Are you ready to participate in a session?  To help give an idea of what goes on at a session, bear in mind that these events are generally unplanned and informal social events with the intent of a numbe of musiciians coming together to make great music, sing songs and tell stories.  It is not totally unstructured though. You might want to do a little research before joining to see who is sponsoring the session, who is moderating the session, what is the average skill level of the musicians participating, and how "open" is the session to new players and styles.

Most informal sessions, which can occur anywhere from pubs, to living rooms to airport runways (yes this has happened) generally have each player sitting in a circle.  One player will start a tune and the others will join in.  When two or three tunes are strung together this collection of tunes is called a set.   A set can be called out before the tunes are played, or at the completion of a tune a second or third tune may be started.  There is no real limit to the number of tunes in a set just how long the players can continue to play without a rest.  After the completion of a set, generally the person to the left or right of the person that called out the previous set will start the next tune.  This type of session gives each player the opportunity to choose the tunes.  A more formal version of a session may have one person who "runs" the session by either calling out the tunes or selecting people to choose the next set of tunes.

But no matter what the type of session you can find, .... you need to start to build a good base of tunes to bring and share.  Here are come examples of common tunes:

The Bag of Spuds

Walsh's Hornpipe (A Dorian)

Garrett Barry's Jig

The Dunmore Lasses Reel

For more tunes, check out our Tune Archive

Click here for Jigs, Reels and Hornpipes