Editorial

Editorial
January 2009

New Volume 10 Magazine CD-ROM now available

Only a day late - due to 'flu - the CD-ROM containing the entire output of the magazine, from the articles in its first paper publications in 1983 right up to the 31st December 2008 for the Internet version, is now available - priced, as usual, just Ł10.

And as you will see from the accompanying cover shot, this is Volume 10 ... and things have grown a little in those 10 years: MT now contains 218 Articles; 841 Reviews; 62 Enthusiasms; 23 pages of Letters; 42 pages of News; 2,857 graphics images; 1,400 sound files; plus loads of other things like Links; Obituaries; Mondegreens; Sessions; Picture pages, Discographies ... the list goes on and on.

For anyone who's not tried it before, the CD-ROM is a really good way of having all the 514Mb of the magazine instantly to hand, with no ISP charges and no waiting for downloads - a very pleasant user experience. Everything is presented as Web pages, exactly the same as on the Net - so you already have all the software required, and you know how to navigate to what you want.

Just pop a tenner in the post to me, or go to the MT Records website if you want to use a Credit/Debit Card, and yours will be on its way to you the same day. You know it makes sense!

Rod Stradling - 2.1.09

Season's Greetings and Review of 2008

Well, as I wrote twelve months ago 'this has been a dramatically different year from last'. In 2007 we produced nine CDs - this year, apart from the Magazine CD-ROM, there have been none at all! Actually, two doubles and a single have been awaiting release for some time but, while I have all the sound files ready to make the CDs, none of the associated booklets have more than a couple of pages of content. All three of the booklet authors have come up against problems in acquiring information - and there's nothing I can do about it but wait. As usual, I'm not prepared to release CDs without the best booklet we can produce.

Nor have we done all that well on the magazine front. 2008 has seen the publication of only 7 new Articles, although one of these was the PDF facsimile republication of a complete book - Reg Hall's wonderful account of the life of Scan Tester, I Never Played to Many Posh Dances. In addition, there have been 2 new Enthusiasms, a large new page of Letters, 2 pages of News and a couple of dozen new Reviews. Not a great deal for a whole year's work, it would seem - but I can only publish what people send me!

All in all, I suppose this has been rather disappointing for Musical Traditions Quarter Centennial year, but it's pleasing to note that our efforts are still reaching quite a number of people - the website had almost 1.3 million visitors in 2008. And I did get to set up a far better site search facility than had been available previously. Onwards!

Once again, I'll remind you that Musical Traditions Internet Magazine exists to share our love of traditional music and musicians; if you have something to say about any traditional activity with a musical content, from anywhere in the world, please send it to me - the contact information is at the foot of the page.

So - in hopes of a far more active 2009, in spite of the credit crunch - may I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year.

22.12.08

NEW new site search

Further to my message, below, about a new search engine for the website, I'm pleased to tell you that I now have the Search Engine Studio solution fully programmed, installed and ready to use ... no more unwanted adverts! This is what you will now find:

At the top-right of the Home page is a link labelled 'Search the entire Magazine'; click on this and a new page will appear containing four search boxes - Magazine, Reviews, Articles and Discographies. This serves both to make your searches quicker and more accurate, and reduces the size of the database to be searched. Each search box allows you to search for a word or words, or an exact phrase - equating with AND, OR, or PHRASE logic. The results page displays all the files in each section containing the search term(s). Files containing no useful information, like the various Index pages and framed headers or navigation bars, have not been indexed - neither have the Links and Sessions pages, as they already contain their own alphabetical search facilities.

Since the Articles and Reviews do not always retain the date of original publication, I have arranged for this to be displayed in the results for an Articles or Reviews search. There is no point in doing this for the Magazine or Discography pages, since these are constantly being updated.

I should point out that the MT Search feature (like Google, or any other search engine) only returns the page containing the information you want - not the point in the file where it resides. You still need to read the page to find it, or - in the case of the huge Discography pages, or indeed any large page - to use your browser's 'Find on this page' facility.

The MT Records website is not included in the Search feature; it already has fairly comprehensive search features anyway, and to include it would break the terms of the Search Engine Studio 'non-profit discount' I have been allowed.

I hope this feature makes your use of the magazine easier and more fruitful ... please let me know of any problems. The search databases will be updated when there is any significant addition of material, probably monthly - you should still look at the What's New page to see what's been updated recently.

23.9.08

New site search

Readers may remember that I added a site search facility to MT back at the start of 2003. It was the cheapest and best I could find at the time, and does a reasonable job. What I didn't really understand at the time was the immense amount of work that would be needed to keep it updated - essentially, going through the index files at each update and removing all the unnecessary words by hand to keep the files as small as possible and thus provide a reasonably short response time. I did this for a couple of years, but I'm ashamed to admit that I have been rather lax of late. A search function that doesn't include everything on the website is a bit of a waste of space - and it has become something of an embarrassment to me now.

