New Kantele Sheet Music! Melody #1

I have finally gotten around to preparing and uploading sheet music for the kantele that I have written, and is the first of many sheet music pieces I will be uploading for the kantele. I have never been good at naming things, and since it was the first piece I composed, named it as Melody #1. The piece is available in a link as a pdf at the bottom of this post.

This particular piece is a simple repetitive melody I wrote last year after completing my first kantele. At the time I was just starting to play around with the kantele, and this little melody arose, like most melodies, from improvising on the kantele. The song stuck, and serves as a simple practice piece. These kind of numbered melody pieces, as you will find, will generally share the same structure of a repeated first section intro, followed by a repeated second section, and third section ending which is a repeat of the first section. The sheet music is good reference, but the song can be proportionally played faster or slower depending on playing style. For myself, I tend to play rather rapidly, so the repeated sections go by fast for me when I play.

The melody is written for the 5 string kantele in D major, though any kantele can play it in the correct tuning. Since I use slightly thicker strings, I originally composed my songs in the key of C, since I tuned my kantele a whole step lower, but because just about all 5 string kantele are tuned to either a standard of D major or minor, I decided to transpose the final released piece in D for ease for the majority of kantele players. However, under each note is also a kind of "tab" notation for the kantele, so it can be played in any major scale regardless of tuning. The numbers go from 1-5, and correspond to the strings, with 1 being the longest and lowest string and 5 being the shortest and highest pitch string. The original melody was written with a short overtone section at the end that repeats the first and third parts, but for simplicity I left it out of this version. I will however release the full version in the next coming posts in about a week.

I wrote the song using MuseScore, which is an excellent and very powerful free music composition and notation program. When I write pieces for the kantele I choose the harp instrument setting and just delete the bass staff. MuseScore allows you to not only compose a multitude of instruments, but has many useful features such as playback which is very handy. I will probably post a basic tutorial for MuseScore at some point in the future.

In addition, I will also be adding a Kantele Sheet Music page dedicated to listing all of the sheet music I post, as further reference and resources to make it easier to find these pieces. From my posting schedule, which I have decided to keep at a post every four days, I will be posting this page with Melody #1 listed, this coming Wednesday for my next post. I definitely encourage you to check back for more material, and have fun playing! Many more songs and information to come, so happy plucking!

Melody #1