Origins

This site began in September 2005 as a collection of tunes for the Wednesday night session at what was O'Regans, then the Fiddler's Green pub. The owner retired and a fire at the pub next door lead to significant water damage and long term closure. The session was reincarnated at the excellent Patrick's Pub until March 2020 when everything shut down due to COVID 19. After reopening slowly, the pub never really recovered from the pandemic and closed permanently in 2023. After a long break, a new session began in 2025 at La Courtepointe every other Wednesday

The original inspiration came from a chance meeting between me (Robin Beech) and Vance Trudeau from the University of Ottawa at an Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society of Zoologists. We met years before at the University of Alberta just after I came to Canada from the UK. I had my concertina, he had his whistle, and we found a corner in the room where the conference dinner was underway. Vance had a binder of tunes we played along to. I thought the binder was a great idea, but rather than put together a collection of paper, it made more sense to make it available on the web. Since then, many excellent traditional music resources have appeared.

As the site's visibility grew, I began to host tune collections that others had transcribed (along with the Northumbrian Minstrelsy, that I fixed from fragments I found on the web.

There is no advertising on the site, and no commercialization. This resource is free to use, and will remain so.

Credits

Site design and programming by Robin Beech, using Claude from Anthropic. I am a Retired Associate Professor in Parasitology at the Institute of Parasitology, McGill University. I play the English concertina and occasionally, button accordion. The site is hosted on a Mac Mini in my basement The original site was hosted by the Web design company, Arboreta, owned by Gord Fisch. Gord is a guitarist and mandolin player in Montreal and very generously donated the space and resources that made the first incarnation of this site possible.

How it Works

The music is stored as plain text abc files. The site uses javascript and the excellent ABCJS library, produced by Paul Rosen, to convert the abc files into sheet music and midi files. The software to convert tunes in abc format into an image of the sheet music and midi files is freely available.

Extras

An excellent javascript bookmark, abc2tadpoles, was written by someone with whom I lost touch. If you wrote it, please remind me so I can add a credit. The bookmark will take any selected abc tune fragment from a webpage, and redirect to this site so the abc can be rendered/edited as you like.