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Mother of all tables

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Rivers:
I was thinking how cool it might be to have a big sortable table of songs that included bar form, and position|tuning. We could extract them from the forum topics currently running on same.

So you could get, for ex., a list of 8 bar blues (probably with a "sub-type" qualifier, since there are two (three?) main types of bar forms of the 8 bars, you'd have to come up with tight nomenclature to convey exactly what you were talking about). Furthermore you could then sort those by position.

So if you had a happenin' version of, say, Crow Jane, you could find a bunch of other tunes like it, say Dryland Blues, Becky Deam. Likewise the various ragtime forms, waltz time and 16 bar blues. If you got real inclusive and included 12 bars / modified 12 bars it would be a big list but more useful and complete.

Then there are the totally unclassifiable left-field things, Wilkins, Robert Pete, you could classify them as Unusual, and easily find all the weird stuff. What other forms are there?

I'm thinking we could build a mother of all tables that extends what we're already doing with the song tables on the wiki, consolidating them all into one comprehensive view.

Here are some of the topics, and we could link back to the particular post that ref'd a particular tune I guess:

16 bar
Waltzes, 3/4
8 bar
rag blues & circle of 5ths

Other columns could be:
Chord content: With minor chords, with diminished chords (we haven't done that one yet), 9th chords, 6th chords, etc
Feel, time: Swing, straight time
Vocal phrasing: Long, short, both, also in this topic

You could further classify by other distinct columns like:
Ensemble type: solo, duo, jug band, string band etc
Instrument columns: guitar 6 string, guitar 12 string, guitar reso, piano, mando, fiddle, harp, etc. Might be too cumbersome, but really useful nonetheless.
Slide: Yes|No
Picks, string gauges, capo: -- nah! Maybe in a 'playing setup' column
Content: Murder ballad, disaster ballad, railroad song, etc
Folk tale group: St James Infirmary, John Henry, Casey Jones, Stagolee, The Dozens, etc
Dates: First recording
State: MS, TX, LA, etc
Style: Delta blues, Piedmont Blues -- Total can of worms but 'Unclassifiable', 'Ambiguous' and 'N/A' are always options
Notes: Anything else not covered

Might be getting a bit ambitious here but talk is cheap. I think it's a logical progression that would reflect the way things have evolved on the forum. In other words distill that work and thought into a single sortable table. Since we're concerned with historic recordings, once the work is done, and it would take a while, it's done. So the workload is finite.

It would be nice to get it all into a database someday but we could probably do 90% of what would be needed in a simple flat master spreadsheet, from which we could export wiki marked-up tables.

Richard:
Can you get help for database addiction  :-X

Rivers:
Rich, it's what I do for a living. :)

Not only that, it's just plain logic. Why have it split all over the place when simple analysis tells you you can get the complete picture. A song is a song, all that additional information is related to that song. Logic rules, you don't have to be a database expert to figure that out.

Richard:
I did once back in the days of hard coding Paradox and later in Delphi, but I have to say I remember little about it now - a sign of olde age!

Slack:
Sounds pretty interesting Mark -- also sounds like a lot of work, but maybe not - as you point out, we have a lot of info already, some data entry is needed to tie it all together and maybe if the effort was organized efficiently, it wouldn't be too bad.

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