Folk Music

Online	Download	Released	Terms
Tunes	tunes.zip	2008-08-23	Free

About the Tunes

My tune collection has folk tunes in abc musical notation, sheet music (PDF), and MIDI to (roughly) demonstrate how they should sound. Most of these are Cambridge Folk Orchestra repertoire; others are personal favorites.

About the Arrangements

I am fond of Hungarian/Rumanian/Transylvanian folk tunes and their accompaniments (probably of less ancient origin). Chords for most of the tunes here are played by a virtual ensemble of bowed bass and contra, a flat-bridged viola body strung with three cello strings. I particularly like a style attributed to the Mezoseg region, which employs major chords almost exclusively.

About the MIDI renditions

The abc tunes are translated to MIDI files by the abcmidi program. The abcmidi translations are much improved (including turns notated in abc by ~) thanks to Seymour Shlien's yeoman work on that software. In 2008 I added another of his enhancements, drum tracks, to Acano Mlada Nevesto, Eleno Mome, Ludo Kopano, Macedonska Sedenka, Pajdusko, Pandalas, Petrunino, Starceska Racenica, Zemer Atik, and Zensko Krsteno.

Although fiddle is typically the melodic lead for most of the tunes, the MIDI fiddle (110) from my computer's sound-chip or the TiMidity++ program sound painfully bad (eg. Acano mlada nevesto). The MIDI santur (15) substitutes for fiddle in many of the tunes. But the TiMidity++ santur sounds an octave too low! To fix this, modify line 15 of bank 0 in timidity.cfg to be:

	15 /usr/share/timidity/instruments/santur tune=12

One drawback of dulcimer doing melody is that it cannot slur. But the transcriptions from Susan Worland (an excellent fiddler CFO alumna) have no slurs. Not playing fiddle, my attempts to add slurs have not been right for that instrument.

Avoid PersonalCopy soundfont!
In April 2008 Fedora-7 (Linux) Yum replaced the timidity++-patches package with PersonalCopy-Lite-soundfont. As a result, some of my MIDI files (eg. Radomirsko, Ludo Kopano) have some instruments playing in the wrong keys. Classical MIDIs from www.classicalarchives.com and www.kunstderfuge.com are also broken by PersonalCopy-Lite-soundfont.
I have tracked down one problem; instrument 56 Trumpet
  56 /usr/share/PersonalCopy-Lite-patches/PCLite-B0/Trumpet # 2 velocity ranges
sounds a dimished fifth (6 halfsteps) higher than it should (59 MutedTrumpet is okay). I should be able to fix this in timidity.cfg.
  56 /usr/share/PersonalCopy-Lite-patches/PCLite-B0/Trumpet tune=6
raises the Trumpet another diminished fifth so that it then sounds an octave higher than normal. So far so good.
  56 /usr/share/PersonalCopy-Lite-patches/PCLite-B0/Trumpet tune=-6
should lower the trumpet by a diminished fifth to yield the correct pitch -- which it does only some of the time! Some notes sound correctly while others are the wrong pitch (repeatably). This would seem to be a TiMidity++ bug. But TiMidity++'s webpage was last updated in 2004 and its bug mailing-list is decommissioned "because of spam"; so I think no help will be forthcoming there.
http://www.personalcopy.com/ gives jim @ personalcopy.com as its contact. I have yet to receive a reply to my problem report of 2008-04-15. Although the trumpet can probably be simply fixed by Jim, there are more serious problems with PersonalCopy soundfonts.
	0 /usr/share/PersonalCopy-Lite-patches/PCLite-B0/GrandPiano
playing "Claire de Lune" sounds like an army of sitars rather than a piano. The patches were apparently recorded with automatic-level-control, totally screwing up the sustain.
Some of the patches in
	1 /usr/share/PersonalCopy-Lite-patches/PCLite-B0/BrightGrandPiano
sound incorrect pitches.
As far as I can tell, all RPMs for timidity++-patches have disappeared; so if you are a Linux user and haven't yet removed (updated) timidity++-patches, don't!

About the Sheet Music PDFs

The PDFs were generated from output from the ABC2PS program, version 1.3.3.

ABC2PS-1.3.3 does not print the "part" sequence contained in the first P: field of an abc file. Earlier versions of ABC2PS do print this field, but produce output which is not as compact; splitting some of the tunes onto two pages.

Copyright © 2002, 2008 Aubrey Jaffer.	Voluntocracy
agj @ alum.mit.edu	Go Figure!