Tune collections
Tunes by L E McCullough
Prize-winning performer, composer and producer L. E. McCullough made his traditional Irish music compositions available on his website http://www.LEMcCullough.com in PDF and MIDI formats in 2010. The LeSession website is now delighted to have been invited to host the abc format file of 161 tunes.
All tunes in this abc file have been © 2010, 2014 L.E. McCullough. Please read this page on his website for further details about the tunes and the restrictions on their use.
La Bourrée
108 dance and song tunes collected in J Canteloube's book of Massif Central music La Bourrée, from the 4th edition published in Paris in 1929, transcribed into abc. Scanned pages of the whole book with song words, photographs of musicians, introductory material, etc. can be found on Gary Chapin's Accordeonaire blog.
The woodenflute mailing list tune archive
641 tunes in abc format posted to the woodenflute mailing list between October 1998 and April 2003.
Tune file from Le Grand Session de Manchester
153 tunes in abc format, mainly dance music from Central France, last updated 12th March 2000. That's why my website is called LeSession by the way.
Tune file from Orchesography
All the sixteenth century dance tunes from the ' Treatise in the form of a dialogue, by which all may easily learn and practise the honourable exercise of dancing ' transcribed into abc.
86 British and French dance tunes
From the repertoire of English ceilidh band Shake The Dice, last updated 13th November 2001.
Session tunes
The Usenet newsgroup uk.music.folk suggested the following were tunes that might well act as a basic repertoire to get you started in a English and Irish music session. October 2006.
Posts
This file started out as being a collection of the tunes that I've posted to various newsgroups or mailing lists: some of them may well therefore be duplicates of tunes in other collections on this site. In time, however, the file seems to have turned into a more general home for good and/or interesting tunes.
And also ...
I'm pleased to be one of the many volunteers transcribing historical tune books and manuscripts into abc for the Village Music Project. The Village Music Project homepage is here, and details of published collections that have been transcribed into abc can also be found on the List of historical tunebooks Folkopedia page here.