Bach's Cello Suites for Mandolin
My teacher Phil Kramer and I recently released a first draft of our arrangements of the Bach Cello Suites for mandolin. The latest version will always be available at this page. This book is basically just a long time passion project coming to fruition; albiet slowly. I find that a lot of people get into playing classical music on the mandolin via the Bach Cello Suites. There was no free way for folks to do that. Phil and I have now changed that. Hell. Yes. I literally learned musescore so I could smush each Cello Suite movement down to one page on my iPad since I hate pageturns. So here we are, 5 years later. I'll be using this blog here as a changelog and status of the project page of sorts, so if you're interested, you're in the right place
Note that this book was released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. So folks can reference, use, and remix this book; they just need to provide attribution. (No making money off of it though. If I’m not; you’re not.) .
What's In the Book?
Well, alot of it is just justification for how Phil and I arranged the book! Believe it or not, there's a fair amount of academic kerfluffle going on about how to best play and interpret Bach's Cello Suites. I kinda dove headfirst into that and bought some suite books to help me learn. The structure of the book is introductory material, history about the Suites, discussion of various sources for the Suites, discussion on how we arranged them, and some discussion on ornamentation. Oh! There's also an area where we recommend different versions of the Suites for folks to listen to, which was my personal favorite to reseaerch! We were also incredibly lucky to get Phil Woodhull to provide us with a Forward to the book about his experience making the first complete copy of the Bach Cello Suites on mandolin. It is beautifuly written and if you're into the Cello Suites at all, it is worth your time to read it. Check out his YouTube.
Feedback
There hasn't been a lot of feedback quite yet, but I've been getting some thoughts as I go along thanks to my friends over at the Mandolin Cafe. I plan to post early versions of the document to Reddit and probobly some of the larger Facebook mandolin groups. I'm 100% certain there are some grave errors that will need to be fixed. But I've wanted to make this book since like... 2020 and if I don't put it out now I'm scared I never well. So here we go. I plan to keep this book updated in a few ways. I’ll respond to the comments and use the following list as my guide. And if you have more recommendations for the book please reach out!
Planned Updates for the 1.0 Release
Here are the items that I'm definetley putting into the 1.0 release of the tunebook.
| Status | Update Item |
|---|---|
| 🗹 | Add additional albums |
| ☐ | Finish fingering and position markings for Suites 2 - 6 |
| ☐ | Seperating the book into different "editions" with standalone notation, standalone tabs, and a tablet friendly version |
| ☐ | Add Anna Magdelena slurs edition |
| ☐ | Upload the xml to Musescore |
| ☐ | Host the PDFs of the tunes on this site somewhere |
If you have any thoughts on these, or other updates, please don't hesitate to reach out! There will also be a change log, so we know what changes happen.
Version History
You'll find older versions of the Tunebook stored here:
You can find a sheet music only copy of the Bach Cello Suites book here here: