Tune resource

[Pasha Alden]

Thanks again to JeffD for the useful link.


Found two tunes to learn:
Berserker Mazurka and Autumn Woods

I can listen and learn to play them.

Also got me the Suzuki violin books, so now it will be melody playing for me.

So many tunes - so few hours in a day

Happy playing all!

[feis]

wow that's a fantastic resource. sharing it with my students! thank you

[neil argonaut]

At a rough estimate, seems like there's just shy of 5000 tunes there - quite a collection.

The only bigger one I know (and I'm suprised it hasn't been mentioned) is http://www.thesession.org, which has around 12,000 tunes in ABC and notation (and lots of them with more than one setting) with midi, list of recordings and discussion on each of them.

[JeffD]

Well its not the size of the collection but the quality of the tunes and relevance to what you play. I like The Session too.

It is sights like this that are forcing me to get a tablet computer. I hate having mandolins in my office. I could put a tablet on a music stand, put up a huge pot of coffee, and.. well... nobody would hear from me for a few days.

[Pete Braccio]

I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but there is an App for this. It's called TunePal. It's available for IOS and Andriod and there is a Tunepal.org website. It queries multiple ABC file repositories based upon tune name or a sampled simper of the tune that you record!

It's truly indispensable and it's only $5.

The folks at the Irish Traditional Music Archive told me about it when I stopped in for a visit when I was visiting Dublin two years ago.

[tangleweeds]

I was just reminded of another tune archive that I've found very useful in the past. It has abc, pdf, and midi versions of the tunes.
Tunes Played at the NOVA Irish Session

And of course there's JC's Tune Finder, which is great for finding different variations on the same tune. The interface is a bit crunchy, but you can get the tune in a wide variety of formats.

ETA: Ages and ages ago, I remember there being a folk-specific tune finder where you entered... the up/down contour of the tune, perhaps? And it would figure out which tune you had... or something along those lines.

Anyway, I was wondering if there is something more technically evolved version of this where you can play it a traditional tune and get suggestions of the tune's name(s).There are apps that can identify just about any canned music, but I'm wondering whether there's now any that can listen and identify music that doesn't pre-exist as a specific commercial recording, but instead is is a known folk tune.

[foldedpath]

The Tunepal app for iPhone and Android phones does this (audio recognition) for Irish trad tunes. You just play a starting fragment of the tune into the app. There is a PC version too, I think. Doesn't work on everything, but it works amazingly often.

I don't know if there's anything similar (yet) for other genres like OldTime, but it should pick up any common crossover tunes.