Is this cool or what? I have for a long time been interested in the historic revival of bagpipe music, and when checking in to Julian Goodacre’s website about a month ago, I saw that one of his replica sets was available for immediate sale. Normally there’s a two years waiting period. Said and done, I announced my interest and a little while ago I made a trip to Scotland to check them out and maybe make a purchase. After playing a few hours and pondering a bit, I decided to buy. So, now I am a member of the elect club of heretics who tries to perform on an instrument which is not a set of modern great highland bagpipes.

It has been a good day! Not only did I get an answer to my gracenote spacing problem, I also got the beamlet gap separation issue resolved. This was important for piobaireachd cadences, and those now look great! Have a look in the Piobaireachd section of the site to see the excellent output.

Hallelujah! After several years of futile searching I have finally found the correct tweak to make gracenotes non-stretchable in Lilypond. Yesss!!

To celebrate this great discovery, I have regenerated all of the tunes in the Sheet music section of the site. Because of the new and improved spacing this gets me, I have also been able to reinsert a bunch of line breaks that were removed previously to make the layout suck less. Now it doesn’t suck at all!

There we go! Now I have most things configured the way I want it, and all old contents restored that I want to keep. I’m pretty happy with the way the site turned out, and Drupal 6 is nicer to work with than the old version 4 that the previous site was using.

It took a little while to port the Sheet music module to version 6, but nothing too bad. So there! Go enjoy the new and improved site!

I still have to code a new sheet music module for my bagpipe tunes. I’ll try to get around doing that this weekend. Shouldn’t be too hard.

Well, there is only one really, but I do go for that one for real.

Music

I love music, any and all music! (Except for most modern popular genres, which makes me dislike what most people like – bummer.) I usually have a strong opinion on if a piece is good or bad, but this is not connected to genres, it is strictly for individual pieces.