Category Archives: Music

My google-fu is still strong (and Tunepal ramblings)

Google-Fu : (informal) Skill in using search engines (especially Google) to quickly find useful information on the Internet.

I was thinking of a famous piece of music, but what was it?

Whistling it, while using Shazam or Tunepal, didn’t work.

So I googled “well known classical part repeats sped up and transposes”

The second link was a Reddit link named : “Need help finding a song that starts very slow and builds to be frantic!”

First YT link in there: In the Hall of the Mountain King (Peer Gynt) by Edvard Grieg

Epic tune!

“In the Hall of the Mountain King” is a piece of orchestral music composed by Edvard Grieg in 1875 as incidental music for the sixth scene of act 2 in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt. It was originally part of Opus 23 but was later extracted as the final piece of Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1, Op. 46.

I’ve used Tunepal many times, it’s great for folkies!

Sometimes it works also on classical pieces, because they were arranged into folk music.

https://tunepal.org/

I bought the Android app, because I liked it so much.

Tunepal is a search-by-playing search engine for traditional Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Breton, American marching band and Canadian tunes.
By playing a 12-second extract from a traditional tune on an instrument such as the flute or fiddle, you can:

  • Retrieve score matches from a database of over 24,000 music scores
  • View and playback, share and download the score
  • Find and play other recordings of the tune from a collection of over 30 million recordings

Tunepal is a search-by-playing search engine for traditional Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Breton, American marching band and Canadian tunes.

On the Record page, click the Tunepal logo or tap the screen if your computer has a touch screen. Start playing straight away. Don’t wait for the countdown to complete. Tunepal works best if there is no silence at the start of the recording.

Tunepal works best with “legato” style instruments such as the tin-whistle, flute, concertina, accordion, pipes and fiddle. It doesn’t work very well with “plucked string” instruments such as the banjo and harp.

To find a tune using Tunepal, first make sure you have a PC microphone connected to your computer or use the phone app

If your instrument uses a different “fundamental note” to the usual D (for example you are playing a C flute) or you are playing a tune in an unusual key, then you can adjust the transcription algorithm by choosing a different “fundamental” from the settings page.

You can filter the search results from the settings page to limit searches to certain tunebooks or time signatures.

Three channel mixer for ay-3-8910 is almost done.

At the back the 8 pin single channel lm368 amplifier.
At the front the 3 channel setup.
I still have to tweak the resistors, and potmeters.
Then I can make a permanent PCB, and figure out the connections to the 6502.

At the moment, the Arduino Nano is playing some real sound samples by using the registers of the sound chip.
The music is being played by sending the register dumps directly to the chip.

Much like i’ve been using SID register dumps to play songs in another project.

This is version 0.1 .. do not use.
If its wrong, or can do better please mail me.
Oh it needs a 1k resistor from the 20K’s to ground I think.

Music top .. dunno

Warning .. nerd stuff ahead, many many more.
These are the ones I currently can think off.

Sid music (commodore C64)

  • Rob Hubbard – Monty on the run
  • Chris Huelsbeck – R-type
  • Chris Heulsbeck – Great Giana Sisters
  • Jeroen Tel – Cybernoid 2

Northumbrian pipes

Concertina

Banjo

Irish Bouzouki

Mandoline

  • Tim Connell Jack Dwyer – The Rakish Paddy
  • Luke Plumb (Plays with Shooglenifty) – Drunken Landlady

Borderpipes

  • Ali Hutton
    Terrortime
  • Ross Ainsley
    (Partner’s in Crime CD)

Great Highland Bagpipe (TO many)

  • Fred Morrison
    Frances Morton’s

Irish Flute / Whistle

  • Michael McGoldrick – Angel Meadow
  • Fraser Shaw – Air Chall

Uilleann Pipes

Other pipes

Callum Armstrong (with Branschke)
https://www.youtube.com/@CallumArmstrongPiping
Angie’s Jig on double chanter, I love that tune
He even has a tripple chanter
https://youtu.be/bGIhFBwItHA

Other instruments

Balalaika – Aleksei Arkhipovsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JqeSU7lSLE

Throat singing:

Folk instruments (other)

I know/play and like Irish/Scottish/Celtic music.

Whenever I come across a musical instrument I want to try it.

