> A friend of mine is a whistle/flageolet player and has whistles in all > the popular keys -- but knows only the fingerings for the D-whistl to > sight-read by. Rumor has it that most whistle tunes are written in D or > G keys, even if they are intended to be played in other keys by suitable > choice of whistles. > However, the majority of songs she wishes to play aren't written like > that (apparantly fiddle and other chromatic instrument players don't > like to pick one diatonic key to write everything in), Are there any > tools out there that would allow us to take a collection of tunes in > ABC and transpose them to a key suitable for tinwhistle notation?
A technical fix is not much use - is she going to type in everything she plays in advance? Recorder players have been dealing with this one for centuries. It is NOT difficult to learn to sightread in multiple keys. The first one is the toughest. I would suggest she spends a couple of weeks playing at pitch exclusively with a different instrument than her usual one (say, moving from a D to a G whistle - this parallels the recorder player's shift from descant to treble). After that she should be able to switch freely between them after another week or two of using them both equally. Then add an A whistle to the mix, or a B flat and so on - each new one gets easier. After a while you're reading relative rather than absolute pitches without thinking about it, creating new mappings between staff positions and fingerings on the fly. This also makes it easier to pick up entirely different instruments. The latest thing I've been playing is the ocarina; this (the European type) has a fingering system which is like the whistle but one finger position down (the tonic at the bottom has all your fingers on). I got my head into that by telling myself "it's like when I play tunes on the G alto recorder that I would normally play on the F alto". I have used similar cross-references in learning the clarinet (which is like two whistles a fifth apart glued together) - for folk clarinet playing, there's not much point in learning how to play from transposed music; either do it by ear or bite the bullet and use what the fiddlers do. People who double on violin and viola will go through similar mental processes on amore limited scale. Keyboard accompanists (e.g. church organists) can often do it very much better, transposing whole chunks of two-fisted texture from G to D flat at sight. This kind of thing is why I find BarFly's guitar-fret-based syntax for transposition (the one used in tune headers) utterly incompre- hensible. I can't count semitones, and if I stopped to try while doing something like read at pitch in the upper register of a clarinet in B natural (yes I've got one) I'd end up like the Wee Kirkcudbright Centipede in Matt McGinn's song. I think "this note goes to that" exclusively - i.e. what would be expressed by an ABC syntax like "A -> F#" or "minor 3rd down". And I would suggest to your friend that it would be disastrous for her to even briefly attempt modelling the problem she's got in those terms; BarFly (and some other programs using a similar syntactic approach) can do what she *wants*, but that sure as hell isn't what she *needs*. Fortunately BarFly provides another way of doing it, a transposition utility with a user interface employing the syntax that a multi- instrumentalist will have in their head. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
