Our goals are many at the SCTLS, but among them are:

• getting in some great craic, first and foremost!
• learning to learn tunes by ear, on the fly
• learning about session etiquette in preparation for moving to other sessions
• getting tempo up to fast session speeds (or close to)
• learning good session tunes from each other
• learning more about the tunes and the tradition, where they come from, how they're played in different places, etc.

Insofar as we know, we are currently the only slow session in the Denver metro area that teaches learning tunes by ear. We welcome all levels of players, but find that, naturally enough, we attract mainly beginners through intermediates. While our session standard is three times through a tune before moving to the next, when learning a tune it's not unusual to repeat it seven to ten times through. This gives beginners time to learn the tune, and more advanced players can really work the tune before trotting it out at a fast session.

SCTLS sessioneers will discover how to learn a tune and how to teach one as well. Check out our page that gives you some hints on how to learn a tune aurally, complete with tracks for you to work with. (A sort of Scoiltrad Lite, you might say.)

If you're a beginner, be warned that we will insist that you play at least one tune at a speed that you can manage well (no matter how slow that may be), so save your blushes for elsewhere!   :-)

We hope that you'll find we're one of Colorado's most friendly sessions. One of the things that makes the SCTLS unique is that we want you to be free to make mistakes, feel your way through some of the stranger bits of session etiquette, and get comfortable with playing your instrument in public, without feeling ostracized if you inadvertently commit a faux pas or some such. Feel free to ask questions or try something new.

The SCTLS began its life when Matt and Shannon Heaton, inspired by the example of accordionist Jimmy Keane and fiddler Sean Cleland in Chicago, decided to start a different kind of session up in Longmont.

"To get a bunch of folks playing even stronger together, this very special session is a concentrated two hours of standard session tunes, played at a moderate pace. Instead of spending the session sharing lovely, maybe even obscure tunes, Jimmy and Sean lead sets of 6 or 7 lovely and very common Irish tunes (with up to 10 repetitions of each tune!). The cool part about all of this is that it sounds really great. And it also accomodates a wide variety of levels of playing. Sean said that they started this session because there were too many sessions that were either too fast, or too exclusive, or too sloppy and 'we wanted a good sounding session that everyone could participate in and enjoy.'"

Matt and Shannon moved to Boston in October of 2001, and asked Zina Lee to keep the session going. Since then, the session has evolved into its current format. Our goal is to get back to the original format once we have a solid core of players with session standards under their belts.