Budget of Strathspeys, Reels and Country Dances
J. Anderson
C. 1810

This is a collection of 115 dance tunes published about 1810 by a publisher/editor identified only as "J. Anderson". The "J." probably stands for "John", but there were several John Andersons who published music at about that time, and it's not even clear how many people this referred to, or who published what.

There are photo images of this collection ar archive.org and imslp.org, apparently the same image. There are some problems with the PDF versions, which have some difficulties showing the first two pages that have tunes. But by using several PDF viewers on different copies of the file, both pages became visible.

I've followed the common practice of transcribing the music in lines of 2, 4 or 8 bars, whichever fits best in a line of under 80 characters. This is mostly to prevent damage by assorted mailers that are stuck back in the punch-card era. Backslashes have been used to combine these into staffs that fit on a paper page at a moderately small size. You may want to adjust staff lengths to fit your paper size, vision problems, etc.

The single-tune files have names of the form of PPN_Title.abc, where PP is the two-digit page number in the book, N is the tune number on the page, and Title is the tune title without initial "The" and with underscores between words. This gives a file name that is unique for this collection, and sorts to the same order as in the book. If I ever find the 2nd volume, I'll probably add a 1-digit volume number to the start of the file names. Note that unusual spellings are common; they've all been transcribed as-is. Sometimes the table of contents has a different spelling from the tune; the tune's spelling has been used in most such cases.

An attempt has been made to transcribe the tunes according to modern standards. Repeat symbols have been adjusted to make sense, since the conventions at the time weren't very well defined. There are many cases of tunes that end with a :||: symbol, which makes little sense to modern musicians. Many phrases have a repeat symbol at only one end, and it's not consistently at the start or end of the phrase. When there's no apparent initial pickup, an initial double-bar has usually been added. In a few cases, the first bar has an odd note count, which is probably a typo, and it has been fixed when there are later similar bars. Sometimes such problems can't be fixed reasonably, and they've been transcribed "warts and all". Of course, a musician can easily adjust such things as repeat patters to match the needs of the current dance.

Note: Contrary to the usual expectations, this publisher consistently spelled "favourite" as "favorite".

The music files are in ABC format. If you don't have ABC software, you can CLICK HERE to use a tool that converts the tunes to other formats. This will return the page you're looking at now, with the ABC files expanded to show all the tunes, and each tune will have a line of links to return it in a number of different formats.