JTAG's (Mostly) Irish Session Tunebook
My teacher Phil Kramer and I recently released my (mostly) Irish Session Tunebook for comment to a few online spaces. The latest version will always be available at: https://mando.studio/irishtunebook.pdf. It's basically a catalog of the tunes I've been playing at local sessions, formatted nicely for mandolin and fiddle. While there are tabs specifically for mandolin, any melody instrument can leverage this book. I'll be using this page as a changelog of sorts, so if you're interested, please stay tuned! 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.) The feedback has been pretty good, and I’ll get into the requests people have made in a minute. Let’s talk about the book first.
What's In the Book?
It represents the tunes played in the Baltimore and Washington, DC areas. I wanted to include only tunes that actually get played, with fairly realistic settings,and not some of the crazier stuff you see on thesession.org. The tunebook was originally written to support the following use cases:
- Playing at a slow session with tabs on a tablet or printed out.
- Playing at slow session with dots on a tablet or printed out.
- Playing with a guitarist, both musicians viewing the same tablet.
The reason for the third use case is that I’m hoping to get my old bandmate Kenny into trad at some point. To me, successfully accomplishing use cases 1 and 2 means that we need large fonts with lots of white space. And no page turns. Page turns take away so much in a live session!
Structure
The structure of the book is introductory material, sheet music, and tabs. I’ve got sections on the following topics:
- What’s an Irish Session?
- The place of the fiddle and mandolin in trad
- A small discussion of accompaniment in trad
- Exploring sets of tunes
- Further online resources
- Suggested listening for mandolin, fiddle, and more
Feedback
I posted the early version of the document to Reddit and MandolinCafe. I didn't do the But a good many comments I received on the book revolved around learning the tunes at home. Playing at home wasn’t really something I had considered for some stupid reason, and this definitely needs to be addressed. More specifically, what people wanted was tabs and sheet music on the same page. That will take a lot of extra time, but I’ll get it done. I also had some folks who wanted old-school-cool ABC notation of the book. I’ll probably get to that eventually. There were also some requests for additional academic sources for the book, which was a bit of a surprise if I’m honest since a history of irish trad is not in my wheelhouse. I purchased some more books, found some PhD thesis, and am getting myself in gear.
I hope to keep this guide updated going forward. I’ll respond to the comments, make some updates, and publish a “finalized” version 1 of the book. There will also be a change log, so we know what changes happen. I’ll likely just keep pushing more tunes to this book as we go. I’ll be adding 25 more tunes from the originally posted draft to version 1, so that’s pretty exciting! And if you have more recommendations for the book please reach out!
Confimed 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 |
| ☐ | Add a Table of Contents |
| ☐ | Create a combined notation/tabs version (lots of work on this one!) |
| ☐ | Seperating the book into different "editions" with notation, tabs, and combined notation/tabs |
| ☐ | ABC format for the tunebook |
| ☐ | Including composer titles wherever possible |
| ☐ | Give some more information about octave mandolin and tenor banjo, since they can use the tunebook too |
| ☐ | Provide additional academic resources |
| ☐ | Update some of the keys of the tunes to better reflect their modes |
| ☐ | Add 25 additional tunes, total of 100 |
| ☐ | Incorporate some sort of acknowledgement that many of these tunes are othern than Irish in origin |
| ☐ | Overhaul of the "sets" discussion |
| ☐ | Links to a downloadable overhauled Google Doc containing all the tunes and relevant information |
| ☐ | Links to a Strum Machine playlist for this book. |
| ☐ | 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!
Version History
You'll find older versions of the Tunebook stored here: