Find Free Celtic Sheet Music Online

Learn about and download free Celtic music!

Wanting to add Irish tunes to your repertoire?

Free Celtic sheet music is a great way to begin building your library of Celtic music.

The sound of a Celtic tune played on a fiddle or whistle is iresistable!

You find yourself tapping your feet, clapping...

...and wishing you could play along!

You can! Celtic music is fun, accessible and easy to learn.

Let's start with the basics -- just what is Celtic music, anyway?

What is Celtic Music? at Ceolas.org is a great primer on the term "celtic" and what regions the music comes from.

You'll also find links for more in-depth study of Irish music. (Although this site isn't currently updated, it's a great starting place in your discovery of free Celtic sheet music.)

Now that you understand the roots of Celtic music, click over to Tunes at Ceolas. Although it isn't the largest collection of free Celtic sheet music online, what I like are the free Tunebooks (collections of songs).

There are six tunebooks available as PDF (Acrobat) files -- these six downloads alone will give you hundreds of songs to work on!

Note: since Ceolas isn't currently updated, you'll find lots of broken links on this page. I recommend downloading the tunebooks and then moving on.

Session Tunes

Sign up for a free account at Session Tunes and you'll be on your way to a huge collection of free Celtic sheet music!

Clicking on "Tunes" from the menu on the right takes you to the songs -- over 640 pages of them! Using the tabs at the top, you can choose to view the tune in sheet music format or in ABC Format. (Not all songs have sheet music; see the note on ABC Format below.)

You can view or leave comments about tunes, and you can download the sheet music, the ABC tab, or a sound file. You can even save your favorites to your own online tunebook.

The sheet music here and at other Celtic music sites is typically not piano sheet music (two hands, treble and bass staff). Usually, you'll find a treble clef melody line only. Sometimes you'll find chord symbols above. Often, musicians fill in chords and ornaments on their own.

If the song you like has no chords... you can learn to add them yourself! For an excellent beginning how-to guide, visit the music arranging page at My Harp's Delight. My friend Susan is a Celtic harpist and teacher, and has written a great tutorial that works not only for harp, but for piano as well.

She's also included a great downloadable chord reference and examples of how to arrange a tune. But... a word of warning -- the Celtic harp is such an alluring instrument, you might find yourself enthralled! I have. It's called "the harp effect." :-)

ABC Format is an alternative method of notating music -- conveying what notes to play and how long to play them. As you're searching around the internet for Celtic music, you'll find much of it is in ABC Format.

Here's an example, from Session Tunes: Junior Gill X: 1
T: Junior Gill
M: 6/8
L: 1/8
R: jig
K: Edor
B,2E EDB,|DB,A, A,G,A,|B,EE EDB,|A,B,D EFA|
B,EE EDB,|DB,A, A,G,A,|B,DE GBd|AFD E2D||
B,2E EDB,|DB,A, A,G,A,|B,EB, EB,E|DEF AFD|
B,2E EDB,|DB,A, A,G,A,|B,DE GBd|AFA E2A||
|:B3efg|fdB AFE|D2F EFD|A,B,D EFA|
B3efg|fdB AFA|DFA GBd|1AFD E2A:|2AFD E3||

Kind of cryptic, right?

Well, if you're interested in learning how to read and write in ABC format, there's an excellent tutorial here. It's not very difficult, and can be downright helpful to jot down tunes quickly.

If you'd simply like to translate tunes you find into sheet music, use the handy online tool here.

Abacci Music

Abacci Music has a nice database of free Celtic sheet music and world music tunes that you can search by song title, rhythm or key signature. I love the simple, clean interface -- very easy to get around. They also have a section of lessons in music theory! It's extensive, but doesn't start from true beginner level. If you're past the basics of reading music, it's a great next step.

Each tune also has a midi file, so you can listen in. If you like the tune, you can click over to a printer-friendly page. As a musician, I truly appreciate sites that take the time to make public domain music easily printable!

If you happen to play tin whistle, harmonica, cello, mandolin, or guitar, you'll also find music for those instruments, written both in standard musical notation and each instrument's tablature, or "tab." There's a nice explanation of tab for each instrument and how to read it.

Breizh Partitions

Breizh Partitions is actually much more than a Celtic music site -- there's great music from all over the world. Just a glance at the first page when you click on scores for Piano, and you'll see tunes from Ireland, France, Brittany, Japan, Cambodia, Spain, Norway, Scotland, and the US!

You can search by country or by instrument (accordion, bagpipe, flute, guitar, piano, violin.) Once you choose your search, you'll see a table that shows you your options for viewing or downloading -- most tunes have PDF and MIDI files, while some are in a graphic format (GIF) or have MP3 files.

Oh, and by the way -- the forums won't be of much use to you unless you happen to speak French! :-)

Now you're ready to play!

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