OVER 2 YOU, 057 (20/11/01)

LANDS END TO JOHN O’GROATS

I am planning a walk from Lands End to John O'Groats with as much as possible off road i.e. on footpaths or bridle ways. Is there a CD with printable maps or website with downloadable maps in order to avoid buying dozens of Ordnance Survey maps (excellent though they are) of which only a small part will ever be used? Roadmaps such as Routeplanner are not detailed enough. I am aware that there are guides for all of the long distance paths such as Pennine Way but this still leaves a lot of ground to be covered.

Frank Ellam, via email 

Your correspondent should go to www.multimap.com, which has lots of maps at various scales. On MultiMap you can zoom to any OS map at any published scale, anywhere in UK. It should be ideal for showing bridleways etc.  I use it all the time.  Foreign coverage is a bit patchy but still very good in parts.
Mike Postlethwaite, via email

John Hillaby's "Journey Through Britain" (my copy was published by Paladin in 1973) covers Land's End to John O' Groats with sketch maps all the way and lots of descriptions.

Gerald Seiflow,

SONG LYRICS

Does anyone know of a site where I can find lyrics of up to date songs with the accompanying guitar chords. My limited musical ability does not extend to working them out for myself, and I have had to resort to buying sheet music books for entire albums. Where they are available these are excellent, but contain much more detail than I need.

Mark Perkins, via email

The OLGA (OnLine Guitar Archive) has been around for ages, and is hosted by several sites around the world. Harmony Central offer a link to it at: http://www.harmonycentral.com/Guitar/tab.html), but it is not the most intuitive interface on the Internet. However, it gives you the opportunity to search by artist or song name, and you will be surprised just how many songs are available.
Charlie Stott,

I would recommend http://www.tabcrawler.com/, which describes itself as "Your Premier Guitar Tab, Drum Tab, Bass Tab, Lyrics & Lessons Resource".  If the songs Mark wants to learn are not available I suggest he may need to "get with it"!
Mark Elliott,

There are several sites, most of which I've found by accident, but the best is www.getinyourcrib.com. Otherwise many bands or artist sites have links.

Martin French,

I prefer the free website www.guitartabs.cc when looking for guitar tabs. Most of the songs have lyrics with them, but this varies according to the person who has typed them up. The site seems to have most tunes, but is American based. They have chords for both lead guitar and bass, it depends on the song really.

Hayley Constantine,

To keep it simple, for lyrics (and sometimes accompanying chords) go to www.poplyrics.net. Check out the "artists" tab for a concise A-Z. There are also useful links on this site on the task bar, left side.

When looking for a specific song title with accompanying guitar chords, if the above doesn't help its worthwhile searching the artist's or band's name for sites set up by doting fans who usually go to good lengths to provide chords and quite often tablature.

If you don't have your head around tabs go to www.guitarseek.com where a chord and tab search engine does a top job at providing chord shapes and an entry-level explanation of tablature.

Failing that, there's the old proven system of listening to a recording until the day that chord changes are imbedded in your head, and the needle of your gramophone is worn out....
Tommy Armstrong,

FOOTBALL FIXTURES

I know we are deep into the football season but is there a site I can use to download my teams football fixtures into my calendar in Outlook?
Manhar, via email

Infuzer is a simple service, which does just this. It requires a small download from www.infuzer.com and users can then put events into their calendar from a variety of websites, including sports sites such as sporting life at www.sportinglife.com (calendar section) but also from a whole host of other sites - see the links from the www.infuzer.com website. It couldn't be easier!

Chris Birkle,

SOLO WHIST

In my youth we passed many happy hours as a group of co-workers playing what we called Solo, a version of Whist for four where each player had 13 cards There were several archaic calls, including misere, abundance and others which I can't quite recall. Now that I have the time I would like to find a version of this game to download so that I can play in the wee small hours to help pass my insomniac time. Can anyone help?

Terry Grant, via email

The best web page for all card games (including some very obscure Chinese ones) is at: www.pagat.com/index.html.  Several versions of Solo Whist are there.
Robin Hendy, Canterbury, Kent.

WINDOWS BACKUP

I have some very important files backed up with what I believe was the Windows 3.1 version of Backup. The files on the floppies have names in the format Cc90217a.001 through to Cc90217a.010 and can no longer be recognised by the version of Backup now found on Windows 95 and 98. Does anyone know where I can get a copy of the 3.1 Backup or, failing that, how I can decompress these archived files?

