Re: How do you tell tempo for indications in English

[Ralph Palmer]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 11:05 PM, Patrick Horgan <address@hidden> wrote:

I'm setting some of O'Neill's Irish tunes, and the tempo indications are (a selection):

Animated, Boldly, Cheerful, Cheerfully, Gaily, Gracefully, Moderate,
Plaintive, Plaintively, Playful, Playfully, Rather slow, Slow,
Slow and distinctly, Slow and mournful, Slow and tenderly,
Slow and with feeling, Slow with _expression_, Slow and feeling,
Spirited, Tenderly, Very slow, With animation, With _expression_,
With feeling, With spirit

What do you do with that?  I can find tables of usual tempo ranges for italian tempo indications, but I have no idea what to do with these.  I'd like them to be authentic, in that the midi file would be about as fast as the tune would usually be played in an Irish pub.  Does anyone have any ideas?

Patrick

Greetings, Patrick -

The tempo indications are just what they say. There's a lot of variation in tempo for the same tune at various sessions.This may not be a lot of help, but I would suggest three possibilities: 1) play the midi at a default or provisional tempo, decide whether it sounds right to you, then modify the tempo accordingly; 2) get a metronome with a beat input button, play or hum the tune the way you think it should go, then tap the metronome button at that pace to find the tempo; or 3) find a recording or an Irish session musician who will play the tune for you, and determine that tempo. No hard and fast rules, I'm afraid. I'd like to see the results when you're done. Incidentally, if you didn't know, all the O'Neill's tunes have been transcribed using ABC format and are freely available. Some of them  may give tempos; I don't know. If you want to check them out, go to
http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/cgi/abc/tunefind
enter the tune name, and you can check out the ABC source file, a .jpg, a .png, and other formats. There will be *multiple* hits for each tune. If you want the O'Neill's, it will be identified by a number (I can't remember what the number is) all the way to the left of the entry.

Good luck,

Ralph

-- 
Ralph Palmer
Montague City, MA
USA
address@hidden