Selected Topics

Notes on the Fumblin' Fingers Music Website Design

Just came across Paul Hardy's website (https://pghardy.net/concertina/tunebooks/tunebook_process.html) and I like his clear, straightforward way of describing his process (all abc file oriented). I'm thinking I should (try to) do the same.

Music for use with the Fumblin' Fingers.

This website is my collection of sheet music for use with the Fumblin' Fingers. It is organised into several sections - at the time of writing they consist of:

1. Books - older music, all of which I had previously organised and formatted into a series of pdf ebooks.
2. New - (nominally) music that we currently or have previously played, that did not or have not yet made its way into the books
3. ToTry - (nominally) music that we have yet to incorporate into our playlists.

Each section has its own folder in the source, and within each folder are individual folders for each song, named appropriately (but with no apostrophes or odd characters to throw off the down-stream processes). The goal is to wind up with a web page in the output with common fields (title, description, etc.), and links to various things, such as it's location in the Session Tunes, Fiddler's Companion, etc. I also include links to the lilypond source file, the .pdf file, extracted ABC files, Midis, lyrics, and variants.

The song folders contain pretty much a consistent set of files per song:

1. FF-tunename.tt - this is the top-level template file, containing variables with all the info mentioned above (title, folder/filename, key, copyright info, standard links to the Session, Fiddler's Companion, etc.)
2. TT-HO-tunename.htm - this is html-coded information about the origins, history and interesting facts about the tune. It gets 'included' in the final page for the tune, under the title 'History'.
3. TT-HPN-tunename.htm - this is html-coded information about the way that the Fumblin' Fingers plays this tune - for instance if it is used in a set. It gets 'included' in the final page for the tune, under the title 'Playing or Personal Notes'.
4. var-tunename.abc - this is the collected '.abc' variants I have found for the tune.
5. FF-tunename.abc - this is the Fumblin' Fingers version of the tune, in .abc file format.
6. (Optional) A pdf of the original sheet music that the band used as its source for learning it. If not the original, then perhaps something to use as a basis of reference when deciding which of the many variants of a song we would use when we play it.
7. FFly-tunename.ly - this is Lilypond encoding of the sheet music, which, when completed will also be accompanied by a pdf of the result and a .mid file of the resulting midi encoding.

There may be other files in the folder, but there is guaranteed to be the first four listed above, as well as the last one, when it gets coded.

File creation and automation.

Automation helps a bit - I can now use Perl scripts to generate the folder and file structures, and insert the obvious variables (song Title, etc...)

I do have problems extracting text from original source material, particularly with text from the Fiddler's Companion (now the Traditional Tune Archive) - this has to do with some of the character encodings that he uses.

I have a perl script ('MakeTuneFolderTT.pl') to create folders, especially helpful when creating en masse large collections of tunes. It takes a list of tune names from a text file ('MakeTuneFolderTT_NewTunes.txt'), one tune per line, and creates a folder with that name. It then copies templates of the 5 files listed above from a template folder, renaming them and updating any tunename variables as it goes.

An example of such a created page is Garryowen (../Garryowen/FF-Garryowen.html) .... check it out.

It consists of a "standardized" layout, divided into the title of the piece, followed by a list of alternate titles (AKA - 'Also Known As'), then, if available, a snippet of the first 4 bars or so of the tune. This is followed by an informational summary of the tune (tune type, key, and playing pattern). This is followed by a table that provides information about how the Fumblin' Fingers class this tune, what type of tune it is, and links to the two .abc files mentioned above, as well as a link to the pdf of the sheet music (in pdf format) from the .ly file, if available. If the .ly is available, that link will have with it a link to the resulting .midi file. This table is followed by a status table that indicates where I am with the research on this tune. The next section is the HPN html-coded info mentioned above, entitled 'Playing or Personal Notes', followed by the HO file, entitled 'History'. Finally I provide a table of 'Standard' links (where available) to the specific page containing info about this tune.