Episode: 4392
Title: HPR4392: The Water is Wide, and the sheet music should be too
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4392/hpr4392.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:07:17

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4392.
For Tuesday, the 3rd of June 2025, today's show is entitled The Water is Wide.
And the sheet music should be 2.
It is hosted by Jezera and is about 10 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is some ramblings about using open source for printing sheet music and helping
with my timing.
Hello HPR listeners, my name is Jezera and today's episode is called The Water is Wide
and the sheet music should be 2.
A few years ago, at the turn of the century, also known as the turn of the millennium or
the early odds, I'll just call it 2003-ish.
I was reading an article that explained how playing a musical instrument was very beneficial
for the human brain.
At that point, I decided to get serious about playing a musical instrument.
As a child, I had dabbled a bit with playing musical instruments, but they were all really
just right-handed garbage.
The violin, the trumpet, guitar, yes, I know a guitar can be strong, left-handed and played
by a left-hander, just as Jimmy Hendrix or Paul McCartney.
However, when I picked up a guitar to take guitar lessons, I was yelled at by the instructor
who said I was holding it wrong.
I was 5 years old.
You never say that to a 5-year-old, that is terrible.
So when I decided to seriously play an instrument, I wanted to find an instrument that I, a left-hander,
could easily play left-handed.
And what I ended up with is the Great Highland Bagpipe, because the Great Highland Bagpipe
melody is played on the chanter, that's the place where the pipe outputs their fingers
and plays the melody of a tune.
And that can be played either left-handed or right-handed, and a full set of bagpipes
can be set up for either left-handed or right-handed play.
Perfect, it's only 9 notes how difficult could it be I'm going to jump right in.
Or so I thought.
After purchasing a practice chanter and an instruction manual, I started teaching myself how to play
the bagpipe.
And what I failed to do a good job of was keeping time.
Time has always been the failure point for me when it comes to playing music, keeping
time, tapping my foot in time, making sure that I have good timing and good rhythm.
That just never happened for me.
But I still had fun and I still enjoyed what I was doing and I'm still doing it today.
Most sheet music for bagpipe tunes comes in BWW format.
And BWW format is only read by an application that is available for Windows.
As a Linux user, I have no access to that.
However, in the early odds, again, I started dabbling in Python and I soon wrote a transcriber
that would take BWW bagpipe notation and convert it to the Lillipond format and Lillipond
is music notation software that is open source and available for Linux, which is perfect
for my needs.
A Lillipond file is converted by Lillipond software into a PDF of sheet music that one can
then print.
The process went something like this.
There would be a tune I wanted to learn.
I would go online and try and find that tune in BWW format.
I would download the BWW file, trans-mogify it into a Lillipond file, and then process
the Lillipond file to have a PDF that I can either look at on my computer screen or I can print
out and have as sheet music to carry around.
A few years ago, I started getting interested in stringed instruments, again, I suppose,
and wanted to find an instrument that would work for me and play the tunes that I wanted
to play, which basically means I needed to find an instrument that would play the bagpipe
tunes that I have a large collection of.
Through trial and error, what I ended up with is a left-handed, dombra-tuned diatonic instrument,
and diatonic means that it plays Doremi Faso Latido, and that's about it.
There are no sharps, there are no flats.
When I say dombra, I am very specifically referring to the Asian instrument, the dombra, or
the dombra, depending upon how one might pronounce it, which is a two-stringed instrument made
popular by Freestyle Lo.
If you remember that from the early days of YouTube, I suppose it was, anyway, that isn't
really important right now.
What is important is that now I have a strumming instrument that I can use to play these bagpipe
tunes.
But before I could do that, it was necessary to create yet another Python script to convert
a lily pond bagpipe tune notation into a file that will also show the tabs for the instrument
that I have created.
What I soon discovered is that strumming up, down, up, down, up makes it very easy for
me to play the notes that take place halfway between beats, so 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
Any notes on the end would be played while strumming up, and that was helping me with
my timing.
It's brought everything full circle for me, going right back to when I started playing
bagpipes, and I decided that I needed to improve my timing, and I'm going to use this
stringed instrument and all this printed sheet music to do that.
The first tune to have this treatment is a tune called the water is wide.
I went online, started looking for the water is wide, and beat up up for a mat.
When I found 3 versions, 1 in 2, 4 time, 4, 4 time, and 6, 4 time.
The version in 6, 4 time had every note either on the beat or on the half beat, and that
was exactly what I was looking for.
So I downloaded the 6, 4 time BdubDub file, transformed it to a lily pond file, then processed
that lily pond file with another script to make it a lily pond file for bagpipe and
dombra, and then I had this wonderful PDF file that I could print out.
My eyes are not as good as they used to be, and printing out sheet music on 8 and a half
by 11 paper in portrait mode is not as desirable as printing it out in landscape mode, and
no matter how hard I tried, I could not get sheet music to print out in landscape mode.
The solution to this conundrum is as followed.
I would open the PDF on my desktop computer, zoom in until it would take up as much of
the screen as possible and take a screenshot.
From there, I opened up Inkscape, imported that screenshot, rotated it 90 degrees, adjusted
my Inkscape settings so that a default paper size is 8 and a half by 11, adjusted the
size of the imported screenshot until it took up the entire page in Inkscape, saved the
file, and then printed it, and that is how I managed to get the water is wide in landscape
mode on 8 and a half by 11 inch sheet of paper.
And this is what it sounds like on my most recent created dombra that I am calling a
drumbra because it has a body like a drum, kind of similar to a banjo.
And there you have it.
That is my experience trying to get the water is wide, sheet music, printed, and played.
And I think I did a fairly good job of it.
Thanks for listening and have a wonderful day.
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