The Caledonian Pocket Companion Vol.1
The Caledonian Pocket Companion Vol.1
James Oswald, editor
(and composer of a few tunes)
Volume 1 of The Caledonian Pocket Companion contains the first 6 booklets in the series. They were basically just concatenated, with an added title page for the book, plus an index at the end that contains the 6 indexes from the 6 booklets. The indexes were joined, but not merged, so finding a title required searching each booklet's index until you found it. The titles were merely grouped under their first letter, but weren't in alphatical order.

It doesn't help the user of the 6-booklet "Volume" that the original page numbers (1 to around 30) were kept, but the tunes themselves weren't numbered.

What has been done here is to use a file name starting with a 5-digit number of the form VBPPN, where V is the volume (1 in this directory), B is the book number (1-56), PP is the page number (1-36), and N is the tune title's count on the page. Some tunes overflow from one page to another, and only their first page number is used; the first tune title on the next page will be N=1, although there are staff lines at the top that are part of the preceding page's last tune. Each tune has its number in its X: header line.

Note that Volume 2 uses a similar but not quite identical indexing scheme.

-- John Chambers

... to be expanded as the transcription project continues ...

All the tunes here 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.