Barry Riley, via email

Windows Backup is on MS-DOS6, not Windows 3.1. An old 386 running MS-Dos 6 with Windows 3.1 should be available for £10 from a second-user shop or via
newspaper adverts (e.g. Yeller, or a local free sheet). To restore from floppy to 386 hard disk, drag and drop on to a fresh floppy, and finally drag and drop on to the hard disk of the PC with Windows 95 or whatever.

Neil Breakwell, Batley, West Yorkshire

MUSIC TRANSPOSITION

I am an amateur singer, singing in local concerts and music festivals.  From time to time I find a piece of music which I would like to perform, but would prefer it in another key. Rather than having to go to an experienced musician and ask for it to be transposed up or down I would prefer to do this myself, but I do not have the knowledge to do this. Is there software available to enable me to produce instant key changes to any given piece, and hopefully a scale of keys from highest to lowest?                              

K.T Naughton, via email

I am not sure that an amateur singer would want to go to the expense of purchasing a major package such as Sibelius simply for transposing. I specialise in writing Music software, and would think that a simpler package would do the trick.

If the melody is already available in MIDI format, then there are programs that will transpose it, making a new MIDI file in the new key. If not, then one of the easiest ways to capture a melody is a format known as 'abc'. I have software (shareware/freeware) available at my web site www.greenhedges.comw, which will do both of these, and also transpose to any key.

My program HARMONY will attempt to add suitable chords to a melody, and then create a MIDI file of the result. Note that MIDI files can easily be played using the Windows Media player.

I have written a program (Hands-on MIDI chords), which will print out a list of chords from any MIDI file, a link to the distributor is on my site.

MIDI files of public domain music are available at many web sites (I tend to use www.melodylane.net) and lyrics can be obtained by searching www.lyriccrawler.com. It is possible to find files with both chords and lyrics, but these are less common. If you need music, which is still in copyright, MIDI backing tracks can be purchased quite cheaply from a number of
suppliers.
Neil Jennings,

CAN YOU HELP?

It's infuriating when you have a song going round in your head and you can't think of what it's called.  But many years ago (On Tomorrow's World, I think) a method was shown of writing down tunes, not with the normal musical notation but by identifying the relationship of a note in the tune with its previous note. A note is either Higher, Lower or the Same as the previous note, so almost any tune can be identified with a sequence of the letters H, L, or S.  Amazingly, this gives an almost unique signature of any tune after only a few notes.  The first few notes of the tune Pop Goes the Weasel can
now be expressed as HLHLHLLSHLHLL which can now be looked up in an index (if you knew the tune but couldn't remember it's title)

I even recall picking a book up that contained an index of tunes in this form and being able to look tunes up from the signatures.  Have I imagined all this?  Does anyone know of a web site with such an index available?
Dennis Ellis, via email

For many years I have been involved in studying and researching vernacular buildings, houses, farm buildings etc. When I had a BBC computer I wrote a program, which allowed me to draw a county map using move and draw and then plot points on it which showed the position of each known example of a particular feature (a type of window, for example) by entering the co ordinates as an ordnance survey grid reference. Modern technology has made this simple process impossible for me. Is there a program that will do what I want

Secondly, for presentation purposes, I would like to be able to illustrate a building in its landscape, is there a program that will allow me to plot contours from an ordnance survey map and convert this to a birds eye view, to see the hills and valleys as they are and the buildings and fields within this landscape?

Ron Gilson, via email

I am compiling a Family History and, with a selection of male photos at various ages back to 1830, want to experiment with the superimposition of these photos to see how characteristic the facial characteristics of the family may be. Can anyone suggest a commercial program, which allows scaling and superimposition to generate a combined general image?

A. R. Warren, via email

I regularly produce a newsletter, which is sent out to over 250 people.  Some of them have said that it would be helpful if it were e mailed to them. This newsletter is for eventual photocopying for wider circulation and this is most easily done as far as I am concerned using Microsoft Publisher. Is there some way that an attachment can be adapted so that those who do not have Publisher can open it, producing the same four-page layout (A4 folded) in their e mail?  They can then easily photocopy in the original layout?  Those who do not have Publisher (most people!) tell me that all they get is gobbledegook!
J. H. Brown, via email