Dots

"Dots" is musician slang for written music — you knew that, right? Here are a bunch of tunes, mostly ones I've taught at festival workshops or the like, organised in collections by where and when I taught them.

The tunes are stored in ABC format — learn more about ABC format — which is then converted on-the-fly into PNG images or PDF documents, as you demand them. This means the images can be a bit slow to load sometimes, but it helps me keep costs down and reduces my workload. Hooray! I notated these tunes over many years and in lots of different contexts so don't expect them to be consistent. Some are really simple, some are a bit more complicated, but they are all pretty simple compared to anything a person might actually play in real life. Do not take these as any more than mnemonics.

With regard to the MIDI playback — I provide this functionality with misgivings. If musical notation itself is a bad friend in folk music, MIDI is something like a mortal enemy. It's been very useful to me in editing my ABC code, but it is objectively terrible: there's no swing, grace notes and trills aren't always rendered according to my intentions, polskas are just awful... none of which is exactly a bug or an error, they're just in the nature of the way MIDI and ABC interact. I hope it will prove useful for people whose sight-reading isn't that great, but please please please remember — the tunes do not sound like this!