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Submit a setting

The tunes first recorded after 1929 are missing from this site, because every book it was built from is older than that. Submissions are how that gap closes.

What we are asking for

ABC notation for a traditional tune. Your own transcription, or ABC you have from somewhere else. Traditional melodies are anonymous and unowned, and writing one down is not authorship. The one thing to leave out is a tune somebody actually wrote. Tell us where it came from and paste a link if there is one, so whoever typed it out gets the credit. Everything is read by a person before it appears.

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Why this exists

Every tune on this site came out of a collection published before 1929, which is what makes them unambiguously free to republish. The cost of that rule is a real gap: The Kesh, Cooley’s, The Maid Behind the Bar, The Silver Spear, Morrison’s and The Banshee were all first recorded in the 1940s or later, so no book old enough to use contains them.

That is fifteen to twenty of the tunes played most often in Irish sessions, missing from a site about Irish sessions. Settings written out by the people who play them is the permanent fix, and it is the only one that does not involve copying somebody else’s work.

Nothing self-publishesThe database refuses it, not just the policy
Credited how you chooseHandle, name, or anonymous
Yours to withdrawDelete it any time before it is published
FAQ

Questions about submitting

  • Start typing the title and anything already in the library appears under the field. Pick it and your version is filed as a new setting of that tune, attached to its existing page, rather than a second page with the same name. Plenty of different tunes do share a name, so if yours only shares the title, ignore the suggestion and send it as its own tune.

  • ABC notation for a traditional tune. Your own transcription, or ABC you found elsewhere and want tab for. Traditional melodies are anonymous folk compositions with no owner, and writing one down is not authorship, so a plain transcription of a tune that already exists is a weak thing for anyone to claim.

  • A tune somebody wrote. A modern composer's tune belongs to that composer no matter how traditional it sounds, and an arrangement with original ornamentation belongs to whoever wrote the ornaments. If a tune has a named living composer, it is not for here.

  • No. If you have ABC from anywhere, send it and tell us where it came from. Paste the link if there is one. It gets shown with the tune so whoever typed it out is credited by name where the ABC carries one.

  • Every submission is read by a person before it goes anywhere. The database will not let a submission publish itself, deliberately, because the one thing that would damage this site is copyrighted notation appearing on it.

  • There is one moderator and no promise attached to this. You can see the status of anything you have sent on this page at any time, and you can delete it while it is still pending.

  • By whatever your profile says: your handle, your name, or not at all if you choose anonymous. Credit is attached at the moment a setting is published, so changing your preference later changes it everywhere.

  • A plain-text way of writing a tune that Irish traditional music has used online for thirty years. It looks like a header of a few lines and then letters for the notes. If you have a tune in ABC anywhere, paste it in and the preview will show you the notation and the tab.