Category: Instruments

Ensembling: Dudys and Dudyettes MiniVersion

Hello again peeps and pipers!
As promised here is the next miniversion of instrument additions!

This time we did Bagpipes, including figuring out a huge duda mess!

MiniVersion Dudys and Dudyettes

¹ Additionally I while looking at the xeremies, I also did work on an ensemble cobla which involved getting sidetracked working on shawms, therein editing and also adding a few:

Additionally these were closed as unfit for now:

² Finally, and the reason for this Miniversion name,
while researching the dudy (and bock) I found out that there were Very Many Different things called variants of “duda”
These haven’t been made into tickets, but they are:

That’s it for now! Soon it’s my country’s National Holiday, and as summer is coming up I’ll be taking a little break, but watch the list of quick fixes for any low hanging tickets that’ll get fixed asap.
またあおうぜ!

Ensembling: Endelig Belg MiniVersion

Yes! It’s been quite some time since you last heard from me, hasn’t it! But despite the lack of blog posts, I haven’t been faffing around the *entire* corona time! Instead we have been updating quite a lot of instruments with IROM images and also doing a few tickets here and there, as well as updating A LOT of aliases.

But thankfully now we’ve stepped up a gear again and can release a proper (albeit small) release! I present to you Endelig Belg!

MiniVersion Endelig Belg!

Closed as not applicable / Reopen if more information can be discerned

Finally we also looked into some other instruments, including checking the aliases and disambiguations for harmonium/reed organ as well as adding and sorting out various other related instruments and their aliases and IROM images. These don’t all have tickets, but see the list of things that have been closed in the meantime for some of it.

Do not despair Fellow Instrument Afficionadoes! The broad strokes of another MiniVersion have already been done as well!

Watch this space!

Ensembling: Gamelan MiniVersion!

MiniVersion Gamelan

This was one of the initial Ensembling-version/family/ensemble instrument-type inspiring tickets.
Initially added on September 2017, it was delayed because it required all the sub-tickets for each instrument being created (and I’m lazy!).
Eventually GCI student mathure, with help from GCI finalist TheFaR8, researched and added a lot of the missing sub-ticket instruments. Many, many thanks to both of them!

There are still however many more gamelan instruments not yet added – if you want a particular one, please add a sub-ticket under INST-556!
Likewise there were a couple instruments that we couldn’t add, since they need to wait for MBS-9642 to be implemented and voice types becoming “instruments”, those being:

There’s also at least one more vocal “instrument” that has no ticket yet, but also can’t be added for the same reason: the kecak (a type of chanting). Additionally, alok and senggakan seem like they might also need adding, but I actually have no idea what these are since they only have Wikipedia page in Javanese ︎😅︎

⌛︎

Remember what I said previously about getting rid of metallophone? :​D
hahaha, what a difference in opinion research will bring… ♪;︎
Since the gamelan included so many percussion idiophones (especially metal/tuned ones) it became a natural continuation fix of our previous (clapper tree mini-version).
That meant that we could finally fix up the metallophone/xylophone/lithophone mess under percussion idiophone!
This also included merging tuned percussion into percussion idiophone (“tuned percussion” as an instrument terminology on Wikipedia was deprecated anyway) and sorting out chimes and other related suches.

Stay tuned for कुछ वीणा सम्बन्धित चीजें!

¹ suuper thanks to ’19 GCI student Antara for additional research on this ticket.

Ensembling: Clapper MiniVersion or idiophones!

The first sub-section of the gigantic “Ensemble this” version is already done:

This started out as a “create clapper-tree” ticket, created after dealing with the clapper ticket during from let’s get serious:

Ticket that inspired/started this

  • [INST-621] – Clapper (done in lets get serious)

Much of the initial part of this mini-version was done during let’s get serious. However, after coming back to it later, it became apparent that a more overarching edit and reorganization of idiophones was needed, so the second phase of this work involved linking existing and creating new idiophone instruments and organizing them.

Many of the tickets in this version were created or improved by students during GCI ’18. Many thanks to our students George Omnet and Jayant Dharwadkar, especially!

