Mar 09 2010
First steps to phone insanity: Irish Flute Ringtones
Recently, Jessica and I took the plunge into Cell Phone land. After years of working without them, it was becoming evident that my business work was suffering a bit. Also, since we don’t have long distance on our house phone, Jessica wasn’t talking with her family as much as she wanted. So, after a grudging decision, we jumped in.
Jess didn’t want a smart phone. Just a regular phone without a bunch of bells and whistles. Me? Because I’m such a geek, I jumped straight into the Android Open Source operating system world with a Motorola Cliq.
Mostly, it’s because I do a lot of things that warrant a certain amount of information accessibility. But it’s also because I just like to play with computers, and the smart phones of today are more powerful computers than I was programming on 15 years ago. Amazing.
Still, the most fun I’ve had with it so far is not really techy at all. It’s something that phones have had for a long time: Custom ringtones.
Irish Music Immersion
Because I tend to talk about it all the time,1 everyone who knows me is aware that I’m studying the Irish Flute.2 Because traditional Celtic music is not something that I have in the “intuitive, gut-part” of my musical soul the way I do things like Blues and Jazz, I’m generally listening to as much Celtic music as I can. Music is like a language, you won’t learn it by removing yourself from it– the best way is to immerse.
So, as a way to keep swimming in Celtic music, I though I’d look at making some Irish Flute music ringtones. Quickly whipping out a CD of arguably one of the greatest Irish Flute players who’s ever lived (Conal Ó Gráda. Jesus, what that man can do with a holey tube of wood!) and dumping some tunes into Audacity, I came up with a few tests.
The nice thing about Traditional Irish tunes is that they often have a relatively short A part which is played twice, followed by a relatively short B part played twice. Thus, it makes a surprisingly nice ringtone to cut the first repetition out of the A part into a ring, because it’ll be repeated when the phone rings again. Since you’ll likely answer before a third or forth time, you end up with the beginning of a tune!
A few Irish polka ringtones
This first suite of ringtones I’ve done is from Conal’s 2008 album Cnoc Bui. I chose three polkas because they are a relatively simple form that I’m currently working on (not that I’ll ever play this well, especially on my $100 PVC flute, but it’s something to aspire to).
The Tunes:3
- The Church Street Polka: Track 1
- Maurice O’Keeffe’s: Track 6
- Mickey Duggan’s: Track 10
I’m not sure if anyone else is interested in these, but I thought I’d post them. In the future, I may create some more from B parts of songs (which are often more upbeat and/or complex) and maybe grab some samples from Michael McGoldrick, Matt Molloy and Liam Kelly (who’s the flute player for my absolutely favorite Irish band, the Sligo-based Dervish).
Someday, of course, I hope to post my own flute playing, but I fear that’s a ways off, yet.
- one time, at band camp…! [↩]
- For those who don’t know, it’s not your boring, metal classical flute. Like most things Irish, it’s an upbeat folk instrument that you can actually drink and dance to! [↩]
- For some reason, these cut off short for some people when clicking, but if you download them, they are complete [↩]
