The biggest collection of public domain Hurdy Gurdy music on the web.
…or at least, I think it is! Regardless, there’s plenty on here. And not just the trad French we all love, but some trad English, Medieval/Renaissance Spanish and French, Swedish, Hungarian, as well as Ukrainian music. Heck, there’s even some Classical on here!
So get stuck in! There’s enough to keep any gurdy player happy for a few hours at least.
Where to start?!
With any large body of tunes it’s hard to know where to start. Thankfully, the good folks at the UK Hurdy Gurdy Forum suggest these tunes as some nice starters:
About
ABC’d
ABC is a simple format for quickly recording tunes on computers, paper, or other mediums.
It is a common format for folk music on the web — notable sources include Jeremy Keith’s The Session. There are multiple free and simple ways of converting it into ‘real’ music. If you have a decent browser (e.g. anything apart from Internet Explorer) you can use my ABCPig tool to quickly view and edit ABC tunes — there’s a link from each tune page, and you can paste your own in.
If you are using Internet Explorer, or you want to deal with multi-page tunes, I recommend Concertina.net’s ABC to PDF tool.
Public Domain
My aim for this collection is for all of the tunes to be completely public domain, i.e. copyright/royalty free. This means that you are free to:
- Redistribute/sell the sheet music
- Record the music and sell it (or give it away for free! Even better).
- Make whatever changes you want to the music
- Mash the music up into some kind of hideous grunge metal epic
- Do any of the above without citing authors (although a link/mention is always nice :))
Unfortunately, some legalese is required to protect myself. So, here goes:
By using this website (waterpigs.co.uk), you (the user) assume all legal responsibility and liabilities for your actions, and will not hold me (Barnaby Walters) responsible for any litigation challenging your use of media gathered from waterpigs.co.uk
In other words — If you’re going to sell this stuff, make double-triple sure it’s copyright free, and don’t blame me if it isn’t ;)
