Over the past year, since my kids have begun to learn music, I’ve been very involved in encouraging and supporting them. I’m re-learning some long-neglected skills and having a lot of fun.
Part of the fun is in discovering how technology has developed to support musicians, especially when it comes to writing music. For example, the old ABC notation I learned for traditional music has evolved into a machine readable format which can be easily converted to staff notation or even a midi file.
Sites like TheSession.org, use this technology along with modern crowdsourcing to create an extraordinary repository of folk music. Folk and traditional music has always been about sharing. By definition, the material is in the public domain. It’s the perfect activity for creative collaboration.
So in the spirit of collaboration I offer a (very simple) piano arrangement of Mo Ghile Mear. Accomplished musicians will find it rather too simple, but it’s just right for me, and more importantly, for my six-year-old daughter who is learning to accompany her fiddle-playing brothers. It’s done using Noteflight which is an online music notation service with some cool social features I’m looking forward to exploring.
Do you know of online music resources you’d recommend? Let me know. Thanks!