I’m a violist. I have transcribed/transposed about 500 fiddle tunes (many, but not all, Irish) into alto clef, and I’d like to share them. I’m afraid they are not in ABC format - I used LilyPond. If anyone reading this has a suggestion for how I could share them effectively with other violists, I would appreciate hearing the suggestion.
I appreciate your time and attention.
Charlie Lennon’s Spideal Reel, sound’s nice, played down a string,
just on the fiddle… Means its down in G major …
It might sound even better on a Viola ?
Charlie Lennon playing it here D Major ( 1st Tune )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyYzPcYa2Y
F4
You could transpose it from this Abc -
https://thesession.org/tunes/5529
f4
Here you Go !
F4
X:1
T:Ril An Spideal
R:reel
M:4/4
L:1/8
K:Gmaj
DB, B,2 GB,EB, | DEGB AE E2 | DB, B,2 GB,DB, | A,2 F,G, A,B,CE |
DB, B,2 GB,EB, | DEGB AE E2 | cBcA Bd d2 |1 DEGA BGGE :|2 DEGA BGGA ||
|: B2 GB dBGA | BcdB cAAc | B2 GB d2 Bd | DEGA BGGA |
B2 GB dBGA | BcdB cAAB | c3 e dB B2 |1 A2 dc ABGA :|2 A2 dc AG G2 ||
One (easy) way would be to generate a pdf of all the tunes, upload to Google Drive, OneDrive, or DropBox to a public folder, then provide a link to it on this site.
I was convinced that the ABC converter at Mandolintab could produce alto clef PDFs, but perhaps I dreamed that.
“I was convinced that the ABC converter at Mandolintab could produce alto clef PDFs, but perhaps dreamed that.”
You can get alto clef in ABC by adding
K: clef=alto
to the headers.
I don’t know of any good way to convert lilypond to ABC, though.
I’d be interested in seeing the settings (for mandola rather than viola), either as pdf or as lilypond source: perhaps put these on something like dropbox?
This ground-breaking tunes-for-viola work could be a gold mine for viola players!
And BTW, was wondering – does the word “fiddler” refer to viola players, too?
Thanks, jeho - it worked! Not that I play viola (nor read alto clef). Now it’s easy to copy/paste, add an extra K: clef=alto (and possibly transpose down an octave?).
My band had a viola-player as lead for some while - he didn’t need alto clef or tunes re-keyed to suit him.
This discussion grabbed my attention as only a few days ago I ran into a friend who plays viola (classical) who’s interested in coming along to our local session. I’m not familiar with Lilypond but I’m having a look at it now. It seems like it wouldn’t be too difficult to do a copy/paste job from Lilypond to an ACB program like EasyABC (I use this one) as the body of the tune is encoded in letters and number in both programs, and follows more or less the same format. Things that are encoded differently like accidentals and the headers etc. would have to be corrected manually for every tune. Like the guys above say, you write clef=alto in the K: field and the program lets you transpose down if you need to. In EasyACB you can add many tunes to one single file and from there generate one single sheet music pdf file with all the tunes. Hope this make sense!
If I’m not mistaken Lilypond imports abc files (abc2ly) but I don’t think it’s been developed the other way around (i.e. ~ directly converting .ly files to .abc). Certainly it could be done manually, though that would require an understanding of the syntax used in both applications (lilypond & abc).
Looking around a bit w/Google I find possible conversion tools w/older versions of MuseScore
< https://sourceforge.net/projects/mscore > or something {more recent} on a Linux platform.
Finally finished the collection. It’s large, it’s in PDF or .zip, in two formats: a large format with, typically, one to three tunes per page; and a small format with three to five tunes per page. Free. I’ve copyrighted the collection to prevent anyone from lifting it and producing it for profit. Here’s a link to the Google Drive folder where the files sit:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1euNCa3b7xbmr8lDaUubwc5O1h31_bBaQ?usp=sharing
You can also contact me, and I could email you .zip file(s).
I welcome any comments!
Thanks to all who run and/or participate in this website. I’ve gotten a lot out of it.
All the best,
Ralph
Thank you, Ralph (two years later)
Will enjoy that.
