A piece of handwritten sheet music for a fiddle tune called “Spotted Pony” came into my possession via a mandolin player I jammed with in LA by the name of Bill McClellan. I got to like the tune and wanted to teach it to a trumpeter I’ve been playing with in Oakland, but my original is covered with chicken scratch handwritten annotations and isn’t readable any more. So I retranscribed it on the computer.
No problem, I like tweaking sheet music for readability. One change is that the font is bigger. The other is that rather than squeeze the piece into the top half of a portrait printout I gave it 100% of the space in a landscape printout. Also I nuked a couple of chords that were IMO needless complexity.
- PDF of the notation for typical treble-clef instruments. (Print in landscape mode!)
- PDF of the guitar tablature for people who don’t read the dots. (Note that this is the default fingering generated by Sibelius. My own is different).
- PDF of the part for B-flat instruments like trumpet.
- Sibelius file for people who have that software.
There’s another song by the same name going around. This isn’t that. If you find something called “Spotted Pony” you have to listen to know whether it’s the same.
If anybody knows the source of this tune I’d be interested to hear it.
I think of these sheet music posts as mail to the future, for people who are searching and come across what they need here. I hope there is eventually a purpose, anyway.