keyboard layouts for people who only had control of one hand. They are now a standard part of Windows. Apparently people can type up to 55 wpm with these. I'd like to see a one handed person do that with qwerty.) For those who experimented with alternate keyboard layouts, and later switched back, how long did you try the alternate layouts? It took me about a month to learn Dvorak, and another 2 or so to reach a decent speed, but it was worth it. Might the difficulty have been that your brain was (soft)-wired for qwerty because it's all you've ever learned and it was hard to rewire to something else, rather than a difficulty inherent in the keyboard layout? Despite what some have said, other than the problem of our brains being softwired to type a certain way, I have a hard time believing that something more closely resembling a keyboard layout couldn't be better (in the long term at least) than something where the main keys used are laid out apparently randomly. If you were to design a layout to enter the tune part of an abc, without knowing where the pertinent letters are on a standard qwerty keyboard layout, would you put the letters where they currently are on a qwerty keyboard? Probably not. I assume that for most or all of you, though, entering abc tunes does not make up the bulk of your typing, so it is probably not worth the effort to relearn how to type on a new layout, unless you could use it for all your typing, which you couldn't in the case of an abc friendly layout. I think that answers my question as to whether it is an idea worth pursuing. Perhaps I'll experiment with it myself, and see if I like it any better. Randy. At 02:31 PM 18/11/2003 +, you wrote: Jack Campin writes: | Meanwhile, for most tunes I can type abc nearly as fast as | I can play it. It's seems unlikely that any clever keyboard | mapping could do much better. Having the notes all on the | left hand is probably much of this. | | I'd never thought about that. For me that makes it more difficult - | while I'm right-handed, I use the mouse left-handed, as many people | do who started using mice before the IBM PC versions came along. | My first was the bitpad on the ICL/Three Rivers Perq; all of us in | the project had our bitpads on the left except for the left-hander, | and nobody wanted to borrow his machine. And the early publicity | material for the Mac always showed the mouse being used left-handed. It has always seemed to me that musicians should react the other way. After all, right-handers who play stringed instruments always seem to want to use their left hand for the fingerboard. And if you're a keyboard player, I'd think you would of necessity be fairly ambidextrous. I usually put a mouse on whichever side is most convenient. I find that switching sides with the mouse doesn't take any thought; I just do it. This seems to surprise a lot of people when they notice it. But I'd think that a keyboard player would just react by asking What sort of keyboards do you play? | What would help for me would be mapping the numeric keypad (at the | right) to note letters. I never use the keypad otherwise, and it | would free up my left hand to stay on the mouse. That sounds like a good idea. In fact, a clever abc editor might have an option to keep track of the tonic from the K: lines, and map 1-7 to notes in the obvious way. You'd use 0 for a rest. Maybe you could use the + and - keys on the keypad to do octave shifts. Actually, you want lengths, too. So maybe you could use the shift key to select between 1-7 meaning notes and lengths. Then, with the left-hand shift key, you could enter notes and lengths entirely with the right hand. You'd still need to move your hand for bar lines, I suppose. It might be worth experimenting with. -- O :#/ John Chambers + [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] Keyboard layout
Hello, I'm curious to know if anyone has ever written keyboard drivers to remap the keys of a typical computer keyboard to something that would be more accommodating to entry of ABCs. For example, characters that are used most often can be mapped to keys in the home row, or the row above it. Let me explain what I mean further. Rather than the typical home row of a keyboard, asdfghjkl, we could have something like abcd~:efg|, the row above the home row could be ABCD[]EFG... or something like that. From a quick glance at a couple of abc tunes, this would seem to put the most commonly used keys in the most accessible positions on the keyboard (one must admit, the key for the pipe symbol, |, used for separating measures, is in a rather awkward position for a key that seems to be used the most often after the letters used for notes.) These may not be the best options (I haven't even considered the possibilities available to us by way of the SHIFT key), that's a different debate, but it is certainly an improvement over a qwerty layout. For those who might be concerned about writing up the header of the tune, where the current system works fine, it is possible to switch between keyboards by a click or two of the mouse or else by keyboard shortcuts (at least in the OSs that I've used), so one could easily use a normal layout for the header, and then switch in less than a second to an abc friendly layout for the tune section of an abc. There seems to be a significant contingent of tech savvy types within the abc using community who work on abc software. I really know nothing about writing keyboard drivers, but writing a keyboard driver seems to pale in comparison to writing something that can take a bunch of text and turn it into a postscript file containing conventional music notation or into a midi file, or vice versa. Does anybody here think this is a worthwhile idea? Or am I the only one who enters abc textwise? Randy. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[abcusers] Abctwin
Hello abc users Does anybody here know what happened to the website containing the abctwin software? As far as I can tell, the only url from which it could be downloaded is http:/www.logeny.com/abctwin.htm, but when I go there the content of the webpage has nothing to do with abc software. Randy. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Abctwin
Thanks for the tip. I found a few copies of the file. However, when I try to download the most recent version, I get a failed connection message. I was able to download the second most recent version of the file, but when I try to use it I get ABCTwin.exe is not a valid Win32 application. Any suggestions? Is ABCTwin.exe supposed to be a stand alone executable? Randy. At 01:30 PM 25/10/2003 -0700, you wrote: It looks like the company removed the page. Or maybe it went bankrupt, or got bought out, or completely revamped itself. In any event, the abctwin page is no longer there. But all is not lost. Go to the WayBackMachine ( http://www.archive.org/ ) and search for http://www.logeny.com/abctwin or http://www.logeny.com/ABCTwin.exe. They cache the contents of the web from time to time. They don't always get every bit of a site, but I'll bet they've got a copy in there somewhere. Ali On Sat, Oct 25, 2003 at 11:18:24AM -0400, Randall J Elzinga wrote: Hello abc users Does anybody here know what happened to the website containing the abctwin software? As far as I can tell, the only url from which it could be downloaded is http:/www.logeny.com/abctwin.htm, but when I go there the content of the webpage has nothing to do with abc software. Randy. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html We're always excited when an Albertan leaves Canada - Mike Bullard. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
