Well, someone did it. The O’Neill’s book online, in all formats (ABC and sheet, etc).
Wow. Free, too!
Anyway, a great great resource.
Here is the link:
http://www.sosyourmom.com/Oneils1.html
Thanks David. Nice site. A 1,000 tunes for learning at your command. Notations isn’t always right, or the way we most often hear it played, but a great reference indeed. Format is in NWC, ABC, MIDI, and GIF. Can’t lose if you want to know how the tune goes, assuming you know the name of the tune. Listen to the melody or read the music.
Wow, thanks for bringing that over here to Piperville, Dave!
Cripes - there goes ANOTHER excuse for not learning more tunes!
Wait - here’s one: I’m rearranging my sock drawer!
Thanks, Dave!
BrianC
I’ve seen your sock drawer, cassidy
better stick to piping
(or was that the other way around??)
dm
Jaysus you’re a right shite, aren’t ya?
That’s a piping SOCK, boyo.
Didn’t a publisher in Cork offer an omnibus O’Neill’s: All of his books in one convenient collection. He put out a few more after the Dance Music, you know.
I misplaced my O’Neill’s years ago, but just for fun I went through all the Hornpipes listening for some old familiar tunes. I didn’t recognize hardly any of the ones I knew, although I did find a couple of new ones I liked. If the notation is the same as the midi files, and if the jigs and reels are anything like the HP, I consider this particular version of tunes pretty useless. It’s just not the way they are really played, and not even close in most cases.
Calling it useless is maybe a bit much. I would certainly think offering it as midi files not a good idea though, if only for the heartless mechanical reproduction you infuse your brain with.
I have some misgivings about this and the other project being advertised at the minute putting O‘Neill on the web. On the one hand it is great to have any collection available and easily accessible. Considering the book has never really been out of print the sense of putting in all that effort and then doing O’Neill’s MOI as well as the DMI eludes me a bit. And the air section of MOI, what can you say, it wasn’t abandoned for no reason at all for the DMI.
I think O’Neill’s collection is a monumental effort [although I would personally pick up DMI instead of MOI]and there are many gems in it if you go looking for them, contrary to Lorenzo’ s opinion I think there are many hornpipes there that are pretty much played as printed, if you look at the first few pages of hornpipes in the original collection Chief O Neill’s, Greencastle, Kildare Fancy, Quarrelsome piper, Liverpool hrnp, Rights of man are all pretty much the standard versions. I wouldn’t trust a midi player with any of this music though, not at any time or for any purpose.
I probably shouldn’t have said that the tunes weren’t close in most cases, most of them are close enough for most people. I found many simple HP to be straightforward and fairly close to they way you’d hear them played, e.g., O’Dwyer’s HP, The Pleasures of Hope, The Good Natured Man, The Groves HP, Pretty Peggy Morrissey, Kitty’s Wedding, etc. But the details, like the #s and naturals in other tunes, kind of throws you for a loop.
Here’s an example in reels, what I heard via the midi. I assume the midi is like the notes on the sheet music on that site. The Dublin Reel.
It starts out fine in the first section and sounds remotely familiar in the second and third for some strange reason…maybe that’s the way they play it in some parts of Ireland, or Chicago.
I think O’Neill’s collection if great, I’ve just had to adjust most of the tunes I learned out of it as I became more familiar with how the tunes are played in sessions and on recordings. I never even recognized Julia Delaney, The Girl That Broke My Heart was closer but in a minor key, Lord Gordon’s wasn’t even half there, The Woman of the House I never even recognized. I only use the midi to go quickly through the list to see if there’s any I like or recognize. I could never do that with the sheet music.
Compare Julia Delaney on this O’Neill’s web site with a midi from Ron Clarkes site, assuming the midi is like the sheet music.
O’Neill’s
Clarkes
Quel difference!
Well, you’re completely right there, James O’Neill who did the actual notation was notoriously bad at assigning the correct key signatures. Reading through it you instinctively correct these things, if you attempt to use the collection as a batch of Midi files to learn from, you end up learning a very different music. You can wonder about the wisdom of letting that part out on the net[in fairness the introduction on the site warns against the odd keys assigned]. In the same way I wonder if Out of Breath who is also putting up O’Neill’s stuff on his own site actually putting up the piano versions from Waifs and Strays, Selena O’Neill’s arrangements are notoriously at odds with the music.
I don’t think though you can fault Frances O Neill for not anticipating Tommy Potts’ version of Julia Delaney.
There are errors in the music, the tune names, the facts in the text of O’Neill’s. Miles Krassen ‘corrected’ and issued a new volume of O’Neill’s and that effort made many people unhappy.
Any transcription is subject to interpretation. Full, detailed, correct transcriptions are not the norm and just about unattainable. The transcription process involves a translation and compromise from the original. Better always to seek out the recordings, whenever possible; best to get it from one playing it.
I think Krassen did a pretty good job of ‘house cleaning’ a lot of the tunes, but even he, as a fiddler, left a lot of the tunes written differently than they were being played by the better fiddlers. A lot of the ornamentation he prescribed was nothing but his personal taste and interpretation, and actually quite overdone in places. He also seemed absent of the concern that should be paid to certain #s and naturals. He didn’t seem aware that some tunes were actually written and traditionally played as modal arrangements. I had a freind that use to hang out with the Miles gang and I heard he was…well, never mind.