I’d play you a tune if I could,
But the fingering’s insane
And the reeds are a pain -
It’s an ill wind that no one blows good.
That was an advert for my CD. Please buy it, now.
I play clarinet. The band I play with these days is called Moorgate. It's a ceilidh band, and it's jolly good. There could be photos and recordings and stuff here, but they're on the band website, so have a look at them there.
Trio RAT never really got many bookings, and is now fairly defunct; but the recordings still exist. Clarinet, mandolin/octave mandolin and guitar, playing anything that took our fancy.
the TuneBook
In the course of going about playing traditional tunes with people, I've learnt a lot of them, more than I can remember at one time. This led me to get interested in feeding them into computers, the idea being that it would make it easier to find the one I was thinking of than forever wading around in huge piles of paper. The time I've spent doing it, I think staying with the paper would have been quicker ...
One outcome of this is, a website full of tunes. It used to be hosted at Leeds University under the name of "Richard Robinson's TuneBook", but then they dropped it, I never heard why. It first went up in the summer of '94 when the web was young, and finally disappeared in the spring of 2009, just a few months short of its 15th year. Kind of a shame it couldn't have reached the anniversary ...
But not to worry, I was replacing it anyway. See "Tunebook Live!" for the new, all-singing-and-dancing version. Web 2 ? Well, Web 1.783beta, at least.
Incidentally, in the course of setting this up, I have registered the domain tunebook.org.uk. This, obviously, covers a much wider range than just my stuff. If you have something that would benefit from a name in this domain, get in touch. (I'm not offering hosting, but I can point the names at wherever your stuff is).
the Curious Potato FAQ
The original purpose of this page was to answer a frequently-asked question. I use a signature on my emails and usenet posts, which reads :-
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem