Beginners

It all depends how much time you have and how experienced a musician you are already. Have a look at the beginners section at the start of the tunebook and listen to the tunes. Try to sing the tunes - get them into your head! Don't worry if you can't read music, it's not an essential in traditional music and it will come with time anyway. These are popular tunes and competent players at most sessions in England will know them. If you come to the session knowing roughly how the tunes go and are able to play some parts of them, you will get a lot from a beginners session. We play the tunes many times and you will quickly realise that your mistakes can't be heard as clearly as they are at home!

 

If you are a rhythm player, e.g. guitar, you will find chords on the tunes in this section. Lots of chord sequences will work with these tunes and you will quickly develop your own style and taste - these chords will get you going in the meantime.

 

Improvers

The Improvers section in the tunebook is a larger selection of tunes and is designed for players who want to build repertoire with popular, well known tunes. We will play them faster than we do during beginners' sessions and you should be trying to play without the sheet music!

If you want to hear these tunes outside of a session, check out the resordings available from the soundcloud link, or Folktunefinder is a good tune search engine and will play the notes for you as well. 

 

Improving rhythm players should be much less reliant on printed chords and able to work out basic chords from the melody they hear.

 

Full Speed

Uses the improvers tunes. Time to kick back and have some fun - this will suit players with experience and who know quite a few of the tunes. It tends to be about "Ceilidh Band Speed" which is comfortable for most attendees. If you can play at this speed, you are probably already a session regular - or you should be!