Hi,
My name is Kim. I heard a whistle one month ago at a scottish fesival and have been hooked ever since. I am hoping you all can help me find sheet music for the following tunes/songs:
skye boat song
sally garden
minstrel boy
far from home
the oak and the ash
the water is wide
she moved through the fair
star of the county down
migildi magildi
watching the white wheat
there’s nae luck about the house
early one morning
barbara allen
Can you tell I like folk songs from the British Isles? Keep in mind that I’m a new player. Also, any of these written as duets would be great, too. Am I asking too much? Hope you can help,
Kim
I recently discovered the joys of ABC – that’s a file format (song.abc) for posting sheet music on the internet, and there’s gazillions ABC-ed songs out there to download. The files are tiny so you can save tons of them without using much disk space, and instead of being inert gifs, they’re machine playable so that you can see if you have the right song, a good version, etc. They’re also transposable, so if they’re not in a good key for whistles, you can put them into one.
First you download a program that lets your computer view ABC files – on my Mac I use Barfly, not sure what the corresponding software is for Windows (somebody please chime in here???)
Then you go here: http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/cgi/abc/findtune
Type in the name of the song you want, and get a long list of results. If you want something you can play right away, look at the column labeled “key” and pick something that’s in D or G (though like I said, your ABC displaying program should be able to transpose songs into tinwhistle-able keys with just a few clicks). To hear if you’ve found the right song, you can click the file’s link in the “midi” column, to see what the abc file looks like click “text”, and to download it to your disk, use the “get” link.
There’s just tons & tons of stuff out there in ABC, and the files are tiny so you can accumulate enough of them to keep you playing for years. By googling on the type of song you want plus “abc”, you can find many large collections of folk songs of the variety you enjoy, and make your ABC program play the unfamiliar ones so you know a) if you like them and b) approximately how they should sound before you learn them.
One file I’m currently enjoying is this one of Appalachian folk music meant for dulcimer, but it has lots of easy songs that sound good on my whistle: http://www.mindspring.com/~bcoffman/
It’s the file called “Old Time Tunes Played Around North Central West Virginia”
One that I have used a lot is the Wandering Whistle at http://www.tinwhistler.com/music/. Some of the tune have besides the sheet music an mp3 file of the tune.
Kim, I am partial to http://www.thesession.org/index.php. Click on tunes, then search for what you want. Once you get to the song you want, you can click on the sheetmusic tab to view the music, or click on download to download the sheetmusic as a gif file, an ABC format, or a midi.