I finally got my very own O’Neill’s, and I’m so excited. But… where do I begin??? I’ve started working on some tunes that I recognized the titles of… but that is just the beginning. I mean, with over 1000 tunes to pick from, how to I figure out which ones to work on first? Course, I want to learn all of them but that will take me til I’m 100, if I even do ever learn all of them. 
Suggestions, anyone?
Start at Shandon Bells, No. 1. Great jig, and very popular. Try to get a recording of it (you could give a listen here).
Generally, if you are going to use sheet music, why not learn the tunes that you have recordings of. Listen to the recording for a week, then start picking the tune out, using O’Neill’s where you get stuck.
Just to ask, which version (there are three that I am aware of) did you get?
Hi,
I had the same problem when I got my book 3 years ago.
I was going to start with #1 one too, then I decided o O’Carolan, but those are hard.
So I finally went to the Hornpipes…a lot slower and easier to
learn.
Lolly
I usually just open O’Neill’s to a random page and start playing. Same with Ryan’s, the complete works of O’Carolan and that other one whose name escapes me. I guess I’m working more on sight reading than learning tunes.
This actually brings up something I’ve been wondering about. How do youall keep all these tunes straight? I see people bandy about a dozen tune names in one breath and they’re all just gobbledygook to me. Same with most of the tunes.
I suspect the answer lies in desire – I’m not a strictly ITM person, so I probably just haven’t put forth the effort to learn those tunes and their names. But I still suspect I’d have trouble remembering which was The Hag With the Money and which was The Hag at the Churn.
I think if you lilted the tunes to yourself rather than said the names, you’d never mix those two up. Hag at the Churn is very characteristic, and Hag with the Money is an entirely different animal with a clear modulation in the B-part (all the c-nats turn into c-sharps). Both great tunes.
As for remembering tunes, I only know a few, unfortunately. But when I consider what I keep in my head for work, it does seem possible to keep a thousand or even thousands of tunes in your head, if you do it long enough and intensively enough.
The version I have is called “O’Neill’s Music of Ireland” and does not have the tunes numbered. It’s not the “O’Neill’s 1001 Gems” version.
Thanks for the suggestions so far, folks. Appreciate it.
As for the question about remembering tunes and their names, this may sound completely corney but sometimes I put the first few bars of the tunes to words that have something to do with the title, just to give me some sort of association. Seems to work well for pipe tunes, which are very easily mixed up. Hope that helps.
I do the same thing, only it’s not always the first two bars…sometimes it’s a characteristic phrase somewhere else in the music that suggests words to me…which gets funny because I’ll have to hum most of the tune before I remember the name! Even then, sometimes I can’t remember them…I’ll be playing something and someone will ask “what is that?” and I’ll give them a blank look and kind of hem and haw, before replying “it’s some Irish air I picked up.” I may not remember the name again unless/until I run across the tune in a book or on a CD!
Redwolf
I got a copy of O’Neill’s a year or so back. If I had the energy to really tackle it properly, I’d start with any tunes I’ve seen mentioned on this forum or the other C&F forums - because they are the ones being played. If they were too hard for my currrent ability (Drowsy Maggie comes to mind as a finger twister) I’d stow them for future attempts.
I’ve also used Chas’ random page approach, I’ll play a tune through slowly and if it grabs me make an attempt to learn it, if not (probably because I’m not playing it right) I’ll move on to the next. It’s nice to be able to bring out an old tune that people haven’t been playing recently.
Like Redwolf, I often can’t remember the names of tunes after I’ve learnt them, and I don’t have even 100 tunes learnt yet. Just last night I found myself playing a tune I didn’t remember learning, but I must once have been practising at least a week to get it. It might have been The Honeysuckle or Alexander’s Hornpipe, but it didn’t really matter to me, it was just a fun tune, and I enjoyed the way my fingers knew where to go even though I didn’t know where to put them.
