Rag's Rag - free ragtime, stride & blues music and scores

About this site

The website Rag's Rag was launched in 2010 devoted exclusively to ragtime.

It has now been totally revised. Why is that? The reason is that music copyrigthed before 1931 are now also in the public domain. That's 16 more years of public domain material on stride and early jazz tunes.

Of course it takes time to add more material so expect substantial additions in the near future.

If you want to comment on this site you can can reach me at my mail adress below (can't make it too easy for spam robots!).

About me

My name is Ragnar Hellspong. I've been playing ragtime piano in the Stockholm area for more than 50 years and piano in various traditional jazz bands for even longer than that. So I'm obviously an old man. Stopped playing in jazz bands long ago but just for fun I present below a 1990 recording by our last band (called Rhythm Kings). We took our tunes primarily from the repertoir of Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers and Bix Beiderbeck and his Gang. This sample is from the Bix repertoir and it's called:

Sorry

If you want to find out more on my background: here is an article I wrote for AMICA Bulletin 2022 describing how this web site came about.

Some years ago I composed two rags myself. Here they are:

1996	Rag's Rag
2000	Krusenberg Rag

I also tested if I could make an arrangement myself. Perhaps the most wellknown of ODJB compositions is Original Dixieland One Step and for some reason it was never published as a stock arrangement. So I created an arrangement with some help of R Veen of the Netherlands.

1917

Orignal Dixeland One Step

How this site was made

The virtual ragtime and stride performances - both piano and orchestral - on this site have all been produced with the help of state of the art music notation software and digital sound libraries.

The music notation software - initially Sibelius (Sibelius 7) but now more and more Dorico (Dorico 6.1)- can produce professional looking music scores and play back the music with the help of digital sound libraries.

In an effort to make the audio files to sound as natural and professional as possible I have over time replaced one sound library with another four times (so far) and redone most of the existing ragtime audio files all over again.

I started off in 2009 (half a year before ragsrag.com went online) by using the sound library that comes with the Sibelius package. This sound library is called Sibelius Sounds. All audio files were produced with this package until November 2011 when I switched to a better sound library called Garritan Jazz & Big Band 3 and shortly thereafter also Garritan Personal Orchestra 4. These libraries had better sounds than the Sibelius package but they were kind of cumbersome to use, at least for the orchestral pieces as I found it difficult to mix the instruments to a balanced rendition.

The latter problem was solved when a brand new sound library called NotePerformer became available in September 2013. The fantastic thing with this sound library was that it optimized the orchestral balance between the instruments automatically (based on some magic algorithms I suppose). This is so far an unique feature not available in any other sound library package. So in 2013 I redid all orchestral sound files on the Ragtime Orchestra page with NotePerformer.

The piano files on the Ragtime piano and Stride piano pages have not been redone with NotePerformer as there is no balancing to be made with just one instrument. These files were initially made with the Garritan Jazz & Big Band library in Sibelius and more specifically with it's Steinway piano font. Starting with the stride piano audiofiles these are now made with the Sforzando library in Dorico and more specifically with it's Salamander Grand piano font.

Most pieces have been transcribed from original music scores with the help of a music scanning program called PhotoScore Ultimate 7. The original scores surprisingly often contained errors which have been fixed when found.

The piano roll mp3:s have been converted from MIDI format with the help of Sibelius. This process involves getting the MIDI files from the people who converts piano rolls to MIDI. Of the four sites I used to get these files three are no longer available: Frank Himpsl, Terry Smith and Warren Trachtman. Only this is still available:

http://www.pianola.co.nz

Kudos to Terry Smythe, Robert Perry, Frank Himpsl and Warren Trachtman for making these files available for free.

All audio samples are in mp3 format. You can listen to them online (a good head-set is recommended for much better sound) or download them. If downloaded these files can be used as they are on your PC or on a mp3-player.

All scores are in pdf format so you can look at them online, download them or print them out. The piano scores usually consists of 2-4 pages and the orchestral scores of 2-3 pages for the piano part and 1 page per instrument for the other instruments.

Practically all music on this site was composed before 1931 and are thus in the public domain. The few pieces composed later are still copyrighted but are here with the consent of their composers so you are free to dowload them too if you like.