Anselm Lingnau writes: | John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | | > Hey, glad to see you're doing this. I've volunteered in the past, but | > the RSCDS didn't respond. | | So far I'm doing this for my own enjoyment, with no official RSCDS | sanction. I want to have an »Original Tunes for RSCDS Dances« book | that saves me hauling 40+ booklets to those workshops where the | teacher makes up his mind what to teach over breakfast on the same day | (no kidding). ... | I'm only doing the melody and chords. I try to stick to what is in the | books but don't lose sleep over stuff that I feel needs changed.
So we really have the same motivation and approach. ABC works best for a "fake book" style, which is what is preferred by most SCD musicians that I know. I'll have to remember to steal some tunes from your site. (And you're welcome to any of mine, of course.) What you're doing was one of my main motivations for doing my ABC Tune Finder. It was obvious that a lot of the tunes that I might want were around on other people's web sites. The only problem was finding them quickly when I wanted one of them. Very often you can find the name of a dance's recommended tune, but how do you find the tune itself? I've seen a few discussions of how slow the RSCDS has been to take advantage of the Net. My usual comment has been something like: Of course they're a bunch of conservative fuddy-duddies who are decades behind the times. The RSCDS exists to preserve a tradition. It's their role to be conservative fuddy-duddies who are decades behind the times. It's up to us radical revisionists to develop their online system, and when they're good and ready, we can give them a copy of what we've done. (When this happens, I expect they'll just invite 2 or 3 of us to do the work. What I'd be tempted to do is set up a SCD wiki and invite all the strathspey subscribers to contribute.) | I haven't yet decided what to do about publication of the ABC files. | I suppose the thing to do would be to integrate them into Alan | Paterson's DanceData somehow (or at least the WWW front end) and see | what happens :^) Yes; he already links to the Fiddler's Companion site. Maybe we should both be discussing with him the easiest way to interconnect all of our sites. I have sets for about 600 dances in my collection (a bare start ;-). I've developed an approach that works for me. But it might be time to start talking about linking the SCD web sites. | > Are you doing the dance descriptions, too? | | No -- different construction site. I need the dance descriptions only | when I'm teaching, and then I usually know what I want to do and just | take the book along. I get the impression that a lot of teachers have put their favorite dances into their computers, and some are online. But they all do it differently. I wonder how long it will take for this to get into a form that can actually be used? I've collected a few myself, but my dance descriptions are in N different formats. I have already had one "Übergeek" moment at a dance, when the teacher gave up on a dance and wanted to do a specific simpler dance, but didn't quite remember it. I thought it was one in my collection, so I whipped out my cute Kyocera "smartphone" (which runs PalmOS and has some ABC software installed), used the browser to find the dance on my MIT site, and handed her the phone with the dance description on the screen. I got lots of geek points for that one. I could have found a set of tunes for it, too, but so far that's of limited value. The phone's tiny screen doesn't work as a music book. I can play the tunes through the phone's tiny speaker, so it's useful as a reminder. But it's not usable for people who don't know the tunes. Some day, we'll have a portable that will fit on a music stand, with wireless connectivity (and good wireless coverage), and then it'll be possible to dispense with the printed pages. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
