Most of the tunebooks have both a standard notation version as well as tablature versions for many instruments including Mandolin, Ukulele, Fiddle Fingerings, Irish Bouzouki (GDAD), Guitar, Mountain Dulcimer, Tin Whistle, B/C and C#/D Box, and Anglo Concertina.
Click on any tune name in the tunebook's Table of Contents or Index to jump to the tune.
The tune pages in the books are interactive, clicking on the tune's title will open the tune for playback in my ABC Transcription Tools player.
From the Player, click "Start Tune Trainer" to practice the tune looped with increasing speed each time or several times through.
I'm frequently adding new tunebooks and websites, or updating older ones with new content and features, so be sure to bookmark this page and check back every few weeks!
Table of Contents
Click the links below to jump to the selected tunebook section
These versions have all the tunes in the tunebook transposed to the key of A folded to the range of the chanter, and plays with both the chanter and drones
Tune Settings Transcribed and Tunes Composed by Mike McHale (Back to Top)
Introduction by Neal Warshaw
"These tunebooks contain all of the settings for the tunes which Mike McHale transcribed over approximately 20 years of teaching workshops, classes and lessons which were collected by Colleen O’Sullivan and Neal Warshaw.
There are approximately 600 tunes, of which, about 200 were included in the 2 tunebooks published with the help of Hilari Farrington Koehler and Benedict Koehler.
Tunes transcribed the first few years were hand written and some of the tunes are a bit faint but after a while Mike got the hang of a computer app.
Mike was a big fan of Paddy O’Brien and his cousin, Sean Ryan. Their compositions are included and acknowledged.
In the last few years of his life Mike composed a number of tunes himself and these are in a separate tunebook."
Gary Martin generated the PDF tunebooks from the transcriptions.
Here is an article on Mike McHale published by the CCE Mid-Atlantic Region:
You can click on any hymn name in the Table of Contents to go to the page for the hymn.
Once on the page for the hymn, click the title to play the hymn in my ABC Transcriptions Tools.
This is a large file, please be sure to save it to your system after downloading from your browser.
Note: Because of the words in the hymns, the tunebook playback links (which contain the entire hymn notes and words encoded in them) are very long.
Most will not work properly if the PDF is opened with Adobe Acrobat, which has a small URL length limit for opening hyperlinks in the PDF.
Virtually all other PDF readers, including those built into the popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari have no problem with the tunebook playback links.
Your best bet is to just drop the PDF tunebook file on a browser window to view it, or open it in a mobile app like GoodReader for iOS.
263 Tunes by John Clare (written 1820-1834) (Back to Top)
John Clare was a working class rural labourer, and a poet of considerable fame, both then and now.
He was very interested in the vernacular culture of his village and left a very important record of this in his various papers.
He was a fashionable poet for a time and is still known and studied, but for our purposes he was also an enthusiastic fiddle player, who collected tunes from a variety of sources. These tunes include both dance and song tunes.
Many of the song tunes have corresponding sets of words elsewhere in Clare's Manuscripts.
Many other tunes have words elsewhere, but not in Clare. Deacon in "John Clare and the Folk Tradition" (George Deacon. ISBN 0-86300-008-8), provides some texts, but it is not certain that Clare knew these as anything other than fiddle tunes. It is equally possible that he did of course, given his interest in song.
Seventeen of the dance tunes have dance instructions attached, and it is evident that these tunes at least were taken from printed sources.
Printing or Creating PDFs for Tunes on the Websites
This can be nice for printing an individual part for "Music Minus One" practice when you want to read off a physical version of a score rather than trying to keep up with the autoscrolling in the Player or Tune Trainer.
When viewing a tune on any of the websites, you can generate a PDF file of the score using the PDF exporter built into my tool by:
Close the Player
Click the "PDF" icon at the lower left
If you want more control over the PDF layout or just want to print a score:
Click the "Full Screen" button at the upper right of the website
Close the Player
Now you can use the browser's built-in Print functionality to print a copy of the score or (depending on the browser) generate a PDF as well.
Zooming Out to See More of a Tunebook Website
When working a very wide but very short screen, you'll want to zoom your browser out to see more of the tunes.
Additionally, you can try clicking the → ← or ← → buttons at far left and right of the buttons in the Player to decrease or increase the width of the player in 10% of the browser window screen width increments.
This video shows the process:
Changing the Instruments Used for Playing the Tunes
Generally, the instruments used for playback are "baked-into" the exported website ABC share links.
You can override the instruments used for playback by following the procedure demonstrated in this video:
Customized Tunebook Website Demo Video
Launching the Websites from the iOS Facebook App Doesn't Work
Some time in November 2024, Facebook changed something about how their embedded webview works and now my tool doesn't work in that context.
For iOS 17 and 18, you will be presented with a button to click to open the page in Safari instead.
