James, if you like English music, the pipemaker Julian Goodacre has a number of small tunebooks out that work well for hurdy gurdy (the "Toodle-Oodle" series). Also, for French music, there are the Massif Central books compiled by Mel Stevens. For early music, I believe George Kelischek (sp?) has some tunebooks suitable for gurdy.
Bagpipe tunes are useful, since they are a limited range of notes and obviously work well with drones. One issue is that bagpipes usually have a leading tone (a half-step or fullstep lower than the key the pipes are pitched in, depending on the type of pipe. So if you have a c/g gurdy with the lowest note the open "G" string, you would have to play any tunes that use a leading tone up in "C", rather than in "G". (For clarification, my English bagpipe plays (low F#), G,A,B,C,D,E,F#, G. So if the tune uses the low F#, I have to rework the tune into "C".) Anytime you look at a possible tune, it's important to first check out the range of notes, since it is infuriating to get through most of a tune, only to have it land on a note below the capability of the instrument. When I first started playing gurdy and pipes as a guest musician with a baroque ensemble, the musicians kept giving me music in the "right" keys, but with the "wrong" spread of notes, and it took a while for them to catch on. I hope this isn't thoroughly confusing! Sounds like you're off to a great start, Nan ----- Original Message ----- From: Jon Redpath To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 6:53 PM Subject: Re: [HG] Drones vs. Key Changes, was Irish? Hi Celia, you ask a difficult question. I made pipes proffessionally for 15years so I thought, wrongly, that scottish pipe tunes would work on th HG. Most do not. But my great love is French music and that does work both on pipes and HG's. But there are exceptions. Quite often, but not always, music for diatonic accordions works fine on the HG. There are many flemish and german pipe tunes that sit fine on the HG as well. Try Ceolas for some tunes http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/ there is quite a bit there. Also try the UK hurdy gurdy forum tunes list Scot was going to put some addresses in. Hope to meet you at Lancaster. JON Cecilia Patko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi, When I started off, just last year, I already had a few pdf-s full with Hungarian bagpipe tunes (I am Hungarian, so that's my main interest). So I had a go at them, some are really easy. Obviously they are good because of the similar drone system, I wonder whether there is any non- Hungarian stuff out there on the web? I assume bagpipes are more popular than HG, so there might well be. Cecilia
