| ABCv1 | ABCv2 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vol.1-4 | ABC | ABC | ||
| Vol.1 | ABC | ABC | ||
| Vol.2 | ABC | ABC | ||
| Vol.3 | ABC | ABC | ||
| Vol.4 | ABC | ABC | ||
Many of the tunes were written by the Gows, or by friends and colleagues. They include a composer's name for a few of the tunes.
I looked around for these books online for some years, and then in late 2020, I discovered that photocopies the first 3 had become available on several sites, including imslp.org and the National Library of Scotland (nls.uk). So I downloaded them and started a project of transcribing a page or two every few days when I had the time. In March of 2022, I found that they also had the 4th book in the series, so I grabbed a copy and started transcribing it. If anyone finds a photocopy of the 5th (6th?) book, could you send me the URL?
A minor problem with this collection is small spacing between notes in many tunes, to make many tunes fit on a page and minimize the thickness of the books. To simplify proofreading, I've used a rather small scale (0.50), to approximate the books' staff breaks in most tunes. Some of the tunes have wider note spacing, and I've often reformatted them to use fewer staffs in my "proofreading" copies. ABC formatters usually use a large default scale, and staff layout isn't musically meaningful, so you should use whatever layout or scale works best for your purposes, (One of the real advantages of ABC is that people with vision problems can easily reformat the music so they can read it easily.)
A major problem with this collection is that the terminology was quite inconsistent from one publication to the next. The tunes were all published earlier, in small publications of various sorts. They were then published as somewhat larger sets, and later as these 36-page publications that were variously called Parts, Volumes, or Editions, and all those terms were used with several other meanings. There were also a number of other books published with subsets of this collection, often undated, and with inconsistent book (and tune) names. People often confuse these "collections of strathspeys and reels" with the similar "complete (or compleat) repositories" that were started somewhat later. A lot of people have been trying to make sense of it all, including when each tune was published, and what that book(let) was called. See the Transcription Notes for explanations that have been added as the transcription projects went on and interesting and/or unusual notation features were discovered.
Some of the tunes are transcribed in two ways, for ABC's version 1 and 2 "standards". ABC1 is still in use by a lot of software, and it doesn't include multiple voices on a staff, crescendo and diminuendo symbols, and a few other things. These have file names ending in .abc1.abc and .abc2.abc, and also use '-' or '=' after the VPPN prefix instead of '_', to make life easier for the software folks. These show up in the Name column with .abc1 or .abc2 at the end of the name. Also, initial articles in titles are lower case, which is also done to make some software simpler, since they can just ignore initial lower-case letters for most purposes.
Following the single-tune files, there are blocks for two kinds of collections. The first two have names starting with "CSR-", followed by "-abc1 or "-abc2". These each contain all the tunes in the entire collection, transcribed for ABC1 and ABC2. There are then blocks of tunes for each of the books/volumes in the set. Thes have names like "CSR1-abc1" and CSR1-abc2", with the first digit ranging from 1 to 4. In all of these, the names and their set of links to get the tunes in various formats, are probably positioned halfway down the block's vertical space. These blocks will get taller as the transcription project continues. At the very bottom, there may be a short section of non-tune files, which are mostly used for controlling the formatting or showing comments during transcribing and debugging the whole collection. These should disappear when the project is complete.