Niel Gow and his son Nathanial organized these collections, that were first published as 4 books of 36-40 pages each. The tunes are organized in "sets" of tunes that can be played as a medley, and sometimes work for a set of dance tunes. All the tunes have a bass line, plus occasional chords in small notes as a further hint for harmonies. A few have a third (harmony) voice.

This is a "working directory" for a project to transcribe the Gows' "Complete Repository" and "Collection of Strathspeys, Reels, &c" books to ABC music notation. Each file whose name starts with a number contains a single tune. The file name is of the form VPPN_Tune_Title.abc, where V is the volume/part number (1-4), PP is a 2-digit page number (1-38), and N is the number of the tune on the page (1-4), Tune_Title is the title with punctuation dropped and spaces represented by '_' (underscore).

Most of the material in these collections started as small booklets of only a few pages, published every year or so. These were gathered together in larger books when the tune count reached around 100. The publications started in around 1780, and continuing until at least 1838. They were organized in two series, for reasons that don't seem to be documented. One series had titles like "A ... Collection of Strathspeys, Reels, &c.", where ... was a number (blank, "First", "Second", ...). The other's titles were all "Complete Repository ...", with a subtitle of "Part" and a number. Their terminology was a bit confused, though, and archivists have had some problems organizing them sensibly.

The transcriptions of the Complete Repository collections are from scans found at https://imslp.org/wiki/Gow%27s_Repository_of_the_Dance_Music_of_Scotland_(Gow,_Niel) in January 2021 and for the "Strathspeys & Reels" were found at https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Gow%2C_Niel in December 2021. The scans were actually are actually dated as early as 2013, but don't seem to have appeared in any discoverable archive site until recently. A search them in early in 2020 didn't find any copies.

There seems to have been a "Fifth Collection of Strathspeys & Reels" by Niel's son Natanial, but so far I've found no images anywhere. (There are many transcriptions of individual tunes, scattered around, but none seem to include the bass lines, and there's no way to compare them with the originals.)

Each tune has been transcribed to ABC in a separate file. There are also "full set" files with the tunes transcribed so far. They have names starting with "CR-". The single-tune files have names of the form VPPN_Title.abc, where V is the original volume number (1-4), PP is a 2-digit page number (01-40), and N is the tune number on the page (1-4?). The "Title" part is the tune title with underscores for spaces and most punctuation characters dropped. Some tunes are split between 2 pags, but are counted only in their first page. (Most have a comment about this in the tune's B: header line.)

Some tunes have been transcribed twice. The reason is that for maximal usefulness, they have been transcribed first using the ABC 1.* limitations (with 1.7-level test software). This means that many dynamics are ignored, and multi-voice notation is handled with the "bracket" chord notation when possible. Tunes that use the features of ABC 2.* such as 2 voices on a staff, crescendo/diminuendo symbols, etc. are done with a separate transcription. These have more complex names, of the forms VPPN-Title.abc1.abc for ABC version 1, and VPPN=Title.abc2.abc for version 2. This multi-suffix works well on unix-based systems that are most of the world's web servers, but can cause problems for more primitive file systems and software that intentionally limits allowed file names (e.g., Microsoft and Apple systems). Feel free to rename the files however works for your purposes. Many musicians will probably want to strip off the VPPN[-=_] prefix, so the titles will show up in alphabetical order on their computers.

A number of tunes have an initial musical symbol that looks like an inverted fermata sign under the staff, with an up-arrow pointing up to the bottom staff line. A note on page 8 of volume 1 explains that the tunes with this symbol "may be played Slow when not danced." This symbol isn't available in any software that I know of, so it has just been "transcribed" by including "air" on the R: lines for such tunes, together with the likely rhythms that would have been used. This symbol indicates that a tune was regularly played as a slow air, and also as a faster dance tune, often strathspey or (slip) jig. Many of the tunes here were/are also used for songs, which of course should be played at whatever speed is comfortable for the singer(s).

Scordatura tuning is used for a few tunes, and those file names contain "-scord.abc". These are indicated in the book by a "chord" before the first clef symbol, showing (some of) the notes for tuning a violin/fiddle. This pseudo-chord has been transcribed as an ABC bracketed chord such as [A,DAe] placed before an initial double-bar. Such tunes are also given in two versions, the other without the initial "tuning chord" and the appropriate notes transposed to their "correct" values. See the Duke of Argyle's Strathspey (v.1 p.32 #1) for an example.

-- John Chambers January 2021 - January 2022.