More about "Ten Years Of Tunes"

 Dusty Banjos presents.... "TEN YEARS OF TUNES"

WHY THIS BOOK?

To celebrate (and share) our

tenth birthday, we at Dusty Banjos decided to put together a book which would record our own versions of the tunes and sets

that have been part of our repertoire over the last decade.

About this book

“Ten Years of Tunes” is an A4-sized book with 264 pages and 419 tunes, all of them part of the Dustys’ repertoire at one time or another. Over half the tunes are in sets (107 sets altogether), and there are 196 black-and-white illustrations including 121 photographs.

All of the tunes in a set are grouped together on a single page wherever possible although, where tunes are too long to permit this, they are on facing pages.  In such instances, the full set (other than jig sets 9 and 20) is on the following page, in a compressed format and without any footnotes.  Some tunes appear in more than one set, or more than one key.

Within the single tunes sections there are some tunes which we do play together, but which over time have disappeared from the current set list.

In the chapter “Notes on Notes” we have included some helpful tips about understanding written music.  But this book isn’t about how to read music, or how to play your instrument – if you need help with this, the answer is a good teacher.

We have used the biggest print possible, and opted for tough wire spiral binding and good quality paper, to make the book as user-friendly and as durable as we can.  Hopefully the mountain of paper on the end of the bed can be a thing of the past! 

The music in the book was written using the software MuseScore 1.0 (www.musescore.org).  A good many musicians don’t read music, so the tunes are also written in ABC.  A new system of ABC (‘abc notation’) has become widely used in recent years, especially on music websites.  While this system can give more information than regular ABC, most of our musicians are not familiar with it and we’ve kept to the standard way.

This book is both an archive and a useful working resource, the context for which is a unique and now very well established community initiative.  As well as tunes, we’ve also included a large number of photographs, posters, illustrations and other material that we hope will be of interest to Dustys members and others, and will enrich and enliven this publication – which is as much a record and a celebration of our ten years as it is a collection of tunes.

If you'd like to download an index of all of the tunes included in the book, just click on the link below. And click on any of the sub-menu links at the top of this page, to learn lots more about Ten Years of Tunes.