Hey, Dinky’s is catchy! Thanks for mentioning it.
I thought it might sound, you know, dinky.
I have it in my head (no doubt from some liner note or other) that the title refers to someone named Dinky Doran, possibly a Donegal fiddler…? I imagine him as a very angry little man, always going around yelling “My name is Maurice, goddammit!”
Ah, no wonder, the cool variation on the B part of the Peter Horan tune (in Trip to Sligo) starts exactly the same as the B part of Mountain Road. Thanks, I’ve got them both now.
I’ve just figured out that you have a concertina coming out of your avatar’s mouth…
Hmm, and all this time I thought it was a chocolate chip cookie. :roll:
Oh well, All the Best,
Tom
I forget the B parts of tunes all the time (especially if it’s been a while since I’ve played a tune)… My (personal) theory is that many B parts are somehow less distinctive than the A parts and therefore easier to mix up in your head (exceptions abound, of course). Or maybe I am just getting senile. 
Speaking of technically hard tunes, one that springs to mind is Richard Dwyer’s, an Ador tune which I believe is on one of Mary Bergin’s CDs. Lots of nasty unexpected (at least when you are learning it) jumps in that one. I’ve also found the Reel of Mullinavat hard to play.
Jens
I think the hardest reel to play is the one you are currently learning. 
For a while, when I first started playing Irish music, I neglected reels for two reasons. Firist, they did seem harder than other tunes. Second, so many if them seemed to me to be merely dance fodder; ie, utterly undistinguished tunes whose main purpose is not to be listened to or played for enjoyment. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with dance fodder—dozens of blues shuffles are just that but are fine in a bar played by a blues band—but since I wasn’t playing for dancers I didn’t see why I shouldn’t learn to play with appealing tunes which were mainly airs, jigs, slides and hornpipes. I then noticed at one stage that several tunes I’d been playing and had learnt by ear where in fact reels. I now play quite a lot of reels and enjoy them a lot. I’m no longer sure about the dance-fodder charge. There is, of course, nothing wrong with music whose primary function is rhythmic and getting in the reel ‘groove’ is a lot of the fun.
What is (relatively) hard and what isn’t depends on the particular instrument. There are some tunes that are easy on whistle but killers on concertina and vice versa. Of course, I agree entirely with those who say that all reels ar hard to play well.
All reels at the moment are hard for me if I want to ornament it.
I think I can keep a steady tempo, and the bounce of a reel, if I play the tune straight save for some simple cuts. But putting ornaments in reels, still doesn’t come naturally for me. For jigs, at least I more or less know where they go.
I still need to listen to a lot more reels played properly, and work out for myself on my whistle what was done and at which points of the tune. I think the trouble was that there seemed to be a whole lot more jigs than reels in the music I was listening to previously. That shows as well, in the fact that I know more jigs than reels at the moment
Until I can understand reels a little better, my motto is keep it simple.
There’s nothing wrong with playing those reels with less ornamentation tuaz. Fairly unornamented playing can sound quite good actually as long as you have a nice touch with the rhythm. Some players get a little too focused on ornamentation. The chune and the rhythm are what’s most important, so go ahead a play those reels!
It’s kind of hard to get the swing happening with reels that have a lot of rolls in them. The first reel I usually teach is Pigtown Fling, which is a great tune that works just fine with no rolls at all. Plus it’s got about three basic little chunks of melody in it so it’s dead easy to learn.
T:Pigtown Fling
R:reel
M:C|
L:1/8
K:G
GBge d2ed|Bdge dBAB|G2ge d2ed|1 B2Ac BEEF:|2 B2Ac BEE2:|!
|:Beed efge|dfaf gfed|Beed efge|1 dfaf g3d:|2 dfaf gfed||!
Intersting take but (sorry :roll: about the quibble) wouldn’t you think Pigtown Fling is actually a…Fling and not a Reel?
