Which tunes are recorded the most?
If I learned these tunes would I be more likely to be able to play in with a session?
Well that is a difficult question because most Bands/Musicians these days try not to record the stuff that has been done a million times. So that leaves the most recorded stuff of the past to be the so called Session standards which are done at many sessions but that is not an easy list to conjure up I will leave that to some one else.
It’s a kind of a rough gauge, but over at thesession.org, if you look at ‘members->tunebooks’
you can see a ranking of tunes by how many members have added them to their online
tunebooks. I think you could do worse than picking out tunes from the first few pages of
that.
Each tune is crosslinked to sheet music and lists of known recordings.
–Chris
I was going to say that but I forgot how to do it.
Another stunt recording artists like to pull is to call the tune by the most obscure title they can find. This makes it difficult for potential buyers to know if they already have a recorded version of a tune. This in turn makes it harder to answer your question, since the same tune will have been recorded under several titles.
djm
Hey Baglady, haven’t seen you on the piping page lately. What up? Still playing pipes?
We definitely need some more estrogen on that page. 
Justine
Hey Justine
Thanks for the holler.
I’ve been too busy playing pipes to talk about them.
I also have been too tied up in women’s work to spend much time on non-women’s work. 
I guess I should come up with a tirade about how hard it is to be a women piper or something.
Seamus my pipeing buddy and I were just discussing how there seems to be just a handful of tunes that end up on recordings and I thought I’d see if anyone else had noticed this.
Later
You got the right idea there. 
Back to the topic,
I was talking to some of the local pipers recently, and we were commenting on the fact that it seems like just about every piper has recorded The Old Bush. But I think the “standard tunes” vary from one instrument to another, you know? Standard “pipey tunes” wouldn’t all necessarily be the same as standard fiddle tunes, etc.
Justine
But I think the “standard tunes” vary from one instrument to another, you know? Standard “pipey tunes” wouldn’t all necessarily be the same as standard fiddle tunes, etc.
Justine
You got it right there.
On the five-fiddle night at the session a whole different set of tunes go round than the five-pipers night or the fifty-flute night.
The box players round here love John Brosnan’s. They are nuts about polkas anyway but I think this is their favorite. I just picked it up on my pipes and I have to say it doesn’t have quite the same flare.
Alan Ng has quite a nice list in his website of the 100 most recorded tunes.
Check out: http://www.irishtune.info/top-tunes.htm.
Good info site in general also.
Wow 
I knew somebody must have done something like this.
So Miss McLeod’s and Bucks are the most recorded tunes.
I’m surprised that I am not all that surprised about that.
Now, if we take the first few tunes and put them together in the sets they are most recorded in, do you think we have something?