Mystery Writers Forum
General Discussion and News => Chat => Topic started by: B L McAllister on May 03, 2010, 10:17:52 PM
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About a year ago, one of my brothers asked me if I knew the names of some tunes one of my uncles used to play on his harmonica. It seems he (uncle) taped the tunes, and his kids now have the tapes, but no information about what he was playing. I knew one of them ("Beautiful Ohio," though that only confirmed what they had already suspected) but I was stumped by the next, which sounded to me like some sort of yodeler's waltz. (Any others they must also have found by themselves.) Although by no means my full-time activity, I have, occasionally, tried to Google up a playable tune that might be it, and have failed so thoroughly that I think it's time I looked for a more knowledgeable person to offer a bit of free guidance. I did find a CD in the Netherlands that played a "Swiss Yodeler's Waltz," but that was not even close, so my token purchase price and less token shipping charge were wasted except that I now know one thing I'm not looking for. Other guesses would have involved purchasing CD after CD until one turned out to be "right." But there's no guarantee that I'd ever land on the right tune. I haven't figured out how to tell Google not to bother with any website that doesn't actually play the tune, and my guess that it's a yodeling waltz may be irrelevant to identifying it anyway, so I wish I knew of websites that play fairly old tunes (the uncle, now dead, must have learned it in the 1920s) and don't demand that you experiment by ordering a CD that may be useless. So, does anybody know a site that will play (perhaps much simplified) old tunes for nostalgia's sake or for any other reason?
Byron
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Can't help with the sites, but when you use Google, you can use the keyword filetype: (with the colon, then no space, then the 3-character filetype you want, like mp3, or wav. You can also go to the Advanced Search page (http://www.google.com/advanced_search?) and find different ways to limit your search.
Good luck.
You might try searching for "harmonica tabs" too; those sites might have links to recordings of the songs.
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Bob----Good suggestions, although they didn't work yet. However, pursuing the general ideas behind them, I did run across a set of websites others seeking tunes might want to know about. Here are a couple, and although they didn't yet find me my uncle's tune, they can (probably) be used to lead others who are looking for tunes to some ideas about them:
http://www.folktunefinder.com/
http://abcnotation.com/
Thanks, Byron