"A Man's A Man" sheet music

[Coemgen]

For my choir audition this fall, I'm going to sing "A Man's A Man For A' That," by Robert Burns (as if you didn't know).

Of course, I had a conundrum: how to get the sheet music for as little as possible? I don't really want to buy a whole music book for just one song, you know, and paying $5 for a download seems a bit extravagant.

So …

I went to the Electric Scotland site and found scans of The Scots Minstrelsie (from eighteen hundred and something or other), which contained "A Man's A Man."

I copied the pictures of the music and entered it into Finale, and fiddled around with it a bit to make it easier to sing, added all the lyrics, and generally had a bit of a time with it.

For your bemusement and possible enjoyment, here is the result:

[Rex_Tremende]

That's pretty clever of you to figure out all those steps - I'm curious to know if you entered all the notation by hand or if you scanned it and used an OCR-like process to upload the score into Finale. And was the time you took to do all that worth $5? Someday, I trust you'll not be a Poor, Starving Liberal Arts Student, and you'll end up coming to a different conclusion to that calculation, I hope.

Ever since a summer trip to Scotland in 1980 I've been in possession of a musty copy of Volume IV of Scots Minstrelsie. I can't tell when it was published - it doesn't strike me as an original edition (it has none of the pictures shown in the Electric Scotland scans) - though it seems very old. It was given to me by a fellow in Glasgow in gratitude for my helping him work out an issue that had been bothering for a long time. I never felt I deserved it, but he wouldn't let me refuse it. I don't play or sing from it - the music doesn't interest me all that much - yet somehow it ended up being my only souvenir from the six weeks I spent in England and Scotland that summer, so I hang on to it. Someday maybe I'll pass it on to a folk band who'll put it to good use.

Regards,
Rex.

[Coemgen]

I entered it by hand. I actually enjoy that sort of thing Besides, this way, I can change the key or the lyrics or the timing, etc. of the piece I want to sing. It may seem unnecessary, but I find some amount of satisfaction and enjoyment from the exercise. Of course, owning a book of Rabbie's songs would be preferable, but that will have to wait until I actually have a disposable income.