For earlier versions of iOS, you'll be prompted to click on the ... menu in the Facebook webview and then "Open in External Browser" to use the tool or the exported tunebook websites.
Click the << arrows on the left side of the tune pages to jump to the Table of Contents.
Click the >> arrows on the right side of the tune pages to jump to the Index.
Click on any tune name in the Table of Contents or Index to jump to that tune in the tunebook.
Playing the tunes:
Click the title of any tune to immediately play the tune using my ABC Transcription Tools.
The player control bar has mouse hover tooltips on all the controls explaining what they do.
To change the play speed, use the speed control highlighted here in the playback controls:
Value is a percentage, set a value of 60 or 70 to slow a tune down for learning.
Click the Start Tune Trainer button to open up a "step-up" tune player with the tune where you can practice playing along with the tune looped with increasing tempos.
Click Export Audio or Image to save the tune either as a .WAV or .MP3 file, or export an image of the tune in PNG, JPG, or SVG formats.
Click the Settings button to set the playback instruments.
Editing your own version of the tunes:
If you click "Close" in the the player, you will be in the ABC Transcription Tools full screen tune view.
From the full screen view, you can open the player again by clicking the Play button in the lower right corner, or create a PDF of the tune by clicking the PDF button at the lower left corner.
Click the zoom arrows in the top right corner to close the full screen tune view and open the tune editor.
Once in the ABC Transcription Tools tune editor, you can view, edit, save, or create a PDF of the tune.
For complete information on editing the tunes, please check out the:
Be sure to save the PDF file to your system after downloading if your browser doesn't automatically save it for you.
Changing the Instruments Used for Playing Tunes from the Tunebooks (Back to Top)
It's easy to have your preferred instrument sounds used for the tune playback instead of the instrument sound that may be specified for a tune in the Interactive PDF tunebooks.
Here are the steps to follow:
1) Play a tune from the PDF tunebook by clicking on its title.
2) Click Settings at the bottom right of the Player. The Player Instrument Settings dialog will appear.
3) Set the Default abcjs soundfont selection to your preferred soundfont from the dropdown menu. The different soundfonts provide different sounding versions of each instrument.
4) Set the Melody and Bass/Chords MIDI instruments to your preferred instrument sounds from the dropdown menus.
5) Set the Bass and Chord volumes. Values are from 0-127. Generally values from 32-64 work best.
6) Important: Click the checkbox labeled "Override all MIDI programs and volumes in the ABC when playing tunes"
This will force the Player to use your preferred instrument instead of whatever instrument might be selected by the tunebook.
7) Close the Player Instrument Settings dialog.
Now, going forward, all tunes you click in an Interactive PDF tunebook will use your preferred instrument sounds and volumes.
To turn off the instrument and volume overrides, repeat the process, and uncheck "Override all MIDI programs and volumes in the ABC when playing tunes" in the Player Instrument Settings dialog
How to Read the B/C and C#/D Box Tablature (Back to Top)
B/C - Shows standard notation and tablature for a standard 21-button B/C tuned box.
The button numbers and pitches used for the tablature match those on this chart:
Notes on the C-row are indicated by numbers: 1, 2, 3, ...
Notes on the B-row are indicated by numbers in circles: ①, ②, ③, ...
Assumptions about the B/C and C#/D Box tablature solutions:
The tablature solution assumes that the "magic" notes (E and B on a B/C, F# and C# on a C#/D) that are available on both rows, will be played on the C-row on a B/C box and on the D-row on a C#/D box.
Use of the B/C and C#/D Box tablatures on a 23-button instrument:
If you are playing a 23-button instrument, you will need to shift your start position one button higher when playing.
Consider your first button as "button zero".
How to Read the Anglo Concertina Tablature (Back to Top)
Using the PDF Tunebooks on iOS and Android Devices (Back to Top)
While the PDF tunebooks are generally intended for desktop or laptop use, in most cases they can be used on mobile devices with some caveats.
Tune playback may not work in some iOS or Android app embedded web browser views, like the one in the iOS Facebook app.
If opening the PDF tunebook from Facebook on a mobile device, use the "Open in system browser" option (click the ... at the lower right of the web view) in the Facebook embedded web browser to re-open the file in Safari (iOS) or on Android on the device's main browser.
If using the tunebook on an iPad, be sure the PDF reader you are using is set to open web links in Safari, not an embedded browser.
On iOS, the tunebook has been tested and works with Safari, Books, Files, and GoodReader if you enable "Open web links in Safari" in the GoodReader app preferences.
Also make sure you haven't turned on the Mute control in the iPad control panel or the Mute switch on the side of an iPhone.
I have done limited testing on Android devices, unsure of the behavior on the various browsers on those devices.
Both the ABC Transcription Tools and Interactive PDF tunebook playback have been verified on an older Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge running Google Chrome as the default web browser and the "PDF Viewer" Android app:
