After forty years playing this music....

[Rob Sharer]

Electronic gimcrackery is lame.





Rob

[I.D.10-t]

Electronic gimcrackery is lame.

He posted on the internet.

[Kirk B]

Electronic gimcrackery is lame.

Yo, I got your gimcrackery right here.

Kirk

[johnkerr]

IMHO the developers of these apps got it bass-ackwards. Who needs to know the name of the tune someone else pulls out at a session? If you like it and want to learn it, record it. There are even iPhone apps that will do that for you. Really, what does the name tell you about a tune anyway? It's just a label, nothing else. The iPhone app is just going to tell you what labels lots of other folks have stuck on a tune that this guy right in front of you is playing. Doesn't tell you anything about the tune or help you in any way to learn it. If you must have a label for it, why not ask yer man what label he puts on it? After all, it's his version that caught your ear and made you want to learn it, right? Why not use his label, and then when you've learned it off well enough that your playing of it catches someone else's ear, you can give credit to your source? No iPhone app will preserve that continuity, which is the whole point of the music in the first place.

OTOH, an app that's the reverse of this would be quite handy. How many times have you sat in a session and said "Jesus, how does tune X go anyway?" Wouldn't it be nice to be able to speak that tune name into your iPhone and have, say, the classic Paddy O'Brien recording of it spew out? How great would that be? Of course, it would have to be a quite an expensive app, unless you got the Green Linnet version where they don't pay the musicians the royalties they're due.

And as for the app that turns your iPhone into a concertina, who needs that? Instead, give me a concertina that can text and surf the web. Then I can use my iPhone for important stuff like recording that nice tune the fella next to me is playing so I can go home and learn it.

[Denny]

feature creep

he's on about release 3 when 1 is barely outta beta

[Rob Sharer]

Electronic gimcrackery is lame.

He posted on the internet.

Yeah, but not during the session!


Rob

[I.D.10-t]

Does one need a mobile phone to do some of this stuff?

[LorenzoFlute]

I don't understand you guys. Maybe YOU don't find any use of tunes names, but I can tell you that I do. Still, you are arguing that it's useless for everybody.

I'll repeat what I said on my other post. It's not about learning the main version on thesession.org (or similar), it's about letting you know who else played the tune on which album, so that you can listen to that recording. And what's the point in listening to a recording of that tune? Easy, you learn other versions of that tune that might be more common on other sessions (you don't really want to play only at the local session for all your lifes, do you?), and most important, you learn variations and the style the artists are playing it. This helps you to develop your own (micro)-version of the tune (still compatible with the plain one) and, therefore, your own style.

Also (and again) it will let you remember tunes you forgot about...

About that concetina stuff, it may be fun for some time but i agree, it's of no real use...


(minor edit for the spelling)

[I.D.10-t]

Othannen, are there any tunes you would never play? Any tunes that are just, not proper? What if an outsider played it?

[LorenzoFlute]

Othannen, are there any tunes you would never play? Any tunes that are just, not proper? What if an outsider played it?

Maybe it's my English, but I don't get (understand?) your point.
Did you read all my post or just a little part of it?
(sorry if I sound aggressive, I'm not looking for any sort of useless fight)

[Kirk B]

Tracks on Lunasa's next CD?

Something I recorded at a session #1
Something I recorded at a session #2
Something I recorded at a session #3
Something I recorded at a session #3
Something I recorded at a session #4
Something I recorded at a session #5
Something I recorded at a session #6
Something I recorded at a session #7
Something I recorded at a session #8

Just thinking out loud.

[I.D.10-t]

Maybe it's my English, but I don't get (understand?) your point.
Did you read all my post or just a little part of it?
(sorry if I sound aggressive, I'm not looking for any sort of useless fight)

Your communication is fine, my communication is most likely the problem.
Honest questions are never aggressive.

I read the whole post and had a question.

Tunes to me are not just a series of notes, they have context and history. Some tunes are neutral, others are not. I personally think it is reckless just to play a nice tune without knowing its context. I was trying to ask (because you seem to be in a different culture) if there are some tunes that would seem off if an outsider innocently played it.

[johnkerr]

Latest tune I learned from a member of Lunasa: a hornpipe Kevin Crawford gave us at a workshop last fall. He didn't have a name for it. All he knew was that he got it from Marcus Hernon's playing many years ago. He said he thought it might be a Paddy O'Brien tune, and that he had just gotten the new book of Paddy O'Brien's tunes but since he doesn't read music himself he was going around to everyone he knew saying "play me a bit of this one" to see if it might be the one. I recorded the tune off Kevin, went home and learned it. And since I have the Paddy O'Brien book myself and I can read music, I looked in the book and the tune's not there. Whatever. I play it anyway. And one time I launched into it at a session and a fiddler joined right in on it. So when we were done, I asked him where he'd gotten the tune and what was it called? He hadn't a clue. Of course, if I'd waited until there was an app for that, none of this could ever have happened.

And as for having the name of a tune without knowing the tune vs having the tune without knowing the name, I'll take the latter any day. If you have a bushel of tunes and no names you can play all night, but if you have hundreds of names but no tunes to go with them you'll be done yelling out the names long before you've drained your first pint. But as they say on the internet, YMMV.

[Julia Delaney]

@ Othanen: ... you don't really [want] to play only at the local session for all your lifes, do you? Yes, in fact I do. In my after-life too. Maybe my local sessions are better than yours. The life of the music is in the local session, and not on a Lunasa CD. If you don't know every tune played at your local session then you should learn the tunes you don't know. If you do know all the tunes played at your local session then you should slow down so that your fellow travelers can learn the tunes that you know and they don't.

@ "Idiot" : ..it is reckless just to play a nice tune without knowing its context. Why is that reckless?

[uillmann]

If I could hum a few bars into my cell phone and it would give me the name of the tune, that would be pretty cool. I think there is something like that already. Not that I could remember the name, mind you, but maybe I could get the B part back again for some obscure tune that has eluded me for years!