Lindsay Davidson

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Pipe Music Library

This will forever be a project in progress. The aim is to create a jpeg/png/pdf library of pipe music composed by me (there have been several issues regarding copyright with pipe music on the web - this is safe) for interested people to print and use. Many of the tunes are all prepared using 'Pipewriter' - a specialised pipe-music publishing program on which I had the pleasure to work with programmer Alan Corrie. Other tunes were typeset using Finale, a general music typesetting program.

In total there are just over 300 tunes for you to browse through and choose from.

Each image is the size of an A4 page for printing so that you merely have to right click on the image (windows users) and select 'copy image' then paste into your favourite editing programme and print from there. Alternatively you can save directly from some browsers (also via right clicking). Users are hereby given permission to perform or record the music, but are politely asked to credit authorship accurately.

The Clan Davidson Collection

A collection of about 70 tunes composed in 2009 for the Homecoming Year celebrations in Scotland. Each tune commemorates either a person or event in the history of the Clan.

"The Ardgowan Collection"

A collection of music written for the Baron of Ardgowan to honour his forbears and mark various moments of his family's history. Approximately 100 tunes.

The Kerr Collection

A collection of music written as a gift for Michael Kerr of Chicago on the occasion of his retirement. The titles tell the story of his Grandparents' work at the first half of the 20th century in Oklahoma.

The Morpeth Set

Northumbrian Bagpipes...for now there are only a few tunes here and so there is only a single page. However, it may be that in time more will be composed...Comments and suggestions from Northumbrian are particularly welcome.


In 1997 and 1998 I had two piping trips to Australia, full of interesting and colourful adventures. On the plane back from the first trip I decided to write tunes to remember it by. Unfortunately, some of the tunes have temporarily gone missing due to software issues (read .... microsoft). However, I have found some of them and the collection is reappearing.


Many years ago a number of people gave me their collections of books with the specific request that I use them and make the contents somehow available to other people, either directly or indirectly. This was before the advent of the significant internet and the matter has waited a number of years and growth of competence to bring this material to the public domain.

Indeed public domain is key here. There is no intention to violate any copyright in this act of sharing - only the intention to bring valuable archive material to a greater public audience. If there is any violation here that you know about, please tell me so that I can remove the offending material or petition for the relevant agreements.

As the intention here is on several levels a decision was taken to scan the book 'as is', complete with comments and annotations, both as evidence of the original source and to allow the reader to interpret what they see for themselves. I believe this complies with best historical practice today.

For display the images have been set to be viewed at 900 pixels wide. The original images are bigger and can be viewed at the original size or downloaded as a jpg.

It will be seen that some of the embellishments are written in a different form and that some embellishments may be unknown to pipers today. This is an historical document and reflects the ways ways of doing things a hundred years ago (in some cxases two hundred years and more ago), including giving us clues about the way of playing.

The collection which is to be scanned and made available is quite substantial and in time may require a completely separate site. It could take several years to scan everything as there are many thousands of pages  which I believe are largely or completely unavailable in any way.

Please follow the link above for a separate index to the historical material.

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