Book of Waltzes, Polkas etc

[pettyman]

Hi guys, I'm looking for a book with waltzes, polkas, etc in for either mandolin or violin - been searchin high and low and haven't turned up anything of any worth yet!

Matt

[Martin Jonas]

Make your own: if you explore Nigel Gatherer's vast site (http://www.nigelgatherer.com/tunes.html), you'll find thousands of tunes in standard notation with mandolin tabs as well as in abc notation (which you can easily convert into standard notation). More than enough waltzes and polkas there. In addition, there are lots of nice waltzes at Mandozine in TablEdit format. Printed out and spiral-bound, the various free sources (if judiciously collated) far outperform all commercial products.

Martin

[pettyman]

awesome - just what I needed - money saving too!

[Martin Jonas]

Enjoy! Be a bit careful with Nigel's abc files, though: there are a few typos in there, most commonly getting individual notes wrong by one octave (easy to do in abc). If you find any unexpected octave jumps, that may be the reason (Scottish tunes sometimes have deliberate octave jumps, too, but that should be reasonably obvious).

Martin

[John Goodin]

Peter Barnes' "A Little Couple-Dancemusic" contains 400 waltzes, polkas, schottisches, tangos, hambos, etc. and is very user-friendly. Bill Matthiesen's 3 vols. of The Waltz Book contain 70-80 waltzes each from many traditions and are very popular among contra dance musicians. These are available from the authors and many other places like Elderly or the Country Dance and Song Society. They're not free but they're nicely bound and I've certainly gotten my money's worth out of them.

John Goodin

[Bill Van Liere]

For waltz(s), I also recommend the The Waltz Book series.
Standard notation.