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Thread: Help ID fiddle tune?

  1. #1

    Question Help ID fiddle tune?

    Does anyone know the name of this tune? Heard in '70s/80s at a fiddle festival concert. I *think* it was either the Cape Breton set or New England set, they played it as a 3-part fiddle tune and it seems like there was a piano involved. I had a homemade recording of that concert for eons but that's gone so here's me playing the tune as I remember it, I'm just guessing at the backing-app chords:


    (or direct link)

    It's a really fun tune to play, I'd like to know what its proper name is.

    Thanks in advance!

  2. #2

    Default Re: Help ID fiddle tune?

    That is part of a French/Canadian tune that I know as La Cardeuse. I think Kevin Burke also recorded it with Patrick Street, perhaps?

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  4. #3

    Smile Re: Help ID fiddle tune?

    Quote Originally Posted by David Surette View Post
    That is part of a French/Canadian tune that I know as La Cardeuse. I think Kevin Burke also recorded it with Patrick Street, perhaps?
    Thank you!!

    Armed with that new info, I went to Google and found it listed at TheSession. Seems that "La Cardeuse" or "La Cardeuse Et Le Grand Triomphe" is two tunes combined together to make one tune, the 2nd half evidently being "Le Grand Triomphe".

    The Kevin Burke recording you mentioned, yup sure enough there's that tune just like you said, and darned nice too, the relevant parts are from 1:24-1:58 and 2:16-2:48 :


    (or direct link)

    There is also a Lisa Ornstein version, a long medley of "La Pecheuse / La Contredanse / Le Set / La Cardeuse". One thing I notice different about her version, is that she doesn't intertwine the parts the way that Burke does, once she begins playing the 2nd half of "La Cardeuse", she just keeps on playing that part and doesn't go back to the first half of "La Cardeuse" (unlike Burke). Fast-forward to 6:04:


    (or direct link)

    (There's a possibility that it might have been Lisa Ornstein I heard all those years ago at that fiddle festival, that name rings a bell & I vaguelly recall that her name was on the roster a time or two when I attended there. But they also had other musicians from all over, different each year, including various parts of Canada, so it might have been some other fiddlers I heard.)

    Another Google tidbit I found today (now that I know what to search for), a 1977 recording of Louis Boudreault playing just the "Le Grand Triomphe" part of the tune, it sounds somewhat different (maybe more ornamentation and alternate notes?) but I still recognize the tune: audio page that has mp3 . They also have a recording of him talking about the tune's history, he's talking mostly in French but the interviewer translates. Louis Boudreault was born in 1905 and learned to play early on (according to a page at Voyager Records), so one might expect some variations in how the tune is played. In any case, wonderful music!

    Many thanks again, David, for solving this mystery!
    Last edited by Jess L.; Mar-08-2017 at 2:08am. Reason: Added link.

  5. #4
    Registered User Bad Monkey's Avatar
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    Default Re: Help ID fiddle tune?

    There's an app for that. For real. Tunepal. just play about ten seconds into your phone and it'll pull up the tune. Even gives you sheet music. I think it's a couple bucks but totally worth it.

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  7. #5

    Default Re: Help ID fiddle tune?

    Quote Originally Posted by Bad Monkey View Post
    There's an app for that. For real. Tunepal. just play about ten seconds into your phone and it'll pull up the tune. Even gives you sheet music. I think it's a couple bucks but totally worth it.
    Ah, a new tech toy to play with! Lemme try it... oh... darn...

    Unfortunately, TunePal didn't help with this tune, even though I fed TunePal the audio from a nice perfectly-clean unadorned midi file (from notation that I'd written) to analyze. It gave me a list of unrelated tunes.

    I tried 3 different ways, switching the order of the tune's parts, in case TunePal was confused about part order. No difference.

    Maybe that tune is just too uncommon to be in the TunePal database, or something.

    However, while hitting Google to look up TunePal, I found a different tune-search option (free, online) that I had marginally better luck with:

    http://abctunesearch.com/
    The drawback is that it seems to function *only* with copy/paste *text-only* abc, no abc file upload ability, and no recording. I'd never worked with abc before, so I had some learning to do. Fast forward past my technical foibles...

    So I finally got the abc (from my exact same notation as used with the TunePal test) and pasted that into abctunesearch:

    Hmm, over 210 possible matches. I scrolled through its long list of tunes to see if it showed "La Cardeuse" in there anywhere. Yup, it's there, listed as a possible match, although quite a ways down the list. But at least it shows up in the list, no wild goose chases checking a bunch of tunes for nothing. At least in this one instance. I haven't done any additional testing on abctunesearch but I plan to, it looks like it could be useful.

    Arguably, even in my case with an apparently-uncommon tune, searching through the couple hundred possible matches at abctunesearch would still be faster than spending a lifetime (what's left of it) looking through the entire world's fiddle tunes repertoire.

    So, I can see some practical application for these types of search tools.

    An aside, I read somewhere that people are using TunePal in place of manually writing music or instead of scouring the web for new sheet music for tunes.

    For instance, supposedly, if they're at a jam or something, they get TunePal to notate the tunes that are being played, and then they add that notation to their tune collections. Huh. Who'd have thunk it.

    Personally I have no interest in using an app to *collect* new tunes for me, that takes all the fun out of it (besides, that's what tape recorders at half-speed playback are for and I prefer to jot down my own written notation), but it's still an interesting use of technology. And yeah, tape recorders were once 'new' and controversial too, historically speaking.

    Anyway, thanks for the tip about the tune look-up app, I didn't even know there were such things until you mentioned it.

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