Accordingly, I've been looking around for a replacement for the past month, and have found two possibilities - FreeFind and Search Engine Studio. The former does the job, and is free - but includes advertising, and will also only index the entire site, rather than giving separate searches for the Articles, Reviews, Discographies and Magazine ... which I feel is far more useful. Search Engine Studio will give me far more control over both the indexing and the output, and its 'non-profit discount' makes it affordable for MT.

So you will now find a new Search box at the head of the Home Page - for the present, this is the FreeFind one, but it will be replaced by the better system as soon as I get it set up to my satisfaction. I hope you will put up with the (very few) adverts for a short while.

9.9.08

Fred McCormick

I was sorry, though not entirely surprised, to receive a message from Fred a few days ago, saying that he wished to bow out of his co-editorship of MT. I guess that we will all have noticed that his regular contribution of articles and reviews has become more sporadic as the years have passed, and that recently they have almost dried-up all together. I know most of the reasons for this, but many of you will not - so I asked Fred to clarify his decision for you.

MT punters may have noticed that contributions from myself have been pretty well non-existent of late. This is due, I'm afraid, to other commitments. These include my Worlds of Trad Internet Radio Station www.live365.com/stations/oneworldmusic which, infinitely rewarding though it has turned out to be, soaks up far more of my time than I could have imagined. On top of that there is the work I've saddled myself with, in cataloguing, digitising and systematising the enormous record collection which nowadays permeates every corner of the McCormick household - see Enthusiasm 47 - the final two paragraphs are most relevent. Also, I'm increasingly fielding requests for advice, assistance and information with various projects, all of which are extremely gratifying and I'm only too happy to help. But there are only twenty four hours in one day, and before the house falls down altogether, I'd like to devote some time to patching it up, taming the garden and doing all the jobs which other retired folk usually end up bored silly with.
Therefore, rather than remain a co-editor on paper (or perhaps that should be cyberspace), I have reluctantly decided to formally withdraw from Musical Traditions. That does not mean that contributions from me will cease altogether, and readers may have noticed that I've managed to squeeze at least one review in of late.
It only remains for me to thank Rod for all his patience and co-operation over the years, and to thank the readers of Musical Traditions for putting up with my copy; over-scholastic and long winded though it may sometimes have seemed.
All the best,
Fred McCormick - 18.7.08

We should all be grateful, I think, to Fred for the many wonderful pieces of his writing you can find dotted around these pages, and for his onging work of cataloguing and digitising the 7,000 or so items in the McCormick/Summers Collections. Further, we should all be thankful for the splendid Worlds of Trad Internet Radio Station he produces single-handedly. Most of all, we should thank him for his enthusiasm and hard work - and wish him all the very best for the future.

18.7.08

Baldwin clarification

As I indicated at the end of the Baldwin confusion piece, below, I rather suspected that Peter Kennedy had tampered with the speed and keys of the recordings he made of Stephen Baldwin, and published on Folktrax CD 115. A message from Greg Stephens (of The Boat Band) seemed to confirm this:

I haven't got your new CD, but I have an old tape of Baldwin recordings (labelled Upton Bishop 1952), and they are one tune once through, generally, but are also on a down-tuned fiddle, and the G (normal key) tunes come out in F. So, what have I got? Kennedy's original recordings, before he speeded them up?

Greg's tape was a compilation of recordings of English fiddlers, passed on to him by Dave Lyth (Lancaster fiddler) 20-odd years ago. It was a copy of a tape he had been given by Keith Chandler. Keith now confirms that, on his old Folktrax cassette, Stephen Baldwin does indeed play one tone lower - just as he did on the Russell Wortley recordings - making it obvious that Peter Kennedy had speeded up the recordings when transferring them to CD format.

I would imagine that it was done to enable players to learn the tunes without having to re-tune their fiddles. I would have no problem with this, provided that CD 115's insert notes made clear what had been done to the recording and why. What seems to me to be extremely dubious is to 'doctor' what purchasers would expect to be an accurate field recording of a traditional player.

This being the case, I have now slowed down the Kennedy recordings by one tone, so they now play in F rather than G, and are at the tempo at which Stephen Baldwin would have originally played them. All new versions of the Musical Traditions CDs will be supplied with these corrected recordings, and I am willing to supply new CDs, gratis, to any customers of mine who bought the Musical Traditions Stephen Baldwin CD.

9.3.08

Correspondence:

Rod Stradling, 1 Castle Street, Stroud, Glos GL5 2HP, UK
E-mail: rod@mustrad.org.uk
- or, if you don't mind the fact that he's getting a bit deaf ...
Phone: 01453 758519

Top Home Page MT Records Articles Reviews News Map

Site designed and maintained by Musical Traditions Web Services Updated: 2.1.09