Gie us a toon there Jock! Herewith a small collection of tunes transposed for the pennywhistle, tuned to the key of D-major. All tunes are rendered in abc music notation thus enabling them to be stored in the Guide. A variety of free software packages exist to convert the abc notation to standard western music notation, to MIDI files, and to other formats.

ABC ASCII Music Notation

Abc notation is a simple but powerful ASCII musical notation format. Devised by Chris Walshaw, abc is widely used for the notating and distribution of tunes, particularly on the internet. Very popular in traditional music circles, it is also gaining in popularity in early music.

A tune notated in abc can be played directly from the notation, or many software packages exist which can convert abc notation into MIDI, produce sheet music, play the file through the computer speaker, etc.

See these links for more information: The Lesession and the abc home page.

Toot Library Catalogue

Pennywhistle tunes are stored as abc-code in separate entries to the Guide, as listed here. Naturally, the list below represents the eccentricity of this particular researcher. Users should be able to copy and paste the code from the Guide into their own text files as necessary to their whims.

1. Derelict: Cap’n Billy Bones’ song.
2. The Wind That Shakes The Barley.
3. Colonel Bogey March.
4. Cwm Rhondda Hymn.
5. Lillibullero.
6. Abdul Abulbul Amir.
7. Jollity Farm.
8. This Land is Your Land.
9. Limehouse Blues.
10. Rule, Britannia!
11. Yankee Doodle.
12. That Night in Bethlehem.
13. Auld Lang Syne.
14. Wild Horse.
15. Looney Tunes.

Practice Technique

A technique that can assist you with building a repertoire is to print either the abc-notation or the standard music-notation to 4-by-6-inch card-stock. By setting the page-size of a wordprocessor to match the card-stock then pasting the notation into the document, you can print the result to individual cards on your local printer; most modern printers support a 4x6 card-size, or the European equivalent.

I have a deck of cards, representing my whistle repertoire, that is very portable, making it easy to pack a whistle with the music. Flipping through the cards: for the tunes I have memorized, I practice with my eyes shut; for the tunes I am committing to memory, I glance at the card as necessary until I can play the whole tune with my eyes closed. I have found this a useful technique for improving my performance.