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Folk Tune Harmony Arrangements
Digital sheet music for versatile two, three or four part harmony arrangements of traditional tunes
These folk tune harmony arrangements began as a simple project creating harmony parts for violists to play as duets alongside folk violinists, the reason being that a lot of folk tunes, being written for the fiddle, go quite high on the viola and aren't easy to join in with for a violist.
The harmony parts expanded into full four part arrangements, even though they can still be used as simple duets. They can be played by a wide range of instrumental groups, up to and including string quartet. Read more about who can use them here, and more on how they were created here.
Irish Tunes Bundle
English Tunes Bundle
Scottish Tunes Bundle
More Info
The first of these arrangements were some four part harmony arrangements of Irish folk tunes, which were originally going to be part of Tamarysk. As they were intended to be part of the Tamarysk repertoire, they were recorded on electric guitar, piano and viola, with bits of overdubbed mandolin and violin, although the pdf scores provided are for various different instruments. The recordings are intended as a demo of what could be created with the harmony parts, rather than exact scorings - the harmony parts are "building blocks" for bands and ensembles to make their own arrangements. As it turned out, Tamarysk headed off in a rather different direction, but the sheet music proved very popular anyway.
So, about a year later, I made some more, this time a collection of English tunes. The concept with the English tunes is the same: two harmony parts and a bass part, primarily aimed at violists and cellists but presented in lots of different clefs and transpositions so they can be played on a variety of instrumental groups. (See this post for a detailed explanation of who can play them.)
The Scottish arrangements soon followed. The demo recordings for the English and Scottish packs sound a bit different to those for the Irish tunes - for these, I've just recorded them straight up on violin, violas and bass guitar, with no piano or extra chords (although chords are provided with the sheet music melodies in the download) – but the format of the sheet music is just the same. The scores come as pdfs, and you also get the recordings included, for which you can choose your format from mp3, FLAC, ALAC (Apple Lossless), AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WAV and AIFF formats.