Origin

This site began in September 2005 as a collection of tunes for the Wednesday night session at what was O'Regans, then Fiddler's Green pub and most recently McLean's. Rather than put together a collection of paper, it made more sense to make it available on the web. It is now possible to try to remember a tune in the session, take out an phone, search this site and retrieve the sheet music so that you can remember how it starts.

Credits

This website has long been hosted by the Web design company, Aboreta, owned by Gord Fisch. Gord is a guitarist and mandolin player in Montreal and very generously donated the space and resources that make this site possible and provides a very stable server.

Site design and programming by Robin Beech, Associate Professor of the Institute of Parasitology, McGill University. Robin plays the English concertina and B/C, C#/D and quebec style button accordion.

How it Works

The software to convert tunes in abc format into an image of the sheet music and midi files is freely available. With a little work it was easy to automate the process of generating a web page listing the tunes with links to the generated files. The result is a site where the most difficult part of adding new tunes is transcribing the tune into abc format in the first place. For those interested, the conversion software includes

abcjs

The excellent javascript library that is used to implement the editor.

abcm2ps

This reads a text file containing tunes in abc format and produces a post-script file of the sheet music

ps2pdf

This script is part of the ghostscript package and converts a post-script file into pdf format that can be downloaded.

abc2midi

Another component of the abc format manipulation software which reads a text file of tunes in abc format and produces a midi file so that you can hear vaguely what the tune sounds like. This package is also used to transpose tunes in the editor.