Beginnings

In the summer of 2005 I attended the Canadian Society of Zoology meeting in Ottawa. At the meeting I bumped into an old acquaintance, Vance Trudeau, and discovered that he played the whistle. I had brought my concertina along so we decided to play some tunes after the Conference dinner. As we were trying to find out which tunes we had in common, Vance pulled out a binder with the collection of tunes for the Ottawa session scene. That gave me the idea that we should have something similar for sesisons in Montreal.

This site began in September 2005 as a collection of tunes for the Wednesday night session at O'Regan's pub. Rather than put together a collection of paper it made more sense to make it available on the web. As technology progresses this makes more and more sense. It is now possible to try to remember a tune in the session, take out an iPhone, seach this site and retrieve the sheet music so that you can remember how it starts.

Credits

This website his hosted by the Web design company, Aboreta, owned by Gord Fisch. Gord is a guitarist and mandolin player in Montreal and very generously donates the space and resources that make this site possible and provides a very stable server.

Site design and programming by Robin Beech, Associate Professor of the Institute of Parasitology, McGill University. Robin plays the English concertina and C#/D button accordion.

How it Works

The software to convert tunes in abc format into an image of the sheet music and midi files is freely available. With a little work it was easy to automate the process of generating a web page listing the tunes with links to the generated files. The result was a site where the most difficult part of adding new tunes was transcribing the tune into abc format in the first place. For those interested, the conversion software includes

abcm2ps

This reads a text file containing tunes in abc format and produces a post-script file of the sheet music

ps2pdf

This script is part of the ghostscript package and converts a post-script file into pdf format.

convert

This is the central component of ImageMagick, an extensive image manipulation package that will convert pdf into many other image formats such as the png files used on this site

abc2midi

Another component of the abc format manipulation software which reads a text file of tunes in abc format and produces a midi file so that you can hear vaguely what the tune sounds like