Free Tunes!

I’m afraid these are all for solo trombone, nothing else. I did a spot of busking a few years ago, in a hospital foyer, so it was for public entertainment, not any fee. And I produced this lot to help. The reason they’re free here is that most of them are within copyright. Therefore I couldn’t, nor would I want to, charge anything for them. If you download these, as you’re welcome to do, and play them in public, please do the same, copyright is there for a reason. If you use them for your own financial gain that’s up to you, but this is by way of being a disclaimer. But of course if you just want to take them and play them at home, or play them anywhere for free, especially just for other’s pleasure, please do so. There must be about 90-odd free tunes to play here. So far.

There are famous individual tunes in different styles: classical (‘Pie Jesu’, ‘The Swan’ etc), popular (a Sinatra medley, ‘Londonderry Air’), and many, many jazz standards, mostly contained within the medleys ‘3 Moons’ and ’10 Standards’. With this last one, as it’s a medley of 10 pieces, obviously this is going to take some time, and considerable toll on the chops, so there are stopping points throughout the medley, with an ending for you to choose to carry on, or stop there. There are several medleys, with at least 4 tunes in each, plenty for anyone to play or listen to. There are several from shows, Chitty, Poppins, Fiddler etc, some very English ones, namely a G&S medley and one a mini Last Night of the Proms. There are bawdy English ones, the Cockney runaround ‘ ‘Ave a Banana’ and ‘The Good Old Days’. There are a couple of Xmas medleys, and one (so far) which is all TV tunes. And there are a couple based purely on a musical phrase. In one case it’s a rising phrase of 4 notes, which I’ve put a warning on, recommending that people don’t play this one, as I did, in a hospital, as one of the tunes in it is ‘Congratulations’ by Cliff Richard. Not what people wanted to hear when sobbing over dying relatives. Finally, there’s one tune by me, scraped off the top of a quartet (available in The Shop), called Loopy Louise.

As a final word to help, especially if you do want to take these to the public, I’ve put timings on all of them. Playing the trombone with no rest is a heavy business, so you can judge the length of your next selection by how your chops are feeling. And (PB) or (NPB) under the title means that a particular tune is happily playable on the PBone, or Not. Not by me anyway. It just means there’s fiddly low stuff, which is hard and awkward on the PBone. Up to you though.

Help yourself.