hello ye stringfreaks, would you know where I can find bluegrass tunes in standard music notation (not tablature)?
Hi! What instrument are you playing? A great deal of BG music is written in tab for different instruments, but they can be translated with several good software packages. We need more info to guide you.
My (future) string instrument of choice is the mandolin.
But these tablature files take so much space. I would really like to have a list of good tunes, and then find them in standard notation only. Does that exist somewhere?
If I had just a list of tune names, maybe I could find the abc with JC’s ABC tune match.
Did you look at Mandolin Cafe. http://www.mandolincafe.com/tabarc.html All the music there is tablature but you could look at the tune lists. I looked at the Bluegrass list and found that I didn’t recognize many of the tunes but I don’t keep up with bluegrass. From my limited experience I can suggest some tunes that are standard parking lot picking tunes.
St. Anne’s Reel
Blackberry Blossom
Whiskey Before Breakfast
Red Haired Boy
Fisher’s Hornpipe
Gold Rush
My son plays bluegrass mandolin and when he’s around here we always play those tunes and several more which I can’t seem to think of now. Also look at the old time tunes as there are many shared tunes.
Here’s another list swiped from a description of a book/CD set by Steve Kaufman http://www.homespuntapes.com/prodpg/prodpg.asp?prodID=1419&prodType=
Alabama Jubilee, Black Mountain Rag, Blackberry Rag, Cherokee Shuffle, Cricket on the Hearth, Dixie Hoedown, Down Yonder, Eighth of January, John Hardy, June Apple, Katie Hill, Liberty, Mississippi Sawyer, Peacock Rag, Redwing, Stony Creek, Temperance Reel, Texas Gales, Wheel Hoss, Wildwood Flower
Also check out another Steve Kaufman item.
http://www.homespuntapes.com/prodpg/prodpg.asp?prodID=374&prodType=
Good luck finding them in standard notation. JC’s tunefinder probably won’t have that many.
PS There’s a message board at Mandolin Cafe. That might be a good place to ask.
although the following are Old Time, many of these are also played in blue grass circles:
http://hetzler.homestead.com/music_2.html
These are midis, but with conversion software you can import them to a SN file. There used to be some of these offered in SM, but I haven’t looked at the site in a while and you may have to join to access those files.
Be aware these are fiddle arrangements, so they may have more notes than you want to attempt on the mando - but you’ll get a good feeling for what the song sounds like.
Another item to note - depending on what part of the country your are in, songs change. Especially in whether they are A,B or AA,BB, etc. Throw in those songs that have more than 2 parts, and it’s anyones guess as to how you play them (I’ve heard so many versions of Jeruselem’s Ridge I honestly don’t know what the “real” version is!).
edited to add:
I think it’s a riot that so far, the dulcimer players are the ones that have responded to this!!! 
Thank you all. These lists should get me started.
What kind of software do you use (on a mac) to convert TEF-files or midi-files into abc or standard notation?
I installed TablEdit Carbon demo to convert the TEF-files. But it just gives me an unreadable mess when I try to print it.
I also installed the “evaluation” version of Harmony Assistant (which is quite expensive: 70 Euro!). This program can convert midi and Tef-files into standard notation. But when I try to print, there are often pages missing, and sometimes pages come in random order.
So finally I found this solution: open the Tef-files with TablEdit, then export it as an ABC. Then use Barfly to convert the ABC to standard notation. Then save this as PDF-files. That gives me a nice and clean music sheet at the end, but the method is a bit complicated.