I now have an experimental new version of all this at Tunebook Live!.

Richard Robinson's Tunebook

Last updated Wed Apr 25 22:50:50 BST 2007

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What is this ?

This is a collection of traditional tunes, and new tunes in traditional styles - Scots tunes, Irish tunes, Scandinavian, English, French, Balkan and more. They are available in two forms - as small black-and-white images of the written music, intended to be convenient for on-screen viewing, and as ABC notation. There are no sound recordings.

Index

• The important bit - the tunes
• Some General Stuff
  • Introduction
  • Some comments on the music and transcriptions
  • Some statistics - Frequently Asked-for Tunes
  • Do you have some tunes you'd like to contribute to this ?
  • The copyright notice
  • Bookmarking things within this site.
  • A note on the helpfulness of copying these tunes onto other websites
  • How to contact me
  • The credits
• Some Techy Stuff
  • ABC -- what it is, and why you might want to know what it is
  • Some notes on my abc usage
  • Accessing the material via scripts
• If you want to know more about a tune
  • If I have any comments or information on a tune, they will be included in the ABC, so it's worth having a look at that even if you don't think you want to know about ABC.
  • Try looking it up in the Fiddler's Companion, whose alphabetically-organised indexes of tune-names contains information on a vast number of tunes.

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How to get at the tunes on this site

There are 3 ways to get at these tunes :-

• If you want to browse around, go to the Tune Lists. These, between them, show all the tunes that are available. It's organised as a list of collections of tunes, from various sources, and gives the best overview of the stuff that's here.
• If you have something particular in mind to look for, try the search form.
• If you prefer to deal with tunes as ABC files, allabcs.tgz is a single "archive" file containing all the ABC files from this site, which between them contain all the tunes here. If you like your tunes that way, you could just grab this file and not bother with the rest of the site.
• Alternatively, if you're looking for a tune you can't find here, you might still be able to find it elsewhere.

Bookmarking

Each tune on this site is assigned a unique "ID", which this site refers to it by. This is the bundle of numbers and letters that you'll see in the URL for the page relating to each single tune. As well as clogging up the ABC for each tune, and making it possible to do some wild scripting things if you're that way inclined, this means that it's safe to bookmark each and any of the individual tunes, include links to them in your own web-pages, and so on - the URLs for each individual tune will not change, however much I may fiddle with re-editing the tunes themselves or reorganising the site in other ways. Unfortunately, I do reorganise things from time to time, so other aspects of the site are not so fixed - the names and composition of the sub-collections are subject to ocasional revision, every now and then I change some of the texty bits around, and so on. So none of the other links here are guaranteed to be permanent, apart from the Richard Robinson's Tunebook front page. In fact they mostly do stay the same for years on end, so you'll probably get away with it for a while, but I'm not promising.

In the summer of '06, for example, I changed some of the internal links within the listings page, since when I've been getting the occasional email reporting that they're broken. I think this comes about because people are using an old copy of this file, containing the old (non-existent) links. If you're having this trouble, try refreshing the page, make sure you're using an uptodate version. If that doesn't fix it, please complain.

Copying

A number of people have thought it helpful to put copies of tunes from this collection (indeed sometimes the whole lot) on their own web pages. This is, in some ways, a good idea, with respect to redundancy and whatnot in case Leeds suddenly disappears off the face of the Internet, but the problem with it is that such copies don't get updated when I update this. I first started this collection in 1994, and I've been discovering horrendous typos in the tunes ever since then. The ones that I've found are now fixed, of course, but if anybody copied those tunes onto their site before I fixed them, they'll still be wrong there. And likewise, they won't have any new tunes I might have added since. For these reasons, the more I become aware of old copies of this stuff lying around on the web, the more I think that their persistence causes confusion and is not really such a good idea. I don't actually forbid it, but if anybody wants to do something along these lines I'd urge them to think about finding a way of dealing with this problem. The simplest possibility would be to check periodically with a file here called last.updated, which contains, what a suprise! the date I last updated one or more of the tunes here (this is the same date that appears just below the title at the top of the page). So if the date there is more recent than when you copied the stuff, you'll know you need to do it again. If you feel more ambitious, look at the section on scripts for ways you could build a dynamic interface to the material here. But at the very least, please do check periodically.

