On this page you will find popular sets of music you may come across in Scottish Country Dance & Music. We will be continually adding to this page to try and introduce you to some of the more familiar tunes, so please come back regularly.
To download a score please click on the name:
ABC notation
ABC notation is a shorthand form of musical notation. In basic form it uses the letters A through G to represent the given notes, whilst sharps, flats, the length of notes, key, ornamentation etc. are represented by other symbols. This form of notation facilitates the sharing of music online. Originally intended as a simple and accessible form of music notation it was used principally with folk and traditional tunes of Western European origin, e.g., English, Irish, Scottish, which are typically single-voice melodies that can be written on a single staff in standard notation, With an increasing list of characters and headers the syntax now supports a range of metadata for each tune and can be used for more than a single line of music.
Any text editor can be used to edit the music, as ABC notation is ASCII-based. However, there are now many ABC notation software packages available that offer a wide variety of features, including the ability to read and process ABC notation into MIDI files, XML and printed as standard "dotted" notation. Such software is readily available for most computer systems. More information and tutorials are available here: http://abcnotation.com/
The XML format produced by these editors can be imported into other music notation packages such as Sibelius, MuseScore, Finale etc.
Book 52
Book 51
It is hoped that over time we will re-produce all of the RSCDS Books in this format to aid musicians.
