Resources for Learning

This music is above all an aural/oral tradition, and that will remain true no matter how many collections of Irish music are ever published. The only path to playing this stuff is listening to it. Without listening, there's nothing to practice. In Irish music, listening is practice.

- Barry Foy, Field Guide to the Irish Session

Web Resources

BBC Virtual Session (Flash required) - A great way to practice tunes, including many on our list like Otter's Holt and Toss the Feathers. Play along, and print sheet music.

Foinn Seisiún Online - A project of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, the Irish arts preservation organization. They publish a set of books and CD's of common session tunes and sets, with recordings here that you can stream online or download as MP3's under the Creative Commons license.

Audacity - Free (open-source) audio recording and editing software for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This is a great way to slow down MP3 music files on your computer for learning tunes. It can record the audio tracks from YouTube videos, and it can split up long files you record at a session or workshop into smaller files. Highly recommended.

The Session (thesession.org) - A site with several resources, starting with a large database of tunes that can be searched for information and sheet music (note: always check the discussion tab for other versions, as the first may not be the most common). The site has a discussion forum full of great information, as well as strongly-held opinions and arguments about traditional music. We recommend spending some time reading posts, and donning a thick set of Internet flameproof armor before diving into the forum discussions.

The Fiddler's Companion - Background info, discography and ABC notation for a huge number of fiddle tunes. Manual search via alphabetized index (no database automation).

Concertina.net ABC Converter - A handy utility for converting the ABC notation you find at places like thesession.org into PDF sheet music, or Midi files.

A Beginner’s Guide to Accompanying a Session by Alan Brown (from member profile at thesession.org). Highly recommended for guitar players and other chordal instrument players coming from a background OldTime music or other American folk styles. Irish traditional music is very different, and this is a great introduction to how to fit into a session.

Intermix - Modes & Scales - A discussion of the modes used in Irish music for guitar and other chordal accompaniment players.

Local Festivals and Events

Festival of American Fiddle Tunes - Centrum at Fort Worden, Port Townsend WA. More focused on American fiddle tune styles, but there is usually at least one guest fiddler/instructor in the Irish, Cape Breton or related traditions.