Long answer: Im not an advanced player, but I do have ABCmus and do use it, but only for the purpose of quickly identifying the general “jist” of abc files that are unfamiliar to me for a very quick assessment if I kinda like them, and want to pursue it further, but I never ever ever use ABCmus when I sit down to really learn and work on a tune.
When I first got it, I thought ABCmus was going to be very helpful, but while it is an excellent program, I actually rarely use it now and don’t find it very helpful for learning tunes.
Lately I start with actual recordings of tunes by known, skilled players, listen to those recordings obsessively till I know them very well in my head, then I get the abc, print out the notation, then if I need to I use the Amazing SlowDowner to slow down the actual recording and loop continually on the small byte of the tune I’m working on till I get it down, then I move on to the next byte. This also has helped me dissect all that fancy ornamentation thats often played at Warp 9. For me anyway, the only way to get the proper “sense” of the tune is to work from an actual recording.
Also, lately Ive been finding it easier to learn tunes by ear, but then I’ve been listening to trad A LOT over the past four months, so maybe it just kinda sinks in after a while.
As a beginner, Ive been nervous about developing bad habits while practicing…thats why lately Im only working on tunes that I have recordings of, so I can be sure I’m in the ballpark of style and phrasing while I’m developing my technique. ABCmus is not only useless for this purpose, its potentially damaging.
All that being said, I think that ABCmus is an excellent program…it does what its designed to do very well.
ABCmus is a fantastic program to have in your machine. I agree that you shouldn’t use it to learn ornaments, phrasing ect, but I find it extremely useful to play along with the tunes as ABCmus plays them. This is good for timing and breathing as the computer won’t stop and wait for me (much like a session). In the new version, I believe that you can string tunes together in sets.
I’ve met Henrik Norbeck at several sessions and festivals during the years and besides being the father of AbcMus he is also a great whistle and flute player. Also a major contributor of IrTrad on the internet. AbcMus is an excellent tool to search, find, edit, share and handle abc-tunes that I wouldn’t like to be without. However, learning to play tunes from abcfiles or any other format played back via midi is NOT a good idea.
When I started out on whistle some ten years ago I exclusively used abc and abc2midi to learn new tunes. At that time it was, if not the only, at least the cheapest way to playback tunes at a lower speed without changing the pitch. It didn’t take long before people started to complain that I sounded more like a living abc-file than a whistle player. As midi devises can’t reproduce the emphasis or articulation of a tune you should not regard it as a good source for whistle playing.
Learn by ear from friend is absolutely the best way and I agree with “DazedinLA”, The Amazing SlowDowner is truly amazing. A great tool to learn/copy tunes of your favorite artists. I have had a link to an example I made of the Ivy Leaf using the ASD in a previous post, you should be able to find it.
