Musicians from Scotland and Ireland have a long and glorious musical tradition of community music. The Scottish Ceilidh (kay -lee) , or Irish Ceili and the picking session in the USA are all formed from the same family tree of musical interaction.
The word ceili comes from the Gaelic word 'ce/ile' (pronounced something like 'KAY l(y)uh', with the y softly pronounced) which translates to 'companion'. It is this companionship of musicians that transcends the raw creation of music and instills a spirit of vibrancy to this kindred clan. Music ranging from the ethereal to the audacious is the end result. The passion developed by the skill and intensity of the musicians is added to the joyful enthusiasm of their audience and this forms an aggregate of vital participants in the historic, traditional expression of joy and love found within this music.
Dancing is the anchor to these tunes. To create the music that someone dances to requires as solid a sense of Melody, rhythm and timing as one can muster. Different dances require different styles of music and regional variations are part of the glory of this heritage. There are Irish dances, Scottish Highland and lowland dances and there are dances that have persisted true to historical form in remote colonies such as the Cape Breton step dancing in the Canadian Maritimes and Clogging in the USA. The strength within the symbiosis of dancers and musicians is like the harmony of the water in a brook and the path the water follows, for you can not have one without the other.
It's my hope that this web page will resemble the mile markers of old where a traveler can oft find the path that not only leads to home but to places they never heard of before. I hope you find these music links as useful and fulfilling as I have and I do hope you will return.
ONLINE MUSIC PAGE Free real time music theory instruction!
DAT (Digital Audio Tape) recording of acoustic music I have gone kicking and screaming into the world of DAT recording. Like the luthier who refuses to use electric tools in the creation of their instruments, I refused to use DAT technology to record, staying with analog (cassette) tape. I have seen the stodgy error of my ways and now use DAT exclusively for recording. Beware! This is an illness, if you listen to DAT, your listening pleasure will be altered forever for there is absolutely no going back to audio tape.
MUSIC SOFTWARE IN THE ABC FORMAT ON THE INTERNET
TUNES in the ABC format . The vast majority of these have come from the internet. Many different people have transcribed these tunes to ABC format and these have been retrieved from the internet. My thanks to all of them for their efforts so that we all may enjoy and learn this wonderful music.
PC-DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) Edit music in your PC! Given the option, I'd rather edit my own music for I know the sounds I'm trying to create. Using PC DAW is absolutely amazing for you have all the features of a professional recording studio right in your PC. It takes a fast pentium processor and a fair amount of free disk space. The pleasure of editing out the snaps, pops & hiss from my old records is a joy. Adding reverb to a tune of my own composition played on the guitar and varying the pitch without changing the tempo is pretty amazing. How about overdubbing 70 tracks of music with zero tape hiss... All that just barely scratches the surface of what PC DAW allows you to do.
ABORIGINAL ORGANIZATIONS. This page from Chris Corrigan speaks to some of the concerns of the original colonizers of North and South America.
AMATEUR RADIO PAGE My Extra Class Ham call has been KA1J since 1980 and my father has been a Ham radio operator for over 60 years. The ability to talk with others around the globe as is done on the internet is truly old stuff to us hams, we've been doing it since Tesla & Marconi. The Licenses are free, you just have to earn them. This is a Great National and International resource.
My favorite Outer Space Scifi TV flick.( {skif-e} to those who think they're
in the "in crowd")
FRANK ZAPPA HOME PAGE. Truly an oxymoron in the musical realm. Zappa was the consummate P.T. Barnum of rock and savant of music, felled by Prostate cancer at an early age. This interesting anecdote of a meeting by Zappa and Nicholas Slonimsky, the Famous russian Pianist and composer is in Slonimsky's Biography and is really worth reading.
GARDENBURGERS. Veggie burgers are a whole lot more delicious than you might think. Me; I'm a confirmed omnivore & I will pretty much eat whatever doesn't get me first. These folks however, believe that being a vegetarian is the only way to go and possibly for this reason have made their foods really a gustatory treat. Check em' out.
The Greenpeace Home Page
We're holding this world of ours in trust for our progeny. If we leave
them a cesspool to live in, what does that say about how much we love our
children and ourselves?
The Internal Revenue Service 
Official Home Page.
JOKES ABOUT MUSICIANS AND THEIR INSTRUMENTS. (Not for the humor impaired.)
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE. An oxymoron. Kinda like the military "Meals Ready To Eat" called MRE's (Which is an example of two lies in one breath.)
SETI - Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence & the seti@home Project. The search for other intelligent life outside our universe is on in a BIG way. Data gathered from the worlds largest Radio Telescope is being processed by millions of computers around the globe. Using software by the program known as seti@home, volunteers are actively participating in this project by donating their computers idle time so it may be spent processing tiny packets of this data. You could be helping to participate in this incredible search. While you're using your computer, seti@home stays out of the way. For example: While you're reading this message your computer is idle. seti@home would be processing in the background while your computer is waiting for the next command from you. It's my guess that this scientific experiment may well be the largest in terms of the number of participants with a single goal on a global scale. Check out this page and you will be surprised at what is going on.
UPS RATES for those wishing to ship anything by these people. You need your ZIP, the receiver's Zip & the size/wt of the package. Kind of cool for you can plan for the cost of sending your nephew's erector set (or today's equivalent) for their Birthday.
My favorite Terrestrial Scifi TV flick.( {skif-e} to those who think they're
in the "in crowd")
ZIP codes (Zone Improvement Program) for the USA & it's territories. If you know the address, this will give you the ZIP +4. I detest looking this info up in those tattered books at the P.O. so here's the solution... We deliver for you.
Gary Smith
ka1j@NO-SPAMarrl.net
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