Is it really? I’m the first to confess my ignorance of course, but I’ve never heard it played that way.
Glad to hear Rob mention Finbar Dwyer. (hi Rob!) I have been wrestling
with Finbar Dwyer’s, the Holly Bush, no matter what I do, not happy with
phrasing so far. Its such a great tune. A~AFA DAFA|~A2de fded ..
Reassuring to know its not just me.
cheers, Lesl
I found Bunker Hill to be the absolute worst bear to learn, and I still find it the worst to play. It has some Cnats in sequences that I find really difficult, plus it’s in a really counter-intuitive (to me) D Mixolydian. I’m not all that crazy about the tune, which is another factor that makes it hard for me.
One tune that I love that I fund hard to learn is the second tune in the first set from Frankie and Mairead’s Ceol Aduaigh (a Tommy Peoples reel). I don’t find the notes all that difficult, except the B rolls, but it has a lot of high-B’s that are unaccented. It’s very difficult for a novice to give it a good reel rhythm. Unlike Bunker Hill, I absolutely love this tune, and I don’t find it hard to play now. My goal in life is to be able to play this tune like Frankie. Off to practice, it’s not gonna happen by itself.
Hi
I tried running The Pigtown Fling thru concertina.net to get a conventional staff format, but the site claims:
No image available – there’s probably a error in the ABC source causing the conversion to fail
I took out the exclamation points and fussed around with a couple of other bits, but I don’t haved any facility w/ ABC format.
Could you have a go at editing it into something that Concertina.net will accept?
Thanks
Roger
Edited:
Um, never mind. I just put a top line:
X:1
and everything is just tickety-boo.
R.
The only thing wrong with it is it’s missing the indexing line..X:1
X:1
T:Pigtown Fling
R:reel
M:C|
L:1/8
K:G
GBge d2ed|Bdge dBAB|G2ge d2ed|1 B2Ac BEEF:|2 B2Ac BEE2:|!
|:Beed efge|dfaf gfed|Beed efge|1 dfaf g3d:|2 dfaf gfed||!
Of course it’s unnatural, it’s a GHB tune. The composer, Pipe Major G.S. McLennan, claimed it was the most difficult he knew of and he wrote some of the best GHB tunes… I realize some of you may think good GHB tune is an oxymoron but I digress.
It’s even more difficult with all of the GHB ornamentation. A lot of the Fs have doublings which are two simultaneous cuts.
G.S. also composed one of the toughest reels, The Little Cascade.
Cheers,
Aaron
chas wrote: Off to practice, it’s not gonna happen by itself.
Truer words were never spoken.
Tony 
‘The Scholar’ as played by Paul McGratten. The B section has a turn that just seems to tie up my fingers every time. The tune itself is fairly simple but just getting the fingers to move correctly, cleanly and at speed is another thing altogether.
Brian Finnegan’s tune ‘Conlagh’s Big Day’ comes to mind - Great tune, really fun to play & I would imagine would pose great satisfaction to anyone looking for a challenge 
I think “most difficult to play” is partly a function of which ones you’ve tried to play.
I’m still very much a beginner with reels, but of the ones I’ve tried some - like “Rolling in the Ryegrass” and “The Bag of Spuds” were very easy to pick up, and others just seem to confuse my ear and fingers both.
My current nemesis is “The Boys of 25”. It shouldn’t be THAT difficult - Bill Ochs has it about halfway through his tutorial, for pity’s sake! - but I find the tune hard to remember and the fingering tricky.
I’m consoling myself with the thought that once I get it down it will seem easy (the jig “Smash the Windows” used to give me similar headaches, but now is one of my favorites) but it sure hasn’t got easier yet.
Update - Sept 22: Now that I’ve posted about my headache, it’s suddenly clicked for me. Still smoothing out my playing, but I’ve got the bones down. This one is actually easier to play with moderate ornamentation (cuts/taps) than plain for some reason. I’m weird, I guess.