Tune archive
Tunes, with their passports
Every tune here gets the same treatment: what kind of tune it is, what key and time, the traditions that claim it, an ABC setting you can paste into any notation app, and a short, sourced history. No tune is “owned” by one country on this site — we note where it started and where it went.
| Tune | Type | Key | Traditions | Origin & travel |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soldier's Joy | Reel / breakdown | D major | Scottish, English, Appalachian old-time, Canadian | Scotland → England → Appalachia |
| The Braes of Mar | Strathspey | A major | Scottish, Cape Breton | Scotland (Aberdeenshire) · Cape Breton |
| The Kesh | Jig | G major | Irish | Ireland |
Play along · engine preview
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Kesh Jig / Leitrim Fancy
Slainte · 123 BPM · key of G major · beat-synced chord grid with capo, transpose and simplify. Analysed on our own machine from an openly licensed recording.
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Sample entries. Three tunes stand in for the archive while it is being built. The full archive is organised by type (reel, jig, strathspey, hornpipe, march, air, waltz, breakdown) and by tradition, with a settings index per tune in the style of The Session.
How to read the ABC
ABC is a plain-text way of writing music that any computer — and most phones — can turn into sheet music and sound. Copy the block from a tune page and paste it into a free tool such as the abcjs editor or EasyABC/DrawTheDots. The settings here are simplified “session skeletons”: the bones of the tune, without one player’s ornaments baked in.