O'Neill's Collection update transcription notes
"The Music of Ireland"
"The Dance Music of Ireland"
"Waifs and Strats of Gaelic Melody"

In the summer of 2020, I was contacted by several people organizing online Irish music classes. They wanted to use the O'Neill's "Music of Ireland" colleection (aka "Oneill's 1850") as their main source, and found the transcriptions from back in the late 1990s a bit difficult to use.

So I set up my own "O'Neill's Update" project to convert my copy of the collection into a form that's more usable. The emphasis is on the various portable gadgets that people are using today in many of the teaching "sessions". I've been involved in some of these myself, especially with the Boston area's Scottish music crowd, which has for some time had a Slow Scottish Session that has converted entirely to electronic gdgets, mostly the various tablets and "phones" that have become so common.

A basic problem was that the tunes were organized mostly by number, with no titles in the file names. This made it difficult to even find a tune. My "ABC Tune Finder" didn't help much. The O'Neill's tunes were mostly buried in a pile of transcriptions of the tunes (or other tunes with similar titles) from other sources, transcribed by various people, with no easy and consistent way to select just the O'Neill's version. My first step was to write a small script that duplicated my copy of O'Neill's 1850, using the tunes' titles as the file names. There are a few cases of different tunes with the same title, and the files' numbers have been appended to the title to make the file names different. With time, I've found that including a tune's number and a few other fields can be a generally useful idea for organizing the collection.

The main concern is the small screens, with a lot of variety in the shapes. I've saved a number of phone models, all with android, but with different height-to-width ratios, and from several manufacturers. I also have a couple of models of iPads. which have their own variety of shapes and capabilities. There is a lot of software-based variety in how they display things, too. One approach I've found useful is to have my copies of the music all in ABC form, which can be easily formatted on-the-fly to a variety of images in different formats, with different staff widths and note sizes. I also have several computers available with different-sized displays, and their windows can be rapidly changed to different heights and widths for testing.

One basic approach I've started with for most tunes is to use file names of the form Tune_Title_info-K-B-s.abc, where the fields are:

Tune_Title	the tune's title, with '_' for spaces, other punctuation deleted, and initial articles dropped.
info	used to distinguish tunes with the same title.
K	the tune's key. In a few cases, tunes have been transposed to be more friendly to key-limited instruments like pennywhistles and bagpipes (and novice fiddlers).
B	the bar count for once through the tune.
s	the staff count.

A few other fields have been added to the file names as I ran into cases where this would help distinguish the different tunes or arrangements of a set with the same or similar names. The main things that has helped is to add the tune numbers right after the title. (So far I haven't found tunes with the same titles and numbers.)

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The main thing done differently here from the original project is hinted at in the above addition of the staff-count to the file names. The O'Neill books use a rather small scale, to fit the large number of tunes into a minimal number of pages (which still gave rather large books). Most of the tunes are on 2 staffs, occasionally 3 for especially notey tunes. The transcription project's leaders suggested that we write the ABC versions with 4 bars per line, which gives about twice as many staffs. Most of the tunes have 2- and 4-bar phrases, with the "parts" usually 8 bars, so this works well. This makes it easy for musicians to display or print them at a larger scale, making the music readable by people farther away from the printed page or display winndow. It also helps people with visual problems.

Anyway, what I've done is presented most of the tunes in both formats. You'll see the typical tunes with file names that end in -2.abc and -4.abc, which are the typical 2-part tunes arranged in 2- and 4-staff forms. You'll also see a good number of -3.abc and -6.abc file names, for the 3-part tunes, and so on for tunes with even more parts.

The O'Neills used the "fermata" sign in both its original Italian meaning (stop, halt, end, closed) to mark the place that a tune should end, and also its modern meaning of holding a note longer than the written length. One problem that shows up in a lot of ABC formatting softwaye is that the symbol is often partly "off screen" and partly invisible because the computer doesn't display things positioned to the right of a window or screen's right edge. This has been partly fixed by adding a "y", which produces a small space at that point. It may also be positioned at the last note, which the O'Neills used sometimes. Sometimes, especially in condensed versions of tunes, the Italian word "fine" (finish, end) is used instead, This is done mostly when the last phrase of the tune is identical to the "A" phrase, and the latter is replaced by "d.C." ("da Capo" = "from the head/Start/beginning"). This makes it stand out as something added by the transcriber or editor, since the O'Neills didn't use it.