If you can attend a session or two, make notes of which tunes are popular there and work on those first. Otherwise, the random approach is fun.. Lotsa real gems in there…
I agree wil Paul about the sessions. However, if your intention is to play at sessions you may very not find the tunes in O’Neill’s. Sometimes when you do, the version is likely to be different from what’s played at the session. Julia Delaney, Saddle the Pony and Poll Ha’penny come to mind. So I’m not sure O’Neill’s is a good starting point for playing sessions. I went through O’Neill’s once and just started playing the tunes and marking the ones I liked and trying to learn those. However, what I usually found was that these were not the tunes that other people knew so my copy of O’Neill’s just sits idle most of the time.
Steve
Yikes… I was hoping to use my O’Neill’s as sort of a guide to learning session music… what do you suggest for learning session tunes since you don’t recommend O"Neill’s for that?
If it’s popular session tunes you’re looking for, 100 Essential Irish Session Tunes comes to mind.
or this one
or this one
But they’re not much cheaper than O’Neill’s and only have 100 tunes in each of course.
O’Neill’s is still a great reference & you should still sleep with it under your pillow.
If you are going to go to an already established session, then find out what they play. Tape record the session and try to find out the names of the tunes.
There are plenty of internet resources for tunes. The Session, for instance, has lots of tunes and also lots of links to other locations with tunes. Go links>search>tune sources. Of cousre, some of the tunes are likely to be in O’Neill’s.
http://www.thesession.org/index.php
Steve
O’Neill transcribed what he heard at the time, which may have been the popular version of its day, or how a particular musician liked to put a spin on the tune. That sort of info never got provided, although his sources were noted (at least in the “1,850” version; I haven’t laid eyes on the “1,001” or that other one which actually supplies ornamentation :roll: ). For example, I prefer the O’Neill’s setting of “The Roving Bachelor”, a reel that is played a bit differently nowadays, or at least where I go to sessions. If I want to play it my preferred way, it will have to be as a solo performance because otherwise it just doesn’t fit quite right in a group setting. OTOH, O’Neill’s setting of the set-dance (long dances, as he calls them) “The Blackbird” doesn’t seem to have changed much.
Another good source would be the “Ceól Rinnce na hÉireann” series; I think there are at least 5 volumes. I vaguely recall a recommendation of the second as session-friendly. I keep promising myself that I’ll get the whole shebang one day, but listening is more what it’s all about for me, so…
I think the big collections like O’Neill’s and Ceól Rinnce na hÉireann are great but are best used for reference, like others have said. I started out using a variety of sources to try to sort out which tunes are well known and commonly played, including:
- What is played at local sessions (best, if you can get the tune names)
- Tunes mentioned on C&F
- Session tune lists I found on the internet
- Tunes listed in collections (like the ones mentioned) that try to select the best known 100 (or 110 or 121) session tunes. **
Then, I started learning tunes that I thought were well known or which I just liked, and just gradually added more as I came across them.
One thing that really helped me was that I started keeping a database of tunes as I learned them. For each tune I listed:
-tune name(s)
-type (reel, jig etc)
-key
-the first measure or two of each tune section in ABC notation
-any books and recordings I own which include this tune
This gives me a way to quickly review my tunes without having to wade through a bunch of books, keeps me from depending too much on written music, and helps me out when I can’t associate the right tune with the tune name. (I’m really brain dead when it comes to keeping tune names straight. )
Mostly now I just work with a printout of my tune list, and refer to books or recordings when I need help. Adding tunes is easy when I learn new ones.
By the way, I agree with those who say that learning a tune by ear is best, but I would argue that written music can be very helpful in just keeping the tunes straight and in learning new tunes, so long as you don’t get married to the written music, and you understand that the written music is just an outline of one possible setting of the tune.
-Jay
** None of these collections are definitive or represent all the tunes you really need to know, but I think they are a more manageable place to start than the huge collections.