thesession.org

Uilleann Pipes
1

thesession.org is a nice enough resource, but never once have I found the version of the tune I wanted to play.

Any suggestions for similar sources for sheet music?

Or maybe the fact that there is a lot of variation in this music genre will make any source the same?

DJones

2

Try JC’s

http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/findtune.html

Or for another resource, the Irish Tune Info page has some cool background info on may of the tunes we play:

http://www.irishtune.info/finder.htm

3

Try
http://tunedb.woodenflute.com/


Ole

4

An important thing to remember about Irish music is that no one setting is the “authentic,” if indeed such a word can be used, setting for tune. Authenticity varies from place to place, time to time, region to region, instrument to instrument. I have a recording of Patsy Touhy playing “Drowsy Maggie” sitting on my iTunes. Trust me, it sounds nothing like any version of “Drowsy Maggie” you would hear today. Is one version better than the other? Well, for playing in a session, Touhy’s version is rather useless since no modern players play the tune like that. It is an aural tradition so people play what they hear and transcribe what they hear and play.

Even a recording only captures a moment, how that player felt like playing that tune at that second. A transcription you don’t like might appeal to someone else. Like a recording, it only captures a moment.
Some “extremists” are completely against using “the dots.” I think they have their uses, but they are limited. They can only give you a skeleton of the tune. You have to listen to people actually play it to understand its true character.