Following my initial attempt at trying to help Arthur Nichols with
converting tunes for a street organ, both Ingmar Krause and Harald
Mueller expressed their wish to have a go at 'impossible tunes', so
here is the one I have had particular problems with.  Just for fun
I wanted to convert the "Star Wars" theme for my Celestina.  I have
sent a copy of the MIDI file (which is of a simplified arrangement
for piano) to Robbie for addition to the MMD sounds site.

 [ The "Star Wars" song is protected by copyright and so it cannot
 [ be placed at the public MMD Sounds site, but I'm sure John will
 [ provide it privately upon personal request.  -- Robbie

The Celestina scale is as follows :-

A#3, D#4, F4, G#4, A#4, C5, D5, D#5, E5, F5, F#5, G5, G#5, A5, A#5,
C6, D6, D#6, F6, G6

The problem I have is simply getting the main melody out of these
notes.  If I try without any transposition, I can get all notes except
B5.  If I transpose the tune down 2 semitones, I'm missing C#6.  In
either case, the missing notes sound, to me, critical to the integrity
of the tune.  (Because of this I didn't get as far as attempting to
deal with accompaniment).  So, Ingmar and Harald, can you prove me
wrong?  :-)

Of course, you may deem this challenge "unfair" in that I am trying to
fit a modern tune onto a machine designed for "old" tunes?  However, my
thought behind this was that younger generations might find our weird
contraptions more appealing if they heard tunes they knew, with the
possibility of attracting some additional young blood to the cause of
antique mechanical music.

Does anyone think this is sacrilege?  I'm going to try some Beatles and
Shadows music next, being a child of the sixties.

Picking up on Harald's comment on arranging not being a mechanical
process, I agree entirely.  This same subject was mentioned at a recent
meeting of the Musical Box Society of Great Britain where the speaker
demonstrated "good" and "bad" arrangements on Musical boxes from the
19th Century, so it's not a new issue.

However, it is clear that not everyone who is interested in mechanical
music necessarily has the "ear" or knowledge to create proper
arrangements, but that shouldn't stop them making music for their own
entertainment, and they might even discover they have a skill they
didn't know about!  So I think it is OK to start with the 'mechanical'
approach, and then refine it with musical knowledge and 'ear' if you
have them.

Finally, since I have approached the exercise from the musical end, and
have not yet got to the point of making any rolls, I had missed the
fact that the roll view in Cakewalk will be very useful in fine tuning
the gaps between notes as mention by several people; it is quite
obvious now that I am enlightened.  It also seems there are different
Cakewalk programs: mine is Cakewalk Music Creator 2002, which probably
has less functionality than Cakewalk Pro.

P.S. If you want to learn more about organettes like the Celestina,
their tuning scales, roll types, etc., the Organette Book, by Kevin
McElhone, is _the_ definitive work.

Have fun,
John Farmer
Worcestershire, UK