So, I’m relatively knew to ITM & looking at the over 1000 tunes in the O’Neill’s book it’s hard to know where to start. So, I’d like a few recommendations for tunes I should learn so I could someday hook-up with some other players & suggest a tune that they’d probably know too.
thx - stv
What instrument[s] do you play ?
Go here: http://www.thesession.org/members/ and click on the “Tunebook” tab at the top left of the page. Listed here are the tunes most added to people’s tunebooks on thesession. Most of the tunes at the top are common session tunes. I know most of them… That would be a good place to start for sure.
Learning strictly from dots = bad. Even O’neills.(I know a lot of folks have the book, but does anybody actually use it?)
I’d strongly recommend hooking up with those other players now and learning how they play those tunes in your area.
I wouldn’t say learning from dots ALWAYS = bad. It might, and probably, would, be bad, if dots were your one and only source for learning a tune.
I use O’Neills and dozens of other dots books, but not as my only source. Generally, I’ll decide to learn a tune after I hear it first, either at a session, or on a CD. Then, I’ll look up the dots. It makes learning the tune MUCH MUCH faster for me than depending on listening alone. I’ll play along with the CD while reading the dots until I have it pretty much committed to memory, then play along sans dots to get the polishing of it.
I wouldn’t suggest learning a tune only with dots, though, you really need to hear it, too.
If you want to learn by ear, which is good, check out some places online. They won’t be guitar players, but they will play tunes you can learn. One place:
I almost always learn from dots, though, but I was classically trained on other instruments. It’s a bad habit, but I can learn tunes fast with dots.
Of course, learning tunes from the dots isn’t always bad. But only learning from them is. Especially if you don’t know the tradition. Once you know the ins and outs of ITM, different story. A drop of ink on a paper cannot convey the heart and soul of the music…
Listening is good. Lots of listening.
I agree.
Awesome recommendation - thx!
btw, kenny, i play guitar primarily, but i’m seriously considering acquiring a mandolin too. i tuned my guitar in 5ths to see how the tunes would lay out on a fiddle, and i liked it so much i’m thinking of trying the mandolin now.
Have you explored DADGAD guitar tuning? It’s quite popular. I don’t play guitar myself, but I’ve heard it’s great for melody and harmony, in the keys of, believe it or not, G ,D, and A.
You seem to be obsessed with the fiddle sound. Why not skip the mando and just go straight to fiddle? 
i’m going to explore that tuning this week
i think a mandolin’s the better choice for me - frets & picks really are the place for me. plus, they’re was cheaper to acquire.
As collections go, though, O’Neill’s (unrevised) books, 1000 and Music of Ireland, are a remarkable set of tunes, many very, very close to how things are still played in sessions (while others are quite different, sometimes in interesting ways). Some tunes are rarely played anymore, and some, maybe, need to be brought back.
The revised versions of O’Neill’s should be avoided – they try to tell a player what ornaments to use, what phrasings – and so most settings are completely useless to learn from or use. Worse yet – the bare-bones tune is lost with all the tinkering. So, if it’s a revised version you’re looking at, burn it.
My thoughts on the original question, then, is to do what’s suggested above - listen and absorb the music first – but then also play through a couple of tunes in O’Neill’s. I do this for fun sometimes, just pick a name that amuses me. If I can find recordings of the tune, it’s also fun and instructive to hear how many ways and approaches a tune can undergo from a simple set of dots.
Dots, IMO, are a useful reference if you already know how the music is played, or should sound when played properly in any given style. Then, it’s nice to find a good setting in print of a tune you’re after, where you can say, ‘oh, that’s exactly what’s happening during that tricky bit…’
Gordon
It sounds like you want to know what the common tunes are that are often played in a lot of sessions.
On the other hand, you might want to consider working on the tunes that you personally think are really nice, and never mind about their commonality. After all, you’re doing this for your own enjoyment, not for the convenience of some future gang of session-goers.
That being said, there are lists of commonly played tunes. Henrik Norbeck’s abc collection seems to be ordered by commonality: the tunes 1-100 of any category tend to be very common ones. And Homespun Tapes sells a book of 121 common session tunes.
But that being said, you’re really better off learning the tunes from people and not from a book.
Anybody got a match?
Knowing common tunes is good, and also unavoidable, if you attend a local session or three. You’ll know what to learn (and hear them in your head for the rest of your life, eventually) if you attend a few sessions regularly. What really gets you chasing your tail, though, is that common session tunes in one locale are often less so in another, and you’ll never really know them all. After awhile, though, you relax and just listen if there’s a tune you don’t know, since there always will be, and you’ll learn tunes you particularly like, which no one else seems to know. So it goes, I guess. Sites like Norbecks are useful – if these tunes weren’t common before, they are now. Kinda like Bothy tunes – they went out of their way to find interesting, lesser known tunes, and now they’re regular session fodder…
Gordon
What really gets you chasing your tail, though, is that common session tunes in one locale are often less so in another, and you’ll never really know them all.
Moreover, I think the more universal the tune, the less likely sessioneers will enjoy you starting it.
Half the fun of a visitor sitting in on your session is hearing new stuff, not the Road to Lisdoonvarna for the 5000th time.
You might want to spend some of you time here - http://www.oldmusicproject.com/oneils1.html
The midis are fair (as midis go), and you can get the abc, standard notation, or NWC formats.