MiniVersion Clapper tree

  • [INST-630] – Rearrange idiophone tree (was: Create clapper tree)
    • [INST-751] – Boomwhacker
    • [INST-752] – Krap
    • [INST-608] – Add “shaken idiophone” and “scraped idiophone”
    • [INST-606] – Add concussion and percussion under “struck idiophone”
    • [INST-741] – Rearrange idiophone and percussion tree
    • [INST-732] – Research if shakers and rattles should be different
    • [INST-783] – clapstick
    • [INST-602] – Chinese paiban clapper and guban combo
    • [INST-566] – Arrabel

Thanks in great part to the new How to Add Instruments guide, we now had a framework to better objectively review inclusions of instruments. Following that, these instruments were found to be either not applicable (noisemakers not intended for music as such, rather than musical instruments) or to be too much of a novelty instrument:

Closed as not applicable / Reopen if/when musical use is demonstrated

The improvement of the idiophone section isn’t completely done however! Some more work is needed: moving and/or renaming the “tuned percussion” instrument (which is basically equivalent to the “percussion struck idiophones” in Hornbostel-Sachs already anyway) and (possibly) getting rid of “metallophone” (which is almost a duplicate of tuned percussion in function today, and that in meaning is basically just “idiophones made of metal”), which doesn’t seem necessary anymore.

Gamelan! (Photo by Bachtiar Djanan; used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)
Gamelan! (Photo by Bachtiar Djanan; used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)

Next, look forward to veena Gamelan!

Interlude: Ensembling!

Hi everyone! As you might remember, our last post was the end of a series of entries meant to summarize everything that had happened in instrument-land so far. So now that catching up is done, here’s what has happened lately!

This post is rather large, so if you only read one thing about instruments today, make it our new guide for requesting instruments! (More details about this in the last section below.)
Continue reading “Interlude: Ensembling!”

Instruments part five: Let’s get serious & GCI

At the end of the last version I was getting into the groove—and feeling determined.
I had managed to vittle down the instrument backlog to half! I though surely I could do even better! Let’s start digging into the meat of things and, get serious.

Now we were going to do things seriously, so therefore this was a pretty big version!
It’s called:

Let’s get serious!

I started by looking into a few issues during autumn:

However right in the middle of this version came GCI!
I was part of the contest as a mentor this year (for the first time) so naturally I had some instrument tasks ready for our participants. They were pretty popular, with a lot of tickets being added or improved by the participants. So, this is how serious we got for GCI:

After GCI we still had quite a bit of seriousness left:

The majority of these where done during autumn ’17 and the first half of ’18. The whole thing would have been finished in the summer, hadn’t May, June and July ’18 been the hottest summer ever! I just couldn’t think, so I took a break until August and then I finished dealing with the last few stragglers.

This version ended up including 58 tickets: the largest to date!
What happens now? Well, at the end of the “Let’s get serious” version I noticed some issues with families and the like, but that’s a topic for the next blog post!

It’d been almost 2 years since I started, and I’ve managed to get quite a lot done! Here is a graph that illustrates the progress (notice the the jump in added tickets during GCI period, when the participants actually added them faster than I could close them!):
progress graph

And with this we have finally caught up! So hopefully all future blogs from now on will be posted soon after the relevant versions are released.

Instruments, part four: After Summer Special and loose ends

After 2-ish months of summer vacation I decided to do an “After Summer Special” (name as a reference to After School Specials)

By the end of summer I had been working hard… on Debussy instead of instruments! Oops!

Once September arrived I realised that I needed to get things back in order, so I set about finishing this version:

Bug

  • [INST-545] – Reverse parentage of classical/acoustic guitars

New Feature

Improvement

  • [INST-430] – akete is missing proper description (along with some improvements)
  • [INST-477] – table steel guitar alias
  • [INST-501] – Please add a couple of Dutch aliases to bullroarer
  • [INST-518] – rebec relations
  • [INST-554] – Improvements to hardingfele aliases
  • [INST-583] – add aliases to handclaps

——–

I also decided to close the tambouras (strings) version, as after much delay there wasn’t really much progress on it. I had started work on these way back in January, adding the Tamburica instruments (see Instruments part two).
However, by the time ASP came to an end it had became clear to me that I had to move on from dwelling on this, to feel like there was progress and avoid burning out.

Now, after over half the INST tickets have been closed, I had a bit more experience and I could finally finish work on this + some random stragglers left over from the “next” version.

Anyway, after all that, I decided that the thing we needed to do, was to, Get Serious

Instruments part three: The “next” branch and Even Moar Taonga pūoro

It’s time for Instruments again!
Now that I was allowed to create fix versions I set about creating such fix versions! (And also, retroactively (re)creating previous batches where these seemed logical.) This also meant creating JIRA Tickets for instruments I had already added without tickets, like the Taonga pūoro instruments.

By now, I was also starting to see the limits of the relationships between instruments we already had, so I was already thinking about what relationships could be added to improve the way we link things. As such, I created a topic to discuss some ideas I had (Reader beware! This is an early and now outdated idea-thread! (More on this in a later post!))

