“The Northern Fiddler” lists this really cool march called “March of the Meeatoiteen Bull” (pron. March of the Misera-bull ). After a lot of searching for online ABC/sheetmusic I only found 1 place (!) that lists it under an alternative title: Road to the Isles.
I’m not an ABC wizard, and don’t know what the > and " mean in ABCism. Concertina.net cannot convert it to dots for me?
What can be wrong with the format??
sorry, I tried it too on concertina.net, and like you found it still wouldn’t run - but I found it on JC’s ABC above - I was trying to be clever and save a second post by editing my first one!
Oddly, I’ve never seen guitar chords indicated on ABC before - though they would be a useful addition. It’s possible ABC has evolved since concertina.net installed it, and they haven’t updated their convertor.
Thanks again for your quick replies.
This is one of my daft moments though. I went back to Fiddler’s Companion (Ceolas: The Fiddler's Companion) to look up the tune-
“The March of the Meenatoitin Bull” is known as “The Inverness Gathering” not “Road to The Isles”…
The other tune was simply listed below and I blindly copied it to the C&F board, wasting all of your precious time
This is still not quite the Donegal version that is in the “nothern Fiddler” book. I don’t have a recording of the tune Carol - otherwise I would agree learning by ear is better.
After all, learning a tune from sheetmusic is like trying to understand sex from a biology textbook
Thanks again.
And now back to the regular scheduled program.
It didn’t work in Concertina.net because it’s missing the X: parameter in the first line. Try inserting “X: 1” at the start, and it will produce lovely sheetmusic, complete with guitar chords and lots and lots of (shudder) dotted notes.
I was just about to write that the tune you’d posted the ABC for certainly isn’t the “March of the Meto-whatever Bull” that you and I know, but I see you discovered that for yourself.
And yes, Gonzo is right, it’s the lack of " X: " at the start of the ABC that keeps the tune from being converted.
If you write up the tune after all (or post it on your site- nudge, nudge) - would you mind also sharing it here? It’s a really cool tune, and I could use some help sorting out the confusion that i created here.
Of course I could have emailed you instead, but that would not have activated the anticipation of hundreds of Chiffers about the tune
Well I learned something from this thread too - how to get guitar chords into an ABC, so thanks all for sorting it out.
Incidentally, though it was the wrong tune, you can tell Road to the Isles is a Scottish tune from the use of the “Scotch Snap”, as described in Bill Ochs book.
Alright, off the top of my head, this is how the tune goes (meaning, this is more or less the way it’s written in “The Northern Fiddler”, give or take a note or two):
Yeah, always check your fields but you sometimes find font conflicts, especially when crossing platforms (PC to Mac), as I do.
When you guys post abcs here on the Forum, they open about 50% of the time without some manipulations. Eventually, most, but not all will open.
Guitar chords are just separated by quotation marks right before the notes you want them to go over. I still have not gotten multi-line feature or lyrics to work but abc has been a great resource for sharing tunes.
). After a lot of searching for online ABC/sheetmusic I only found 1 place (!) that lists it under an alternative title: Road to the Isles.
![pmarch [GIF]](http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/cgi/abc/gettune?F=GIF&U=http://www.firepowr.com/TRAD/abc/pmarch.abc&X=9&T=INVERNESSGATHERINGTHE&N=InvernessGatheringThe.gif){kind=link}