Musical Links

Main Music Sources

Sources of on-line Fiddle/Traditional sheet music, in either .ABC, .ly, .midi or graphical format (such as .gif, .png or .pdf);

The Session Tunes - my usual starting point.
The Fiddler's Companion ("A Descriptive Index of North American and British Isles Music for the Folk Violin and Other Instruments.") - also a good place to start; HOWEVER... see the Traditional Tune Archive for new material..

"Since 1996 the Fiddler's Companion has been a popular internet resource for those interested in the body of traditional music usually associated with the violin, generically called 'fiddle tunes'. Primarily dance music, the genre also encompasses listening music and music written for specific occasions. The Fiddler's Companion is used by musicians, investigators and writers as a research aide, a source for information and lore, for general interest and just for the fun of browsing."

"Indexing began in 1987 and continues through the present, and is the sole work of the editor and identified contributors and sources."

The Traditional Tune Archive - As of 2012, Andrew has been busy converting the old Fiddler's Companion into something even more useful, the TTA

"The Traditional Tune Archive is a World Wide Web information storing and retrieval tool dedicated to instrumental music of the past 300 years traditionally used for dancing in Ireland, Great Britain, and North America. It is a curate [sic] semantic index in which the meanings (semantics) of information are organized in a way that makes it possible for the web to "understand" and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the content. Thus, the aim is to allow the semantics of traditional music pieces-their properties, historical information and musicological traits, commentaries, etc.-to be employed in an improved data structure that allows for myriad research possibilities."

"It is my good fortune to be collaborating at this time with Valerio Pelliccioni, who presented the solution to a number of the organizational problems I had encountered with the Fiddler's Companion. His knowledge of, and expertise with, semantically based web tools holds the promise of allowing an explosion of varied and unique relational juxtapositions that is truly remarkable. In addition, the format we have decided upon allows opening the index not only for casual searches for general information and specific relational searches of any number of combinations, but to contributions from the traditional music "community" to exponentially grow the database for even more useful research combinations."

Alan Snyder's "Cape Breton Fiddle Recording Index" (One of the several references provided by the Fiddler's Companion.)
Alan Ng's "irishtune.info Irish Traditional Music Tune Index" (Another reference provided by the Fiddler's Companion.) -
"This non-profit site aims to be especially useful for both experienced and novice players of traditional Irish music as well as for musicologists. It appears to be unique in the world for its coverage of recorded sources of Irish traditional music."
The "Digital Tradition" is a feature of the Mudcat Cafe - it is an online searchable database of Lyrics and "Knowledge" of Folksongs, also available as a downloadable executable and database. I mention it here because the "knowledge" part of the equation is quite extensive, and the website includes a set of Forums for discussion which are quite busy. Of special interest is the "Songs you thought were trad" forum, where I found out, for instance, that Redwing is not "trad", and that the "Happy Birthday" song is still in copyright (until about 2030...). Also note that because the database is transportable, it is available as mirrors, including the Yet Another Digital Tradition Page, which also includes ABC files (at least for some songs). (Note: no response at the website on 10 March 2006 - is it down, or down for the count?)
The Max Hunter Collection is an archive of almost 1600 Ozark Mountain folk songs, recorded between 1956 and 1976.
JC's ABC Tune Match [tunefind] on trillian.mit.edu - This is one of the most useful sources of abc files on the web! It is amazing how much material JC (John Chambers, apparently an Anthropologist at MIT) has gathered together in one searchable index, and how useful the output of such searches is. (Automagic conversion to png, svg and pdf!).
JC's Online Music Books - Also under the banner of JC's is his extensive collection of tunebooks - in abc format, natch!
Ceolas - claims that it "houses the largest online collection of information on celtic music, and has links to hundreds of related sites"
Greg Dahms http://www.gregdahms.ca/index.html (a local "archetier" or bow (as in fiddle bow) maker) has a website with Music Resources, including a variety of tunes in ABC format.
The Virtual Session hosted by BBC radio. Not really a source of sheet music in ABC or other transcribable format, but you can print the sheet music used therein...
Sheet Music from Canada's Past - by our very own Library and Archives Canada.
Pete Braccio's Place For... - among ohter things, this particualr link brings us to Pete's list of links to Session Tunebooks, along with his notes about each. Another interesting find here is that he has the sound recordings that originally came on the floppy record (yes, record!) that came inside of Jack Tottle's legendary book, Bluegrass Mandolin (with Jack's blessings!).