Hi ,
How many of you are (or know of ) guitarists who actually flat pick the tunes at sessions as opposed to back the the tunes?
And can you be heard at all?
At home Ive been picking away with friends for a while and enjoy it a lot more than backing with chords.
When I feel like it I lash out a few chords ( which are very easily determined from knowing the notes I pick ).
Ive been wondering why more people don’t do it at sessions, or maybe they do at sessions I havent been to.
Thanks for any enlightenment!
It pretty much just disappears under everything else. You should just get a banjo 
“get a banjo” : I’ve been told this before but I prefer the guitar!
I would think that knowing the melody line well enough to play it would help a great deal with chosing complementary backing. And for god’s sake, don’t get a banjo, that’d be like going to the dark side. 
I’ve been trying to get up to session speed with my flatpicking. But I’ve
seen several guitarists at our session who switch between chording
and picking.
cheers folks.
btw , the speed only comes with practice!
and i use DADGAD which to me seems a lot easier for placement and if you hit the wrong string now and again it doesnt sound too bad!
regarding the chords , the shapes are there in front of you from the notes so you dont have to worry about stuff like which notes go with which chords.
Don’t get a banjo. 
Get a dobro and tune it to DADGAD. 
That’ll get you heard at the session.
Alternatively, get a 12-string and tune it to DADGAD. It’s buckets of fun picking jigs on a 12-string. You have plenty of volume and a tone that rises above the clatter and din. 
Wold it be considered bad form to use an amplifier in a session?
I finger pick the melody and i can hardly hear myself in room with people talking let alone people playing musical instruments.
You are joking, aren’t you?
No. It’s a genuine question.
Well then, yes, I would say that generally it’s considered bad form to bring an amplifier to a session. And that being the case, it explains why there’s not a whole lot of melody finger-picking going on in your typical session. Probably, the best you can hope for is that your session mates will let you finger-pick the tune one time through as a solo before jumping in and drowning you out.
One of the reasons I don’t go to pub sessions is that most times, a few players want to be heard above everyone else. For me, a good session is where the musicians are playing together and no one instrument dominates.
Amplification could get one shot in certain pubs… bad, bad, bad idea idea altogether. However, I really would like to see what may transpire should anybody do such a thing. I might even have to pop some corn for a snack and settle in with a diet coke to watch what unfolds. 
Thanks guys.
When it’s suggested to ‘get a banjo’ I’m guessing it’s meant as ‘get a tenor banjo’. It is easier, for me anyway, to play melodies on instuments tuned similarly i.e. mandolin, fiddle than on a guitar tuned the usual way. So maybe a tenor guitar is the answer? I’ve learned a few tunes in DADGAD but am curious as to the suggestions of using this tuning to play melodies. Is it easier to pick out the melodies in DADGAD?
I know more than a couple of tunes on guitar flatpicking style (Norman Blake and David Grier style for example) but when playing session tunes don’t find it easy to pick out the melody single string on a regularly tuned guitar.
I was loitering around Gryphon Strings a few years back and was on a 12 string kick. I asked one of the guys there if he thought a 12 string would be cool at a flatpicking session. He says ‘well the session might break up pretty quick.’ I cracked up at his answer though I wondered if it wasn’t a little snobbish. We were talking about bluegrass flatpicking though not Irish (or DADGAD as was mentioned) so he probably wasn’t kidding.
Dan Crary has recorded a few jigs on a 12-string. That guy’s on a different planet completely.
I’m able to play about half a dozen tunes (mostly jigs) on a 12-string tuned to DADGAD. I’ll try record a few and post to clips and snips.
Diatribe warning:
This topic is close to home for me because I went through the same thing, and as such I think this diatribe is directed at myself circa 2004 as much as it is at the world at large.
Nobody could hear me play guitar melody in a session, including myself. I tried octave mandolin and had the same problem. Eventually I decided to take up the flute on a lark (can’t go wrong with a Tipple flute) and I found that there was a well of tradition I could draw from rather than naively trying to forge my own path to adapt my guitar to the session and vice versa.
What I discovered is that “irish traditional music” is much, much bigger than the individual and it needs to be approached on its own terms… otherwise that individual will probably be forever confined to a relatively isolated experience. If that’s your path, then maybe you should try to organize a very small session group who understands your plight and supports your cause, so you will have a “safe” environment in which to function. Like it or not, most of us do not have the ambition and wherewithal to be, for example, the first person who said “I’m going to take this banjo thing and make it work with this music to which it is foreign.”
I suppose some stop-gap solutions may include sitting in a corner, or with back to wall would help the guitar project, or perhaps wearing a hat would be the best bet to help hear oneself even if the others can’t, if you’re not in control of the session situation, as most people are not.
I’m not going to encourage anyone to give up whatever instrument they wish to play, but I think you have to realize that your options will necessarily be limited by having an instrument whose sound, volume, etc are not compatible/complimentary of the other instruments. Otherwise, I assure you that you would have role models to follow and would not need to ask the question that started this thread.
This may come across more harshly than I intend it, and maybe I’m making it out to be more than it was meant to be, but I think it’s true. I sincerely hope I didn’t upset anyone.
The way i see it, DADGAD is a diatonic tuning making your guitar more like a whistle, as aposed to EADGAE which is a chromatic tuning making your guitar more like a recorder.
DADGAD gives you much more speed in the left hand as the notes are in a more intuative position.
monkey587 - I’d agree with a lot of what you say.
However, one thing that many people miss is that there is very little tradition in the pub session. The pub session has only existed for 60 or 70 years and, from what I gather, got underway in London in the 1940s. It got popular in Ireland in the 1950s & 60s. Prior to that it was mainly played at home or the Feis.
It depends. We have a few folks locally who bring electric pianos and it’s been fine.
I will probably NOT be taking my Rickenbacker with my Vox AC 30 anytime soon though.
Mostly cause I don’t have an AC30 