But here are some others I like

Guzheng (Instrument)

Altai – Bai Terek (Band) – Throatsinging and Tovshuur instrument

Other throatsinging bands: Altai, Hanggai, Huun huur tu

Alexei Arkhipovskiy – Balalaika

Ney Flute (Egyptian)

Kyiv Ethno Trio – Overtone Flute (no fingerholes)

Largest flute (at the end)

Also cool (Flute with “drone”)

Didgeridoo

Jaw Harp (I’ve got one, but i’m not good at it)
also known as : Jew’s harp, mouth harp, Ozark harp, juice harp, murchunga, guimbarde, mungiga, vargan, trompe

Not an ancient instrument, but cool nevertheless.
I play Misirlou on BorderPipes using accidentals, I’ll upload this soon.

Found a crappy recording of Misirlou on my Borderpipes.
C-sharp, B-flat, F-Natural and G-sharp as accidentals.
Hard to play on Great Highland Bagpipe without using a lot of tape. 🙂

Something I want to make myself : A talharpa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talharpa

A sausage fagott 🙂
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wurstfagott

Busy weekend .. didn´t have time to post

I’ve got my SDK-85 cassette interface PCB’s in, If you want to have the Kicad files. Message me.

My 3D printer has a worn out hot-end .. so a new one to install.

BBQ time! .. That’s from 1-januari till 31-december .. rain, snow storm whatever.
I’ve made a lot of Rubs/Sauces and marinades.
But a new book i always welcome ..

Also new recipes and tips. Let me know.

Sunday a day of music with our folkband.
Played some old and new tunes.

Did some Vulkan / OpenGL benchmark testing.

Cleaned and fixed our wine cellar.

And tomorrow i’m starting new work.

Flute note detection with leds

Yesterday I got my MAX9814 in, last night I got it working.
Used the leds from a lightpainter project to test controlling the leds.

Why is it, that it doesn’t matter how much components and ledstrips you buy, you alway need more.

First parts of the Scale, then a part of Farewell to Uist

Arduino Nano, using FastLeds library and FFT.
Ledstrip is WS2812, and the MAX8914 microphone

Busy day: PHP, Python, RP2040 and Frequency detection.

While watching a online python course, I was writing the code for a music guessing game (Highland Bagpipe Tunes)
The core is working, now it’s a matter of filling this “pruts” with tunes.

Switching between python, php, bash and C is a nightmare 🙂

A screenshot of work in progress

Then the postman came .. with goodies.
I needed the MAX9814 analog microphone with amplifier, all of my other sensors were not up to the task.

So I switched to this WIP with the MAX9814.
I want to make a little gadget using an Arduino and 9 leds, which uses FFT to blink which note I am playing on my Highland Pipes.

So detecting is working, now I have to attach a bunch of leds.

First test using Arduino Cloud (I still prefer PlatformIO) But this is better than the old IDE. (Note, you have to install an agent to connect your browser to a board)

Next thing I did today:
Getting my waveshare RP-2040 Zero working with micropython.

Great the little NeoPixel Led on the board.

Steps to get this working:

  • Install Thonny
  • Connect the rp2040 via USB with the boot button pressed
  • place RPI_pico.xxxx.uf2 on the mounted usb disk, it will reboot
  • Run Thonny connect and run a test program

Want to run program @boot ?
save -> to device, and call main.py

Music players

Note: I love everything streamable from my own servers.
So if its music or movies i tried the lot.
(Another post about movie streaming using Jellyfin,Phpmytube and more)

I’ve got music in mp3, flac and ogg and I have been using below players for a long time

If you have any other suggestion mentioned below, let me know!

MPD – A linux terminal mp3 player (using ncmpc)
XMMS/XMMS2 – Linux gui music player ( The winamp for linux)

Then i moved to

VLC – Sporadic music file playing
Clementine – Linux gui player

For a while Audacious, Rhythmbox and Amarok

And later spotify (Btw you CAN use spotify with local files)

Clementine was not updated very much, so I went with Strawberry Music Player (which is a maintained clone of Clementine)

Tagging mp3s I did using Kid3, Picard and Mp3tag (with wine)
Now with Strawberry

Strawberry in which i play and edit tags.

Strawberry

Webplayers

For a while I used some webbased mp3 players.
I like it when I can stream my music from another location.
But none were to my liking.
It really has to have a Android client, and a secure connection.

  • Ampache
  • Funkwhale
  • Emby
  • Subsonic ( android client is $$ and broken)
  • Volumio
  • Koel
  • Jellyfin

In the old days i used even a simple php streamers

  • Turnstyle andromeda
  • A own written mp3 streamer
  • kplaylist