Contributions

If you have some tunes that you'd like to make available on the 'web - put them on your own webspace if you have access to any, the more collections the merrier. If you don't have access to any webspace, send them to me and I'll be glad to give them a home. Please note, I can only take tunes in ABC format, and you must, really must, be sure that there are no copyright problems with them. I can't take a tune that's in copyright unless the copyright-holder has explicitly given their permission. I'm not being picky here - legal problems of this sort can take entire sites down. This is a good place to put in a plug for my copyright notice. Having said which, don't let me put you off - I am happy for contributions, I like the way this site is becoming more than just what I have to offer.

Contacting me

If you're interested in any of these tunes, or other tunes, or the software behind this effort, or that sort of thing, email me. I've received a lot of email about this site over the years, and most of it has been nice to get; people tell me interesting things about tunes (which I can then include in the abc for everybody else to know, so this is Good), sometimes people offer transcriptions, sometimes it's just nice to be reassured that people are finding it useful and hear what they're doing with it, sometimes people have good interesting questions and we've had some nice discussions on things I wouldn't have thought of without their help ... but I do occasionally get something that seems like an obvious waste of the writer's time. So, in hopes of avoiding mutual annoyance, it might help if I spell a few things out :-

• If you were thinking of asking me for a transcription of something that you'd like to have, please stop to consider that if I had such a thing, this is where I would have put it. So if you can't find it here, that's probably because I don't have it. I expect you'd be better off looking for it via John Chambers' Tune Finder - if an ABC transcription exists on the net, that'll find it. Anybody who sends me a midi file with the demand that I transcribe it for them need not expect a polite answer.
• These are tunes. They exist as a single melodic line. There may be a few rare cases with a second voice, in which case this will be included in the existing notation. They are not orchestral, or other, arrangements; no, I can't send you the tuba part, there isn't one.
• If you would like a tune transposed, or provided in some format I don't supply, see here.
• If you were thinking of asking me a question about a song ... I don't know, I'm not a singer. I suggest that you consult the Digital Tradition
• Please don't ask me for Gaelic translations, sources for Celtic artwork, and other such extraneous stuff; this site is limited to The Tunes. The fact that there are some Scots tunes here does not indicate that I can tell you how to sew a kilt, or even where you could find out. Nor does the presence of tunes named after a person mean that I can put you in touch with your long-lost relatives who happen to bear the same surname.
• My point is, I'm only one individual, I do this on my own, using my private resources, in my spare time, because I like the tunes, that's all. I try to be helpful, where a question concerns the music, but please be sensible with what you ask of me (I made up the bit about the tuba. All the rest are real examples).
• Junkmail, advertising, spam. I don't care how special yours is, I don't want it. It's because people persistently fail to respect this that I've been driven to make my address more awkward to get at. My apologies to everybody else for the decrease in convenience.
• Since I do receive a lot of junk mail, it's helpful if you can put something nice and recognisable into the Subject: line to reassure me that it isn't one. Also, please, send in plain-text if you can, rather than html, because I easily mistake that for junk, and I have an itchy delete-finger.
• ... If I haven't put you off by now, here's how to contact me

Thanks. The tearful gratitude "have I forgotten anybody ?" speech

• To Peter Nix for the original suggestion, and for encouragement, discussion and support along the way
• Musical :- This all arises out of my enjoyment of the tunes, and playing them with people. So, it wouldn't be here as it is without all the people I've played with, learnt tunes from, all the people who've given me transcriptions, the people who made the tunes in the first place, all the people who pass them on ... lists are hopeless. If we've ever had a tune together, thank you (and, see how many familiar tunes you can spot in here ?)
• To those people (lots, by now) who have looked at this and sent helpful suggestions, corrections, encouragement, or just found good tunes in among this lot and used them. Especially, some people have thought to send me copies of their recordings of tunes they've found here, which is nice of them, and I appreciate it. Recordings that I know of are :-
  • Maartin Allcock OX15
  • WAZ ! Fully Chromatic (there used to be a web-page for this, but it's disappeared).
  • the Geckoes the Red Horse
• To Leeds University Music Department for giving it a home on their server
• To the people who made the software that made it possible. To Chris Walshaw for ABC itself, plus Michael Methfessel, Jean-François Moine, James Allwright, John Chambers and the rest of the ABC developers and users; and, finally, to the worldwide Linux community, the XFree86 project, GNU, and many others vastly too numerous to mention. My work on this project could not have been done without their work on the software I've used.