Hi, I felt after reading for several months I needed to add my thoughts on several subjects. I play mostly Irish flute and Uilleann Pipes, and have played in over 100 sessions around the US, and quite a few in Europe. One of the things that has struck me over the years is that often music sessions are right where you least expect them, at least they can be hard to find. I have also found that the different folk groups which include Bluegrass, Old Time,( they swear there is a huge difference) Irish, Cape Breton and general folk sessions tend to be somewhat protective. Most don't want players showing up who don't know the three most important things about their session, 1) Know the Music 2) Know how to play and have good etiquette when playing 3) Don't ever play a different style at their session,
Irish musicians don't want to hear "Rocky Top" which is understandable on several levels. A friend of mine and I had put up a web site to find sessions mostly Irish around the US, most in bars, some restaurants and books stores. Over 200 around the US and Canada http://www.sessioneer.com Other Irish sessions can be found through the Comhaltas site http://www.ccenorthamerica.org Here in Tennessee we have 4 weekly Irish sessions, and several bluegrass held mostly on Saturday nights in churches. You can find some Irish Music in a Bluegrass session played in bluegrass style, but I have never heard bluegrass at an Irish session that lasted very long. There is plenty of opportunity around the area so they tend to be protective. I think it stems from a fear of the Irish session drifting over to the more dominant style and thus diluting the number of musicians. The second thing I wanted to comment on was some of the questions about MIDI. Particularly the question as to why MIDI didn't have song names and longer more easy to program words like ABC. I am an engineer and started in the late 70's as a young engineer working for both Yamaha and Oberheim and sat on one of the original MIDI committees. MIDI was designed primarily to allow sequencers and specific keyboards control other sequencers and keyboards, The syntax of the language is designed to be a simple ASCII text code that can be sent quickly over a midi port which by the way is an RS-232 port 8 bits plus stop and start bit modified so that it works over a optical current loop. The transistor of one keyboard drives the LED of the attached keyboard and vice versa. That was mostly my invention to get around a fight brewing between Yamaha and Korg. In the early 1980's it migrated to IBM PC's ,Commodore and Apple computers and soon these became the standard for sequencer and control. The MIDI language and thus the syntax was meant to be simple character codes to turn notes on and off and allow for some notes to be held while others were quicker. It also allowed for changes in the voice ect back when everybody had a different idea about what effects ect were important or not. All keyboards had different ideas as to what voice #1 was for instance.The more standard MIDI we all are familiar with is based on one manufacturers structure which was originally a Roland contrivance. MIDI was never designed to be used as a programming language, even though it has the structure of one. At the time it was to opporate at 9600 Baud which was the fastest and most available bit rate at the time and still talk to several keyboards and computers at the same time. Therefore MIDI was designed to be a short language that sent the fewest characters necessary to accomplish this job Soap box down hope someone found it useful... Jim Pogge -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Toby Rider Sent: Sunday, February 02, 2003 10:43 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [abcusers] Re: Musicians and techies On Sun, 2003-02-02 at 19:23, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Toby wrote (nice to see you actually on the list, Toby): > Not so all over the USA. > > See <http://www.fiddlerstour.com/default_ft.aspx> for a description > of our weekly pub/restaurant session. I know several of others here > in the Northeast. Ah sweet! You guys should consider yourselves lucky, it looks like a nice session you guys have going there. It's certainly not the norm. Toby 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