However, reosarevok added two more helpful link types: Artist created and Label (company) invented instrument.

next: 2017 March to May

Bug

  • [INST-442] – Alias of three-hole pipe has erroneous end date
  • [INST-465] – Typos in names, descriptions and aliases of concertinas

New Feature

Task

  • [INST-451] – Confusion in n'goni/ngɔni instruments
    • [INST-452] – Fix ngɔni relationship to banjo and picture
    • [INST-409] – Doussn'Gouni
    • [INST-453] – Fix donso ngɔni description and its relationship to kamalen ngɔni (and add relationships as improvement)
    • [INST-133] – Kamale n'goni
    • [INST-454] – Fix kamalen ngɔni description, check invention relationship (and add relationships as improvement)
    • [INST-450] – jeli ngɔni
  • [INST-476] – Conclusion of the n'goni/ngɔni instruments

Improvement

  • [INST-125] – add alias to zither (was: Harpeleik)
  • [INST-379] – Add aliases to the Melodica instrument
  • [INST-398] – add aliases to three hole pipe (was Flauta de 3 agujeros)
  • [INST-438] – Missing search hint aliases for sax instruments
  • [INST-441] – Typos in descriptions of pipe and tabor
  • [INST-443] – Add aliases to three-hole pipe and tabor

Quite a lot of tickets!

Eventually I came to recreating the Taonga pūoro tickets (previously I just added the ones in the Wikipedia page). It became clear to me that this was huge task and deserved it’s own version:

Taonga puortwo: 2017 May 9th to 25th

Updates

After this I was a bit tired and summer was finally here, so I decided to Go On Summer Vacation… so hold on for the fourth part!

Instruments part two: tamburica, hybrids, community links, and growing pains!

Continuing our story from last time…

tamburica instrument family tree
tamburica instrument family tree
By now I was starting to get a bit more comfortable in my role as Instrument Inserter. I went about doing a bit more in-depth research, especially for the tamburica, and I made a post on the forum where I asked for input researching these instruments.
Eventually I mean to come back to this group of instruments (and in fact this is what I am doing currently), expanding the family tree I’ve been working on, which is why this “fix” version is still open.

Tamburica: 2017 January 6th to the 25th:

New Feature

    • [INST-64] – add the instruments of the Balkan tamburica orchestra; was: Contratambura
    • [INST-455] – (Indian) tanpura
    • [INST-529] – samica/dangubica/kutrevka
    • [INST-457] – clean out and clarify “tambura”   (still open)

Initially, what I found to be the hardest part of adding instruments was actually the addition of aliases. It was a cumbersome, time consuming and annoying part, and I often clamoured for someone to write some sort of Batch Alias script. Then, in March, loujine came in like a superhero with a batch alias script! Now thanks to this script I can add aliases en masse, which has helped me tremendously!

After reosarevok fixed INST-723, I could link hybrids with the instruments they were hybrids of, therefore a batch of “hybrid” instruments came next.

Hybrids: 2017 February to March:

New Feature

Task

  • [INST-461] – Add the Wikidata link for the mirliton
  • [INST-462] – Add ヴァイオリン alias to violin
  • [INST-463] – Add コントラバス alias to double bass

Improvement

  • [INST-458] – English Horn – Cor anglais
  • [INST-459] – Correct Wikidata link for the three-hole pipe

By this time a community discussion came out about the use of disambiguations and descriptions (instrument exclusive fields, which, unlike disambiguations, are translatable), with some users suggesting they were too long, some pointing out issues with translating and yet others suggesting the description field should be dropped altogether. While this discussion didn’t reach a clear resolution, it’s definitely something we should revisit later.

Stay tuned for part three!

What’s going on with instruments anyway? (part 1)

Hi everyone! I’m CatQuest, the Endeavouring MusicBrainz Instrument Inserter. I’ve been meaning to write a post or two about this for a while, but now finally everything is in order!

As some of you may know, I have “officially” taken over instrument additions from reosarevok. I suggested this way back in June 2016 because a) reo was already overworked enough between doing Style, handling support, dealing with social media, and other things, and b) as a consequence of this, the Instrument Requests queue had grown unmanageably large.

Initially I started without grouping, components, or “fix versions”, but later I’ve been allowed to organise everything to my liking and so, I’ve gone back and retroactively added tickets for initial batches, modelled on freso’s ORG tickets.

So without further ado: Here is a list of the instrument tickets I solved from my initiate appointment in July 2016 to roughly October:

Very first batch:

New Feature

It felt natural to separate this at Pipe and Tabor, so the next batch got a different “fix” version, from October to (taking a Christmas break) January 2017:

Second batch:

Bug

New Feature

Improvement

Stay tuned for part two!